on 2011-02-23 dscanland Said:

Great review Charles! Makes me want to revisit Taxman. It's been a while.
Not Rated

Review:

on 2011-02-22 CharlesMartel Said:

I recently revisited this album after some while not having heard it. That experience, and the sharp-witted observations of politics and life in general and their relevance even years later prompted me to go back and reconsider my review.

For anyone who experienced the misery of the Thatcher years in the UK, Billy Bragg was a hero. Intensely political, many of the tracks on his albums are a scathing comment on British politics during the destructive years of Margaret Thatcher's Conservative Governments. Yet many of his other songs are bleak, somewhat depressing songs about love in an urban, soulless environment. For instance I am always moved to sadness and an intense feeling of loneliness when I hear the opening words to the superb "Levi Stubbs Tears" -

"With the money from the accident she bought herself a mobile home
So at least she could get some enjoyment out of being alone."

For his third album he very much continued with the same vein of work as his second. He had adopted a broader, though still sparse, range of instrumentation but it seemed as if the message was beginning to wear thin. Some of the political songs are not as good as on earlier albums, but then matching "To Have and to Have Not" on "Life's a Riot with Spy vs. Spy" would always be difficult. "There's Power in a Union" is a bit too much like a demagogic, marching song, while "Help Save the Youth of America" is perhaps a little too knee-jerk-left anti-American to be credible were it not for stanzas like the eerily prophetic -

"The Cities of Europe have burned before
And they may yet burn again.
But if they do I hope you'll understand
That Washington will burn with them."

Or the humorously accurate:-

"When the lights go out in the rest of the world,
What do our cousins say?
They're playing in the sun
And having fun, fun, fun,
Until Daddy takes the gun away."

As I learnt from my own experience living outside the country of my birth, it sometimes takes an outsider to point out how utterly ludicrous some of the things you take for granted really are.

Among the love songs, the bleakness is still evident in some of them, though again, matching "A New England" on "Life's a Riot with Spy vs. Spy" was always going to be difficult. Again, one line stands out above all the others, off "Greetings to the New Brunette" -

"How can you lie there and think of England
When you don't even know who's in the team."

But he doesn't just pour scorn and derision on the other half of the so-called "Special Relationship". For instance, on "Ideology", Bragg takes a pop at both sides of the political divide in the UK, but reserves his most scathing attacks for the neglect of the ordinary man, the voter, the guy who slogs his guts out day after day in some boring shit job to make sure there's a roof over his head, food on the table and a future doing the same for his kids. Instead

"The patient millions, who put them into power
Expect a little more back for their taxes"

Instead, those who really call the shots are those who

"Built their private fortunes
On the things they can rely:
The courts, the secret handshake,
The stock exchange and the old school tie"

In the same way as some of the lines on "Help Save the Youth of America" are relevant today to the USA, so are these comments apposite in this time of international financial crisis brought on by everybody's favourite (and justifiably so) hate figures in finance. It just makes me want to scream out loud - FUCKERS!

Overall, there some classic moments on this but unless you know the context in which Billy Bragg wrote his albums you may find it hard to get into. In my view, though the biting comment was still there, the songs were weaker than on previous albums, hence the lower rating. I pretty much gave up on Billy Bragg after this.
Rating: 7/10