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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 is a singer, songwriter and campaigner from Barking, east London. He began recording in the early 1980s, and his first releases — starting with Life's a Riot with Spy Vs Spy — consisted largely of 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 He later collaborated with Wilco on the Mermaid Avenue records, setting unpublished Woody Guthrie lyrics to new music, and has continued to record, tour and write about politics and music.

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