street roots
10
Oct 14, 2011
"I don't see why if people can watch three
hours of King Lear or Chekhov, they can't
listen to seven-minute songs. It makes
demands on the audience, but if they can
make the effort I don't think it should be a
problem."
class politics. I try to create well-crafted story
songs about people — it’s a bit like writing
mini-plays. Of course, politics is part of life.
What I don’t like is to be labeled as political.
If you’re a political songwriter, people expect
you to write songs with messages; I write
songs. The world I live in includes everything.
I write songs for children; I write songs about
relationships and songs about my relationship
with the world. I write songs about the past,
when it seems to me that it has relevance,
because they say something to people today.
My most recent song is about a guy who is
on incapacity (disability) benefit The British
government is giving people on incapacity
benefit a computer test which will reassess
them and push them into some awful job or
else they’ll be on job seeker’s allowance,
which is less than what they get now — much
less. That’s the politics. You’ve got to make
something out of it, which is not a description
of the politics but a story. So I created a story
about Jim, who may or not be justifiably on
incapacity benefit It’s a story. You’re always
going to get different interpretations. It’s
multidimensional — if you’re writing a
statement song or a slogan song or a song
with a message, there’s only one dimension,
which is good for gathering the faithful and
giving heart to the believers. They need those
songs, but it’s not mainly what I write.
M.W.: Most people I’ve talked to about
songwriting say you should keep a song simple,
with lots of repetition and not too many lyrics, to
avoid overwhelming the audience. Your songs,
which I quite like, are the opposite of that:
They’re full of words. Is this a completely
different aesthetic?
L.R.: If you’re writing a pop song, that
would be very good advice. I see song
differently: I don’t«see why if people can watch
three hours of King Lear or Chekhov, they
can’t listen to seven-minute songs. It makes
demands on the audience, but if they can
make the effort I don’t think it should be a
problem.
PHOTO BY LUCIEN KNUTESON
Hie unlabeled man
Leon Rosselson still sings for the excluded
BY MIKE WOLD
CONTRIBUTING WRITER
f you didn’t hear about the Leon Rosselson
concert in Seattle in late July, you’re not
alone. Fewer than 100 people attended
West Seattle’s Kenyon Hall to hear English
singers Rosselson and Robb Johnson perform
an acoustic set of mostly political songs.
Acoustic they may be, but neither is he
strictly a “folk” singer — Rosselson in
particular insists that he only accepts the label
“folk” because there’s no place else to put his
albums in the record stores. And Rosselson
consistently rejects the label of a “political”
songwriter.
Although Rosselson has had moments of
“fame” — from writing songs for a seminal
English TV show in the 1960s to a Billy Bragg
cover that made the indie charts — he’s better
known in the music community for his
accomplished and complex guitar
arrangements and his complicated, literate
and often satirical lyrics. He has a consistent
and unpatronizing sympathy for the excluded
of society, the “hungry and the homeless,
downtrodden and distressed” in “Harry’s
Gone Fishing” or, as he also put it in “The
Ugly Ones”:
I
What shall we do with the ugly ones
The ones who have nothing to sell
The failures, the fumbling muddly ones
Who never do anything well
Who never remember their name or number
And lose their place in the queue?
And what can you do for the ugly ones
When they can’t do a thing for you?
At 77, Rosselson has just issued a four-CD
retrospective of 72 songs, “World Turned
Upside Down; Rosselsongs 1960 - 2010,” he
recorded overlive decades with supporting
musicians including Roy Bailey, Billy Bragg,
Martin Carthy and the Oyster Band. With
tour-mate Johnson, he’s also recently issued a
CD of stories, readings and songs from a show
he created about the life of Thomas Paine,
one of America’s more radical founding
fathers, on the 250th anniversary of Paine’s
birth in Thetford, England.
Mike Wold: Your best-known song and the
title song of your CD set, “The World Turned
Upside Down,” is a kind of anthem about the
Diggers, a group of early socialists who resisted
the privatization of the English common lands
in the 1600s. Many of your other songs have
Political topics or reference working-class history
—yet you don’t like being called a political
songwriter.
Leon Rosselson: I’m not Working class and
I don’t see myself as representing working-
M.W.: In the liner notes to the CD set, you
talk about being influenced by the chanson
movement in France.
L.R.: That would include George Brassans,
Jacque Brel and other singers like [Edith] Piaf.
Brassans’ songs, for example, can be
extremely demanding and complex and quite
literary. When I went to hear him, he never
even spoke to the audience, he just sang. He
said, “I write for the ears, not for the eyes.”
People were listening, song after song. They
were obviously popular; they sold millions of
records. The problem is not with the audience
but with the expectations of song in Britain
and America. It’s not seen as an art form,
more as a lower class of poetry. But I like to
think of it as an art in its own right, which you
should take seriously.
M.W.: What hope do you see for the future?
L.R.: When you’re 77, the hope you see is
for the children and the grandchildren. I’m
not all that optimistic about the future for
them.
Looking back over those decades on the CD
set, the ’60s was a hopeful decade, although
we were a bit naive then. Since then, it’s been
downhill ever since in many ways. You have to
keep on. William Morris (19th century writer
and socialist visionary) says you may get what
you think you fought for, but in the end it <
turns out to be not what you fought for, and
you have to fight for your vision again under
another name.
M.W.: What would be your vision?
L.R.: My vision would be a transformed
society, not based on money and greed. It’s in
the song about William Morris, “Bringing the
News from Nowhere.”