The Beat Surrender

I have been buying Billy Bragg’s music longer than I care to remember and first saw him live on his “Stand Up Election” tour when Labour regained power. To describe Billy’s music in one word, I would have to say ‘passion’. Whatever subject he is writing about you get the feeling that he is writing from personal experience, whether that be from some picket line to a love song from a schoolboy’s frustrations.

It would be understandable for an artist of Billy’s years to lose some of this passion as we experience fewer new experiences as we grow older. However, this collection shows that it has been worth the wait and a definite improvement on his last collaboration with The Blokes.

Billy Bragg has written some great lyrics in his time. I only need to remind you of ‘how can you lie there and think of England when you don’t even know who’s in the team’. That will always be a tough act to follow but Billy continues intelligent song-writing into this with ‘take the M for me and the Y for you out of family and it all falls through’.

Billy’s idiosyncrasies continue in this album, he occasionally tries to reach notes he never would with the help of a specialist surgeon and is prone to squeezing a breathless number of words into one line ‘here’s a message from the sponsor of the Johnny Carcinogenic show’. And….. out.

Bragg fans will love this album and that is who it is aimed at. When an artist has such an extensive back catalogue ,it gets harder to produce albums of excellence. None of these songs would trouble my Bragg top 10 but it is still fantastic.Bragg fans will also love the acoustic double CD special edition and I look forward to seeing you and him in April.

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