There may be ever-lengthening gaps between full-blown albums these days, but Billy Bragg isn’t one to let timetables and release schedules place obstacles in the path of his message. This collection features songs originally made available via the singer’s website; pointed and pithy reactions to news stories of the day, ripped from the headlines, then written, recorded and posted in a trice.
The most recent of these is Never Buy The Sun, Bragg’s eloquent tirade against Fleet Street phone hackers (“The parents of the missing girl cling desperately to hope/ While a copper takes improper payments in a thick brown envelope”), its title also reminding us of the post- Hillsborough boycott of the tabloid on Merseyside. Closer to home, The Battle Of Barking was written in response to the BNP winning council seats in the London borough of his birth.
World politics don’t escape Bragg’s pen, either, with The Lonesome Death Of Rachel Corrie (sung to the melody of Dylan’s Hattie Carroll) remembering the International Solidarity Movement worker killed in the Gaza Strip in 2003, while The Price Of Oil examines what many believe to be the truth behind the invasion of Iraq. The strapline on the album sleeve describes its contents as “polemical tunes in an age of indifference”, but Bragg’s own activism burns as bright as ever.
