Review:

on 2011-02-22 CharlesMartel Said:

I suppose the Billy Bragg story is one of decline in each album - at least that is how I view the first three. I stopped buying his stuff after that. This was his first outing beyond the simple man and his guitar format which had launched him so spectacularly into the UK world dominated by Thatcher's ruinous politics. The songs were still broadly divided into two types - stark loveless love songs from a soul-destroying urban wasteland; and political messages from the left of British politics.

Trouble is, after I read my review so far, I feel I have run out of things to say. I wrote this review last, and when I look over "Talking with the Taxman about Poetry", which I reviewed second, I find that I cannot actually remember which songs feature off which of the first two full-length albums on occasions. And therein lies a problem - Bragg didn't seem to develop much beyond the format he had set out in "Brewing up with Billy Bragg" and that lack of development put me off further exploration of his work.

The album opens with the anti-right-wing press song "It Says Here", echoing sentiments which still carry weight today, twenty five years later, in the Murdoch dominated world of Faux News, the Scum and News of the Screws trash rags which dominate his stable of so-called newspapers. It continues with a political theme throughout, mixed occasionally with bleak love songs such as "St Swithin's Day". Occasionally, such as with either of these two songs, Bragg shows he still has an edge, but at other times he seems to struggle to recapture the heights he achieved with "Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy". Whereas Bragg was always a leading light in what came to be known as the Red Wedge - a group of left-wing artists - his politics was initially politics with a small p. As he went on, he increasingly went uppercase with those sentiments. He became more strident and less observant in many ways, taking fro granted some things which needed explanation.

I guess it is this which demonstrates another thing that put me off Billy Bragg, in spite of the fact that I agreed with the message, and found it so eloquently said elsewhere by many of the post punk bands I admire. Bragg was politically in front of you. This was party political music, and he made no secret of it. I guess I felt that, even though the right in Britain did so much to ruin this country, the left at the time had made a mess of it, and had in some ways laid the foundations for the right-wing brutality of 1980's Conservatism. If that was not the answer, the left certainly had no answers either, and being preached at that the alternative is better when you know damn well it was not, is not the way I like my politics in music.

Still, this was a good debut album from Billy Bragg (though I will always think of "Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy" as an album, particularly the extended and remastered version which I now have). It contributed to a strain of political discussion through music which had begun a few years earlier during the punk revolution in the UK and at times provided the only genuine political opposition to what was being done in our names by our politicians. For that Bragg deserves to be commended.
Rating: 8/10