Billy Bragg - Worker's Playtime (2006)

"If you've got a blacklist, I want to be on it..."

By the time of the 1989 stateside release of Worker's Playtime, punk-inspired folkie Billy Bragg had found an unlikely measure of commercial success in the UK and had developed a loyal cult audience in the United States. Whereas Bragg's first two albums, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg (1984) and Talking With The Taxman About Poetry (1986), featured many politically-charged songs delivered from the singer's left-leaning perspective, they also offered up intelligent romantic commentary such as "Levi Stubb's Tears" and "Love Gets Dangerous." It is the tension of this dichotomy – the soapbox rabble-rouser shouting political rhetoric and the hopeless Celtic romantic singing love songs – that drives Worker's Playtime.

Working for the first time with noted producer Joe Boyd (Nick Drake, Fairport Convention), Bragg pretties up many of the songs on Worker's Playtime with finely tuned melodies and lush instrumentation, a stark contrast to his sparse previous work. The angry young man of Bragg's early EPs and debut album has, a half-decade later, mellowed somewhat, allowing the romantic songwriter to come to the foreground. The result is a superb collection of material like "She's Got A New Spell," the melancholy "Valentine's Day Is Over" (featuring just Bragg's voice, guitar and a piano) and the rollicking, self-effacing "Life With The Lions."

The most striking moment here, however, is "Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards," the song building from Bragg's lone piano-backed vocals to a swelling crescendo of choral voices and a grand finish. It's the defining moment of Worker's Playtime, an affirmation of the singer's social consciousness. Even so, the song displays Bragg's growing disenchantment with politics as well as his wry sense of humor. Although proclaiming that "revolution is just a T-shirt away," Bragg asks, "will politics get me the sack?" In the end, Bragg's surmises "start your own revolution and cut out the middle man," evoking Dylan's "don't follow leaders, watch the parking meters..."

Worker's Playtime proved to be commercially questionable, fans and critics alike seemingly confused by the album's tentative nature and artistic contradictions between the "new" Billy Bragg (stronger production, more instrumentation) and the "old" (guitar and vocals). In reality, the album's sublime strength lies entirely in its uneasy nature, Worker's Playtime showcasing Bragg's evolution from street busker to self-aware musician. Somewhere between album number one and number three, Bragg realized that there might actually be a future to this music thing.

The material on the bonus disc of this excellent Yep Roc reissue – studio demos and outtakes – supports this critical perspective, showing Bragg experimenting with different ways to express his music. The demo of "She's Got A New Spell," with the Attractions' Bruce Thomas and the Jeff Beck Group's Mickey Waller, evinces a rock aesthetic while "The Short Answer" sounds like low-key Graham Parker, complete with the Rumour's Martin Belmont on guitar. Other material, such as a stark, powerful cover of the Jam's "That's Entertainment" and an uncharacteristically soulful live reading of Tim Hardin's classic "Reason To Believe" display different facets of Bragg's talents.

In retrospect, Worker's Playtime is a solid collection of songs that served as an invaluable stepping stone to Bragg's work on albums like Don't Try This At Home as well as his collaboration with the band Wilco on Mermaid Avenue. It is in these grooves that you can hear Bragg becoming comfortable in his role as artist and musician, the album an important part of the artist's overall catalog and an influential release in its own right. (Yep Roc Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Worker's Playtime from Amazon.com)

Billy Bragg - Talking With The Taxman About Poetry (2006)

"But if you think all I do is press words other people use into my service Comrades, come here, let me give you my pen and you can yourselves write your own verses!" - Victor Mayakovsky, 1926

By the time of the 1986 release of Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, Billy Bragg's self-professed "difficult" third album, the artist had become the poet laureate of the musical left. A tireless troubadour of socialist leanings, Bragg placed more fervor, energy, passion and emotion in a single phrase or turn of a word than most artists are capable of mustering throughout an entire album.

After a couple of critically acclaimed British EPs and a full-length indie album, Talking With The Taxman About Poetry represented Bragg's major label debut in the United States. Although Bragg had softened some of the rough edges that endeared audiences to his early work, the lyrical arguments presented on Bragg's third album proved no less passionate, his penchant for radical polemics no less zealous.

Whereas Bragg's early songs featured only his thickly-accented vocals and an accompanying guitar, Taxman was fleshed out with a few additional strings, a horn or two, and even an occasional background harmony. The music remained stark, simple and effective, Bragg's folk-punk musical style serving to underline the importance of his lyrics. First and foremost, Bragg is a poet; a hopeless romantic with a revolutionary bent (not unlike Byron), whose lyrics deal almost exclusively with love and politics – not an entirely inappropriate combination, for one inevitably involves the other. Bragg aims his pen mercilessly at the governments, institutions and the societies that would oppress the seemingly unflagging human spirit. Bragg champions the worker as a noble creature, envisions romantic love as the Holy Grail and, at times, jabs so deep in the heart with his lyrics and often times brutal lyrics that he is able to invoke the tears/passion he himself obviously feels.

The recent Yep Roc Records two-disc reissue of Talking With The Taxman About Poetry includes the entire album, remastered and spiffed up for the digital age, along with a bonus disc of rarities and inspired covers. Songs like Gram Parson's "Sin City," Woody Guthrie's "Deportees" and Smokey Robinson's "The Tracks Of My Tears" reveal the depth and scope of Bragg's musical influences and display the artist's charm and joy in music-making.

Even after 20 years and better than half a dozen album releases, Billy Bragg remains an acquired taste. His music has never been a commercial commodity, although he has enjoyed a hit song or two along the way. As this critic wrote at the time of this album's release, Bragg "is one of the most important artists to enter the rock arena in years – perhaps the most political folksinger since young Bobby Dylan strode into Greenwich Village with a guitar in hand." Bragg remains a man with a message, a poet of uncanny vision and a socially concerned artist whose work remains as fresh and relevant today, in the days of Bush and Blair, as it was during the Reagan/Thatcher era two decades ago. Much of today's "folk revival," the acid-folk music of artists like Devendra Banhart, owes a great debt to Bragg, an artist who, inspired by the music of Joe Strummer, would go on to create inspiring music of his own. (Yep Roc Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Talking With The Taxman About Poetry from Amazon.com)

Billy Bragg - Life's A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy (2006)

When originally released in 1983, the seven-song EP Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy earned Billy Bragg a reputation as a historical curiosity. After all, punk rock was still hanging on while new wave and Goth had begun to excite UK audiences. Bragg, on the other hand, was a wandering English troubadour, singing of love and justice and freedom...definitely an anachronism in the modern, trend-driven, media-savvy world. At that time (as now), if you weren't a beautiful actor/model/coverboy-girl with a set of safe, bland, over-produced songs, you need not apply. Bragg didn't fit into that mold, relying instead on talent, attitude and sheer guts in his attempt to make life-changing music.

Somehow, Bragg succeeded. Never a commercial artist, but always an influential one, his creative emphasis was on the lyrics, especially with his earliest work, which eschewed niceties such as production values and lush instrumentation in favor of the word, the voice and a guitar. The result, on these seven songs, was simply devastating. A talented wordsmith with a taste for the bizarre turn of the phrase, Bragg had a sharp eye for the absurdities of modern life and relationships, and a satirical wit that sinks a razor-sharp rapier into the jugular of the subjects he aims at. Bragg's political material voiced the most radical worldview since the early days of the Clash (Joe Strummer was a major influence on Bragg's songwriting), the songs made even more effective by the sparse musical accompaniment. Bragg's love songs are both emotional and bittersweet, never maudlin, and infected with a contagious romanticism more common to the folk genre than to punk rock.

In the twenty-three years since its original release, Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy has aged well, songs like "A New England" and "The Busy Girl Buys Beauty" benefiting from the timeless style of Bragg's writing and performances. The Yep Roc Records reissue of the EP features the original seven-song EP on one disc, and a second "bonus" disc of unreleased rarities, alternative versions and a great cover of John Cale's "Fear Is A Man's Best Friend." Personally, I would have liked to have seen the label include the four songs from Bragg's Between The Wars EP here, to flesh out the first disc somewhat. However, this is a minor cavil, and since Bragg personally oversaw the Yep Roc reissue series, it was his choice, not mine....

In 1985, when the vinyl version of Life's A Riot With Spy Vs Spy hit these shores, I wrote that Bragg had "a great artistic future," and that although he would never become a "big star," he would always be an "interesting and dedicated performer." Through the years since, Bragg has never proved me wrong. (Yep Roc Records)

(Click on the CD cover to buy Life's A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy from Amazon.com)