Beans on Toast: Singing in a political age

English folk singer Beans on Toast on nostalgia, activism, and singing in turbulent times

It’s not easy writing songs about politics, as folk singer Beans on Toast knows well. He’s taking a break from it this year.

“I’m literally in the studio the day after tomorrow recording the next record,” he says, one breezy May afternoon. “Not wanting to get too bogged down in the election cycle, I’ve written a bunch of pagan hymns. So it’s ignoring politics completely and just going back to the wild.”

This marks a departure for the Essex-born singer-songwriter. He’s built a reputation over the last 15 years for his distinctive brand of light-hearted, politically conscious folk music. With an acoustic guitar and his trademark optimism, he waxes lyrical about topics such as love, politics, and escapism into the jacuzzi.

The political songs came early. His first album, Standing on a Chair, released in 2009, features a track called “Thanks for Fucking Up the World for Us” – essentially, he says, “me having a moan about George Bush and Tony Blair, and how bad they were and how it’s got to get better.” He pauses for breath. “We didn’t know how good we had it, almost.”

Since then Beans’ work has juggled political hot potatoes as varied as climate, Brexit, land ownership, protest, conspiracy theories, and artificial intelligence. The way his songs tackle social issues with humour and frankness is reminiscent of singers like John Prine or Billy Bragg.

Beans on Toast, real name Jay McAllister, started his music career as a teenager in the late nineties with the grunge band Jellicoe. When they disbanded, McAllister gave up singing in a faux-Seattle accent and started the Beans on Toast project.

The name, a tribute to the British delicacy, comes from McAllister’s desire to re-embrace his roots. “I wanted to be more myself,” he says, full of beans. “I’d write songs in an English accent, and I guess I wanted a name that was going to portray that Englishness as well.”

Beans’ output is prolific, a consequence of releasing an album every year since 2009 on his birthday, 1 December. Across those 15 years, he has learned a thing or two about political songwriting.

“If you’re going to write songs about current events,” he says, “you’ve got to be open to the fact that they’re going to have a short shelf life.” Such as when he wrote a song called “2016”. He remembers soon after thinking: “Okay, this has got six months on it.”

“There’s another song, ‘On & On’,” he continues. “It’s the best song to finish a set on. But the second verse says the lines, ‘There’s less war now than ever before, less disease and less famine.’ And the truth is, since I wrote it, there’s been more disease, more war, and more famine. So it’s like the words feel pretty fucking clunky coming out my mouth now, and I feel the need to explain myself.”

“I suppose that’s the blessing and the curse of writing about current events,” he muses. “They go out of date quickly. But then at the same time, you can look back and feel how you felt about stuff in the past.”

In the third verse of “On & On” Beans describes how “children marching in the streets” give him “hope”. I ask whether this is still the case. “Yeah,” he says, his optimism barely twitching. “I have hope in the children of the future.”

His advice to young people is to “follow your heart” but also “be careful whose advice you take”.

One difficulty when mixing politics and music is the risk of sounding preachy. “I certainly don’t claim to be right on any of the subjects,” Beans makes clear. “I try not to push anything down anybody’s throat.”

Throughout his music, Beans on Toast showcases a knack for balancing the political and the personable. “I’d like to see my songs as like a celebration, really, of life,” he reflects. “But through that celebration you can’t be naive. So, you know, I’m happy to criticise the world around us, but only ever from a place of love – without sounding too corny.”