Just over a decade ago, Billy Bragg wrote a rather buoyant song, Sexuality, in which he proclaimed, "Headlines give me headaches when I read them". They still do, in fact.
"Does it really matter that Prince Harry was frolicking naked with girls?" Bragg asks of the royal heir's (albeit third-in-line) latest capers.
"He's 20-something and a soldier ... I don't think it's headline news; it's not that important. I'd like a bit less celebrity-shock and some more real news in our newspapers."
Actually, it's not the first time Bragg has mentioned both Prince Harry and the press in the same sentence.
Bragg says he writes about "the things that piss me off". He always has (ever since his 1983 debut, Life's A Riot with Spy Vs Spy). And, he promises, he always will.
"Sometimes it's about the Government; sometimes it's my relationships; sometimes it's about football. Then I go out and play my pissed-off songs to people and they applaud ...Suddenly, I don't feel so pissed off."
Bragg is speaking from his home on the south coast of Dorset, England. The reason for the phone-call is his forthcoming concert at the Otago Festival of the Arts on October 14 (Otago Girls' High School auditorium), when he will perform a show of two halves.
Bragg will do four shows in New Zealand, including an arts fundraiser in Christchurch.
Titled "Ain't Nobody That Can Sing Like Me", the format will replicate his recent United States performances: the first half of the concert will celebrate the legacy of Woody Guthrie, while the second half explores Bragg's own extensive repertoire, which covers three decades and more than a dozen albums.
This year marks the 100th anniversary of the birth of Guthrie, a prolific folk singer whose songs, ballads, prose and poetry championed the plight of the underdog and inspired artists from Bob Dylan to The Clash's Joe Strummer as well as Bragg himself.
When Guthrie's daughter Nora unearthed a treasure trove of her father's unrecorded lyrics after his death (in 1967), Bragg and Wilco worked together to create the Mermaid Avenue series of albums, of which The Complete Sessions, including a third volume, has recently been released.
Not only was the process of working with American alt-country act Wilco enjoyable, it also provided Bragg with a deeper insight into Guthrie's persona.
"Nora encouraged us to choose songs that shone a light on another side of Woody's character; songs like Ingrid Bergman, where he wants to make love to the film star on the slopes of a volcano, or My Flying Saucer, where he wants to hitch a ride home on a flying saucer."
Musical curiosities aside, Guthrie, the author of 1940 classic This Land Is Your Land, is best known as an artist of dissent. In that regard, his words still resonate, Bragg says.
"For some time now, I've been singing one of his classics, I Ain't Got No Home In This World Anymore. It was written during the last Great Depression.
"In the first verse, families lose their homes to the bank; in the second, they get split up because they are looking for work; and in the third, he castigates people gambling on the stock market and making millions, while ordinary working people can't make ends meet. This song could have been written anytime in the last five years, but it's actually 70 years old."
Bragg might brandish an electric guitar as frequently as he does an acoustic instrument, yet he has long been drawn to the core ideal of folk music offering no-nonsense engagement with an audience.
"We are all doing Woody's work, when it comes down to it. If you follow back to the people who inspired us, it often leads back to Woody."
However, Bragg and his modern-day peers have a technological advantage over those protest singers who have gone before: technology or, more specifically, the internet.
"One of the interesting things about the digitisation of music is it has allowed topical songwriters to make songs, record them and make them available to be heard in, say, Otago the next day."
Take, for instance, the British miners' strike of 1984-85, about which Bragg wrote the single Between The Wars. However, by the time Bragg had written, recorded and released the track, the strike had ended.
"Now, I can write a song on a Friday, perform it live on a Saturday, put a clip of that live show on You Tube on Sunday, record it properly with a band on Monday, mix it the next day and have it available as a free download on a Wednesday," Bragg enthuses. "That's a very exciting dynamic. I've done that a number of times in the past 10 years.
"Since the success of Never Buy The Sun (written in the wake of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal), people have started asking about my older songs, so I put them all on a compilation," he says of last year's Fight Songs, which comprises material previously only available via his website as well as several new songs.
It helps that Bragg's wife, Juliet, specialises in web-page design. The couple work on Bragg's rather slick website from the Dorset seaside home they share with teenage son Jack.
"It's like a cottage industry," the 54-year-old songwriter explains. "You know where you are; you know what sells; you know what works; you have quality control. I think it is a better business model to cut out the middleman and do it yourself.
"When you've been in the industry a long time, like I have, you don't have the immediacy of those first few years of success. You have more time to think about things."
Tagged "The Bard From Barking" early in his career in reference to his upbringing in Essex, on the eastern fringes of London, Bragg was a tank driver in the British Army for a time.
However, that career choice proved flawed ("When you've driven one tank, you've driven them all ...") and in 1982, in his mid-20s, he found himself back in Barking, writing songs.
Inspired by the anyone-can-do-it ethos of punk, the politically-themed songs of The Clash, the social observations of Elvis Costello as well as the Rock Against Racism movement in England in the late 1970s, Bragg employed a no-frills approach to his 1983 debut album, Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy, on which his lyrics ranged from vulnerable to cutting to a combination of the two.
"If you think about Costello - or even The Clash - we all come from the same roots. I was inspired by what happened in London in the late 1970s with punk rock," Bragg says.
"I was also inspired by Costello's new take on what Bob Dylan had been doing - that acerbic love song and political thing. For a while I tried to measure myself against Costello, but that way leads to insanity; he's on a different planet to the rest of us.
"When The Clash came along I was really happy because I was able to measure myself against people who I might be able to do similar things to.
"Generally, it's getting back to that idea that the music should say something, that it should be a platform for ideas rather than just a method of selling records. I remain true to that."
Although often defined by his political songs, Bragg has also penned more than few poignant love songs, including Milkman of Human Kindness, Man In The Iron Mask, The Saturday Boy and A New England (with its killer line, "Though I put you on a pedestal, they put you on the pill ...").
"I think what resonates through my work is the mixture between the pop and the politics. The area where the two overlap is where the most interesting stuff happens.
"That's why I was always into Costello. He's a great lyricist. I've tried to take some of the cleverness of him, add the energy of The Clash and a bit of myself in an attempt to do something new."
The founder of Red Wedge (a collective of left-wing musicians who campaigned for the defeat of Conservative Party leader Margaret Thatcher at the 1987 British election), Bragg has consistently railed against sectors of English society which, he believes, have an unrealistic vision to return to an England that once was.
"I've been involved in fighting both the English Defence League and the British National Party.
"We on the left have traditionally fought against racism by being internationalists but, unfortunately, by refusing to engage in the debate about national identity we have left a vacuum. That vacuum is very easily filled by outfits like the British National Party, who are able to define who does and doesn't belong in their own narrow racist terms."
Yet Bragg has copped a little flak himself in recent times. He might have been raised in the suburbs of Greater London, but his songs about the working man (and woman) have provided him with a 1.5 million abode overlooking the English Channel.
Last year, his village of Burton Bradstock, on Dorset's "Jurassic Coast", was the target of an anonymous hate-mail campaign.
Sent to random residents, the letters (complete with racist overtones) labelled Bragg a hypocrite for living a celebrity lifestyle despite his socialist views and claimed he was anti-British and pro-immigration.
Bragg responded in the British press, condemning the letters as the work of a "disgruntled member of the British National Party" and suggested his fellow villagers throw them in the rubbish.
In song, Bragg has commented on both England's changing sense of identity Take Down The Union Jack; England, Half English and its growing multiculturalism. He suggests "Englishness" is not something that should be defined in a single moment. Instead, it is a constantly moving idea.
"We saw in the Olympics a snapshot of what London, and England, is like now. That's been very healthy for us.
"In a sense, I'm less English than my father, who grew up in England before World War 2 eating English food and listening to English music. I grew up listening to different music and eating different food.
And my son has grown up with a different set of influences; the world he lives in is more globalised.
"I think identity is always contested ... we English now have to discover our identity."
Though some artists would recoil when asked if they felt a sense of social responsibility when writing, recording or performing their music, Bragg embraces the concept.
"Responsibility is a good word.
"I think if you have a platform, you have a responsibility to use that in a constructive way rather than a negative way. Too many people in my job use interviews to say nothing more than 'I'm great, they're shit' or 'Do you like my songs?'
"I'd much rather talk about what's happening in New Zealand because I might learn something, or hear your perspective on what I've tried to do with the concept of Englishness because I might find another thread there.
"It's a matter of curiosity, of engagement."
Hear him
Billy Bragg performs at the Otago Festival of the Arts (Otago Girls' High School auditorium) on October 14.
Billy Bragg's discography
• Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983)
• Brewing Up with Billy Bragg (1984)
• Talking with the Taxman about Poetry (1986)
• Back to Basics (1987)
• Workers Playtime (1988)
• The Internationale (1990)
• Don't Try This at Home (1991)
• William Bloke (1996)
• Bloke on Bloke (1997)
• Mermaid Avenue (1998) (with Wilco)
• Mermaid Avenue Vol. II (2000) (with Wilco)
• England, Half-English (2002) (with the Blokes)
• Mr Love & Justice (2008)
• Fight Songs (2011)
• Mermaid Avenue Vol. III (2012) (with Wilco)
• Mermaid Avenue: The Complete Sessions (2012) (with Wilco)
