Worker’s playtime
Celebrating 40 years of graft and great songwriting.
Billy Bragg
★★★★
The Roaring Forty
COOKING VINYL. CD/DL/LP
BORN JUST months apart and releasing their debut albums within weeks 40 years ago, is Billy Bragg the anti-Madonna? Yet her brother-in-law Joe Henry has worked with both. Nor is that all. Both are driven, working-class musicians with Marmite visions of wider empowerment. Both broke through only after years of hustle honed their entrepreneurial nous. And both have sustained careers of interest and variety despite creaky singing voices.
Being no Maria Callas mattered not to post-punks as long as you could sell your song, usually either sarcastically (Rotten onwards) or sincerely (school of Strummer). Bragg is a Strummerista, authentically himself though with considerable presentational wit and ingenuity. That authenticity was at first demonstrated in pub-standard voice, busker guitar and demo-quality records that defined him as both punkily DIY and a new kind of electric skiffling folkie. This honest but plain sound undersold some excellent songs ruminating romantically as New Man dawned, his delight in humdr um detail painting a bigger picture – “With the money from her accident, she bought herself a mobile home/So at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone” (Levi Stubbs’ Tears) – aligning him slightly closer with Ray Davies than the obviously influential early Costello at his snappiest and least convoluted – “For the girl with the hourglass figure/Time runs out very fast” (Valentine’s Day Is Over).
In this career retrospective available in three different sizes, from single LP primer to 14-CD completist box set, among the 40 pieces of memorabilia pictured in the booklet is Bragg’s Smokey Robinson And The Miracles Fan Club membership card, and among several covers here is Smokey’s Tracks Of My Tears, whose elegant double helix of mutually reinforcing words and music is what the Barking Bard’s inner classicist aims for in his own work.
When his sturdy tunes do hit the jackpot, one wonders why Kirsty MacColl’s hit with A New England is such a rare cover. Adele for one should clock 2021’s I Believe In You and I Will Be Your Shield, songs whose fullfat band originals are far easier on the ear than the early one-man band approach.
Perhaps he’s overlooked by being pigeonholed as a political songwriter. The inspirational Woody Guthrie is indeed a constant, and, with Wilco, the Mermaid
Avenue trilogy set previously unheard lyrics to new music. Like all political songsmiths, Bragg seeks to transcend the didactic and stir the blood, and largely succeeds. Unusual and all the more resonant is 2002’s confession of the disheartened campaigner, Some Days I See The Point. Making the political personal, it poignantly embodies Bragg the idealist. Madonna seldom drops her guard like that.