1001 Albums You Must Hear Before You Die: 575. Billy Bragg – Talking With The Taxman About Poetry (1986)

 

Bragg is a folk artist from that strand of British folk that deals with polemics and the experience of industrial workers, not the strand that concerns fair maidens met while a-walking one May morning. His work generally encompasses ardent political comment delivered over acoustic guitar, Essex’s answer to Woody Guthrie. 

Here, he tends towards a more complex musical arrangement although for his more political songs it’s pretty much him and an electric, rather than acoustic, guitar. Ideology, for example, skewers career-politicians who treat the role as an exercise in their own comfort rather than addressing the needs of the people. There’s Power In A Union is a classic picket-line anthem, Bragg having risen to fame with his track Between The Wars in support of the Miners’ Strike.  

Yes, he’s a left-wing firebrand and, cometh the hour, cometh the man, he’s back again these days, occupying the same kind of socio-political position as Robert Tressel’s Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, or the likes of Dickens and Shaw. 

When he’s not calling for workers’ rights and the rich to pay their dues, Bragg sings about relationships. Whether political or personal, his lyrics are rich and often witty. In A New Brunette he complains of his lover Shirley that “How can you lie there and think of England 
when you don't even know who's in the team”, and also that, in the time-honoured fashion of the English working class, “I'm celebrating my love for you, with a pint of beer and a new tattoo”.  

This track, as well as The Passion, feature Kirsty MacColl on backing vocals, part of a long-standing collaboration between the two. One of MacColl’s biggest hits was with a Bragg song, New England. I don't think she crops up on the list as an artist in her own right – none of her albums quite fulfill the “all bangers” criterion, alas. Johnny Marr of The Smiths features on guitar on the same tracks, and there are lyrical and topical similarities between the music of Bragg and that of The Smiths, as well as Paul Weller (especially in his Jam years). 

After a whole album, Bragg’s rather strident Essex accent begins to wear, like being harangued at Speaker’s Corner for forty-five minutes, but taken track by track this is a solid bit of protest folk.