My 100 Favourite Albums (In No Particular Order) #4

Billy Bragg - Brewing Up With Billy Bragg (1984).

The first concert I ever saw was Billy Bragg on April 7th 1985 at Penyrheol Leisure Centre. Barely a week earlier i'd heard my first Bragg song when he appeared on Top Of The Pops singing "Between The Wars". My elder brother must have liked what he saw because he bought us both tickets for the nearby concert. Support was from cult band The Three Johns and a local male voice choir. I kid you not. The concert was a fund raiser for local familes who were affected by the Miners Strike at the time. So this was the first Bragg album i heard after seeing him in concert. Like all the best Bragg albums you have your political songs and the personal. I must say as much as i like his political songs i've always preferred his relationship/lovesongs. On this record you have two of my all time favourites, "St. Swithin's Day" and the almost perfect "The Saturday Boy". I think "The Saturday Boy" resonated so much beacause it echoed my life at that exact moment, the boy who admired from afar and never got the girl, as another great lyricist put it "Fifteen, clumsy and shy". "St Swithin's Day" became another "song of my life" when a long term relationship ended the lyrics "The Polaroids that hold us together will surely fade away like the love that we spoke of forever on St Swithin's Day" seemed really profound. That's the ability of great lovesong writers to speak of unspecific events that so many people can read into and enterperet as "their song". The rest of the album crackles with political numbers ("It Says Here"), anti-war songs ("The Island Of No Return") and other's bitter relationship songs (the equisite "Myth Of Trust"). Billy Bragg has written many better songs, certainly more mature songs but i don't think he's ever written a better "album" since. Having said that "Worker's Playtime" runs it a close second.