Public Servant Lifestyle

After 20 years of releasing records, the inestimable Mr. Billy Bragg has finally decided to release a greatest ‘hits’ compilation album!

Must I Paint You A Picture? by Billy Bragg

Must I Paint You A Picture, a double-CD retrospective celebrates 20 years of songs about protest, romance, revolution, lust, poetry (and the taxman) body politics, and the absurdity of life and love. All this from one of the least likely pop stars of our age, the man The Times recently described as a "national treasure", the often essential Mr. Billy Bragg.

Featuring some of the man Bragg’s best-known and most popular songs, starting with a selection from Billy’s debut album, Life’s A Riot with Spy Vs Spy (1983) the compilation comes right up to date with tunes taken from Billy’s most recent (2002) album, England, Half English. One new track appearing on this mammoth collection is St. Monday - released as a single in America but here in its first release in the UK.

Initial copies of Must I Paint You A Picture? will also include a bonus CD crammed to the gills with additional Billy Bragg rarities.

Solo Performer

Billy Bragg is a singer songwriter of the old school. A self-taught, grassroots folk musician with a telling ear for melody and the poetry of everyday life. An absolutely essential voice on the music scene in the early to late Eighties and a superlative – particularly when playing solo – live performer, it’s hard to believe twenty years have passed since he first emerged. Or how much the music – and the world – has changed since those Cold War days of yore.

Billy dabbled with folk music in his youth, borrowing arcane compilations from his local record library in Barking, but this was the time of the punk rock explosion in Britain (Billy turned 19 in 1977) and he and his first band 'Riff Raff' formed with friends from school were fired up by The Clash and The Jam. The unifying strength of punk lay in anger and loud noise, and the political and emotional punch of folk was too subtle for the young Billy Bragg to appreciate. Plus it wasn't exactly cool.

British Army

Riff Raff disintegrated after just one single, but the experience taught Billy the visceral thrill of live performance, and honed his song writing skills. After a desperate stint in the British Army in 1981, Trooper Bragg bought himself out for £175 after the minimum 90 days, and re-entered the civilian world energised and raring to go. Choosing to go solo, but playing an electric instead of the conventional acoustic guitar, was his calling card, and it was here, writing simple but hard hitting punk inspired love and hate songs that he first tapped into the folk tradition.

Coming into the public eye in 1983 with his debut album, Life’s a Riot With Spy Vs Spy (Go! Discs) he has become one of the country’s best known and best loved popular musicians. Dubbed Britain’s finest rock poet by the NME, Billy’s high quality song writing has consistently shunned the glossy values traditionally associated with pop music. Life's A Riot’ – and the first two or three albums released on Go! - were raw and economical, full of righteous indignation and romantic bitterness. That debut caught the national imagination, topped the independent charts and made Billy an unlikely star, going on to sell 100,000 copies in the UK and over 200,000 copies worldwide.

Billy spent the years between 1983 and 1993 touring extensively across the globe, much of the time as a solo performer. During those years he released several Top Ten albums and numerous Top Twenty singles in many territories. He has collaborated with The Smiths’ Johnny Marr, with 10,000 Maniacs’ Natalie Merchant, Peter Seeger and REM. Those who have recorded songs written by Billy include Kirsty MacColl (A New England), Paul Young (Man in the Iron Mask), and Dubstar (St Swithins' Day).

Apart from his music and his sense of humour, Billy is also well known for his personal commitment to political and humanitarian issues. Politicised by the Margaret Thatcher years - and by his experiences while actively supporting the British mining communities during the Miners Strike of 1984/85 - he later created a coalition of musicians, Red Wedge, which supported for the Labour Party 1987 General Election.

Internationalist

An internationalist, he has been a longstanding and vociferous campaigner against racism and has lent his solidarity to many international issues in many ways, including performing to raise funds. In 1993 Billy became a father and curtailed his rigorous touring schedule in order to spend time with his family. Working mostly in London, he wrote music and songs for several films, including Walking and Talking and the BBC’s Safe and the feature film Mad Love.

While his musical career is the most important aspect of his work, he manages to find time to work as a broadcaster and writer, discussing social and political issues which are close to his heart. He has written extensively on such subjects as Englishness and the reform of the House of Lords, for both broadsheet and broadcasting media. Most recently he added his support to the successful campaign to get Ken Livingstone elected as Mayor of London.

It was while playing benefits for the striking miners that Billy came into contact with real political folk singers, and saw parallels between what he was trying to do and the effect of their stirring, hand-me-down folk songs. In 1992 he was invited to play at Woody Guthrie's 80th birthday memorial concert in New York's Central Park, and his interpretation of three Guthrie numbers impressed Woody's daughter Nora, who, as curator of her father's archive at West 57th Street, was looking to extend his musical legend by way of some new songs. "Billy has a way of getting a message across without being pompous, the same way Woody did," Nora says.

Folk Revival

Woody Guthrie forged his craft in the thirties, when drought and dust storms swept through the South, and caused a great exodus to "the promised land" of California. "You can only write about what you see," he said later. What he saw was poverty, devastation and unbreakable human spirit, as conveyed in his Dust Bowl Ballads. In Los Angeles, he wrote prolifically, and, milking his hillbilly image, earned his own radio slot and wrote columns for left wing newspapers.

Ever the migrant, he moved to New York, and became a minor celebrity, a published author (the semi-autobiographical Bound For Glory) and a hit on the folk circuit, often playing at union meetings. Tragically, a hereditary wasting disease, Huntington's, hospitalised him in 1958 and he was unable to perform again. The sixties folk revival spearheaded by a young Bob Dylan (an ardent Guthrie follower) happened without him, and he died in 1967. Thankfully, during those painful years, Guthrie continued to write lyrics, latterly dictating them to devoted wife Marjorie - and it is some of these songs that formed the Mermaid Avenue album.

In 1996, Billy was invited by Nora, to visit the Guthrie Archive in New York where she showed him thousands of unpublished lyrics that her father had written. The songs had never been recorded, as the original tunes - carried in Woody’s head - had been lost when he died, having only managed a couple of recording sessions in his whole lifetime. It was Nora’s hope that Billy would take on the task of writing new ones.

Mermaid Avenue

The resulting album, Mermaid Avenue, was recorded in Dublin with US country rockers Wilco. Following its release to worldwide acclaim in 1998, Mermaid Avenue was nominated for a Grammy Award and included in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the most influential albums of the 90s. To date it has sold 500,000 copies worldwide, and the follow-up, Mermaid Avenue Volume II, was released in the summer of 2000.

"It's a collaboration, not a Woody Guthrie tribute album," said Billy at the time - a collaboration between himself and Chicago country rockers Wilco, and a collective collaboration with the spirit of Woody.

The full tracklisting for Must I Paint You A Picture? – as voted by fans on the Billy Bragg official website is:

CD1.

New England
Walk Away Renee
The Man In the Iron Mask
Greetings To The New Brunette
The Milkman of Human Kindness
There is Power In A Union
To Have And Have Not
Help Save The Youth Of America
A lover Sings
The Warmest Room
St Swithins’ Day
Must I Paint You A Picture
The Saturday Boy
She’s Got A New Spell
Between The Wars
The Price I Pay
The World Turned Upside Down
Valentines Day is Over
Levi Stubbs Tears
Waiting For The Great Leap Forwards

CD2.

Sexuality
The Space Race Is Over
Cindy of 1000 Lives
The Boy Done Good
Moving The Goalposts
Ingrid Bergman
Tank Park Salute
Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key
You Woke Up My Neighbourhood
My Flying Saucer
Accident Waiting To Happen
All You Fascists Bound To Lose
Sulk
NPWA
Upfield
St. Monday
The Fourteenth Of February
Somedays I See The Point
Brickbat
Take Down The Union Jack

CD3. (limited edition bonus CD)

Trunk Road To The Sea
Rule Nor Reason
Fear Is A Mans Best Friend
Debris
Cold And Bitter Tears
Dry Bed
Seven And Seven Is
She Smiled Sweetly
When Will I See You Again?
Take Down The Union Jack (version).

Help Save The Youth Of America

Over the last two decades Billy Bragg rightfully has gained an elevated reputation - among those prepared to look beyond the agit-busker caricature – as someone who writes sublime bitter-sweet love songs. The author of such great songs as Help Save The Youth Of America, A New England, Levi Stubbs Tears, St Swithins Day and title track – Must I Paint You A Picture – deserves this overview of his career so far like few singer songwriters of the last twenty years. Essential.

Life's A Riot with Spy Vs Spy, Brewing Up With Billy Bragg, (usually collected as Back To Basics), Talking With The Taxman About Poetry, Bloke On Bloke, Mermaid Avenue I & II, England Half English and Workers Playtime are all still available in one form or another, some have been collected, some not. The only major piece missing from the back catalogue is a long overdue re-issue of Bragg’s 1990 mini-LP The Internationale – one for Cooking Vinyl to think about I think.

Must I Paint You A Picture? Is out now, on Cooking Vinyl.

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