Mr. Bragg goes Moscow Part 1.

In 1924 Lev Kuleshov directed a film called The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks. This film, The Strange Case of Mr. Bragg in the Land of Glasnost and Perestroika, or Mr. Bragg Goes to Moscow, a traveloque from 1987, is a humble attempt to follow in Kuleshov´s footsteps. The time: November 1987. The place: Soviet Union. The menu: a series of concerts in Tallinn, Estonia and Moscow. The majority of performances are in a huge hall, used for weightlifting in the Moscow Olympics of 1980. That is the main reason for sound quality being far from celestial. Billy Bragg performs for card carrying party members, but occasionally at an alternative rock club too. He is an unknown entity in the USSR, so the selection of songs he performs differ radically from his normal set: Clash, Marvin Gaye, Junior Murvin, Buzzcocks, Smiths, Hank Williams, and Smokey Robinson. He explains how punk, Motown, and later, Morrissey/Marr have influenced him. The trip is an opportunity to see how Mikhail Gorbachev´s perestroika and glasnost work in practice. As a well-known British leftwing artist, and a mouthpiece for the Red Wedge movement, Bragg ponders how all that he sees fits in with his own idea of socialism. Or, if this what he sees is socialism at all. He says ironically that revolutions don´t always turn out the way we expect them to turn out, before starting a storming version of Leon Rosselson´s World Turned Upside Down, the story of the Diggers´ activities in 1649. Bragg also tells how the Soviet accomplishments within the space race had inspired him to write I Wanna Be A Cosmonaut for his early band Riff Raff. We see glimpses of local bands, like Russian Bravo and Boris Grebenshikov´s Akvarium, as well as Estonian Rosta Aknats and Villu Tamme of JMKE, who plays a semiacoustic version of his anthem of independence, Tere Perestroika. Companions for Bragg on the tour are the members of the Finnish punk group Kadotetut (the Lost Ones). Mr. Bragg Goes to Moscow was directed by Hannu Puttonen (Oldstars Ltd.).