'I've paid a high price': Michelle Shocked talks notoriety, Spotify and her Fringe return

She lived happily in Los Angeles for 25 years, moved to New York and was based across town in Chelsea for five years, until the pandemic hit and she moved to her current abode. "I watched everyone leave town and thought ‘well I guess I’m staying’,” she says. “I think this little studio is going to be my crypt.”

This is not Shocked’s first spell in the city that never sleeps. As a young itinerant, she hung around the downtown CBGBs scene in the 1980s. “Itinerant is kind, because I was homeless,” she says bluntly. “At that time in the punk era there was the squatter movement so I lived in the Lower East Side.”

But Shocked first came to prominence - entirely by accident and, it transpires, without her permission - while playing her songs around a Texas campfire in the mid-1980s at the Kerrville Folk Festival. “I would meet up with friends who were also vagabonds, writing songs like diary entries and sharing with each other,” she recalls. “The real story was in the campfire affinity that we created but in a sense that process was interrupted.”

Shocked’s impromptu performance was recorded on a Walkman (by Pete Lawrence, who went on to found The Big Chill festival) and released as The Texas Campfire Tapes. It was a viral sensation back in the day when that kind of sudden notoriety was still called word of mouth.

“I call it a bootleg,” says Shocked. “I've been up against a Cinderella story - ‘aren’t you lucky you got discovered?’ It was the closest I was ever going to come to being shot out of a cannon. You don’t have anything to grab on to to say ‘treasure this for the rest of your life’. It’s all going by in a blur like a thrill ride. You know that at some point it’s gonna end but you don’t know when and you’re not in control of it so you just live for years at a time with that anxiety: I hope this nausea never ends…”

Forty years later, Michelle Shocked’s new Fringe show Bootleg This! is actually a tale of two bootlegs, the one that started her career and the one that nearly ended it. In 2013, audio surfaced of a San Francisco concert when she appeared to speak out against same sex marriage. The show was closed down and Shocked’s remarks - the interpretation of which she disputes - have haunted her ever since, still leading to show cancellations.

Shocked’s reaction was to push against the practice of bootlegging and become a “copyright nerd”. These days she has no truck with streaming services such as Spotify and YouTube, which, as well as remunerating artists poorly for their work, also “gamify artistic worth” with their emphasis on amassing views or streams. “No artist should have their artistry measured by the number of streams,” she says. “That is just as manipulated as going to a casino and thinking that you can actually beat the house.”

The gamble Shocked is taking is in removing her music from the most pervasive global platforms. She is sanguine about her choice. “I believe I’ve come up with a viable model for artistic resilience,” she says. “I’ve paid a high price which I think every pioneer does but if my model is viable then I can pass it out and feed the multitudes.”

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Her advocacy for intellectual property and the artist rights’ movement is the latest chapter in a lifetime of activism: the cover of her 1988 debut album Short Sharp Shocked is a photo of Shocked being detained at a protest at the 1984 Democratic Convention when she was campaigning against big money in politics. In much the same way that she was storytelling round that Texas campfire, she has recorded an aural memoir, also called Bootleg This!, rather than write a book on her eventful life, a medium she chose “because I started writing songs as travelogue, as a way of keeping a journal of my experiences.”

Shocked sees herself as both performer and observer - the alchemy for any good songwriter. “Much of my show is the consequence of 40 years as an observer of this business we call show,” she says. “I want to tell the story in Edinburgh about a boldness and audacity. It’s not a victory lap but it is a story of resilience. What is my relationship to the audience coming to see the show? Am I relating to them as if they are all the bootleggers because that’s been my experience or am I relating to them as the people that nurtured and sustained me so that after being cancelled for 13 years I still have a platform to tell my story? I’m nervous because I don’t know who I am talking to.”

She does have previous happy experiences of Edinburgh to draw on. She felt like “the It Girl” at her 1987 Fringe debut when she co-headlined with Richard Thompson. “It felt like a whirlwind, everything about being a debutante, an ingenue, the flavour of the month.” Six years later, she performed at the Edinburgh International Festival in a show choreographed by Mark Morris and has returned to the Fringe several times since. On this occasion, she has an eight-song setlist which may or may not include a brand new song called Snap Out Of It, but she is also working with a dramaturg.

“I want to induce an element of theatricality because it’s the Fringe,” she says. “I’m at the Gilded Balloon and I noticed there is two magicians and a hypnotist on their bill. I want to give them a run for their money. If I can pull it off that would be quite a magic trick.”

Michelle Shocked: Bootleg This!, Gilded Balloon Patter Hoose, 8.30pm, until 20 August

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