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Billy Bragg

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Barking's electric troubadour, welding trade-union politics to love songs since the early eighties — a solo voice, a loud guitar and no interest in separating the two.

Billy Bragg grew up in Barking, Essex, the son of an assistant sales manager, and learned guitar from his next-door neighbour, Wiggy, absorbing the Faces, Small Faces and the Rolling Stones alongside Bob Dylan and Simon & Garfunkel. Punk turned him toward politics: seeing the Clash at a Rock Against Racism carnival in 1978 was the moment he later cited for shifting him away from the casual racism he had once ignored.

Before going solo he ran a short-lived punk band, Riff Raff, with Wiggy, cutting singles for Chiswick Records that went nowhere. After the band split he drifted through odd jobs, briefly joined the army in 1981, and bought himself out of basic training after three months. He returned to London, dyed his hair and began busking solo as Spy vs Spy.

He talked his way into producer Peter Jenner's office at Charisma Records by posing as a television repairman, and Jenner liked the demo tape enough to release it despite the label's near-bankruptcy. Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy appeared in 1983 on Charisma's new imprint, Utility: voice and unaccompanied electric guitar, a format that made him easy to book and hard to ignore.

The songs split between plainly political material and love songs written in the same conversational, unsentimental voice. "A New England" remains among the best known, helped by Kirsty MacColl's hit version.

Bragg was closely associated with the miners' strike and with Red Wedge, the mid-eighties attempt to organise musicians around Labour politics. He later collaborated with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue records, setting unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to new music, and has continued to record, tour and write about politics and music.

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