Mr. Love & Justice

Since the release of his previous album, ‘England, Half English’ Bragg has chronicled his entire career with two box sets released in the spring and autumn of 2006. They contained all of Bragg’s studio albums together with EPs, singles, B-sides, covers and rare outtakes as well as DVDs of UK television’s South Bank Show and concert footage from Bragg’s shows in communist Eastern Europe during the late-80s – places where very few Western musicians played at that time.

 Other new generation musicians to come out as Bragg fans are The Nationwide Mercury Prize-shortlisted Hard-Fi who invited Billy to support them for six nights at London’s Brixton Academy in May 2006. The band later covered Bragg’s ‘Levi Stubbs’ Tears’ for a BBC Radio One session.

Jamie T – another artist shortlisted for the UK’s prestigious Nationwide Mercury Prize – recorded a version of Bragg’s ‘A New England’ for a recent B-side while Get Cape. Wear Cape. Fly, the new band led by Sam Duckworth, asked Billy to support them at a gig in London’s Wandsworth Prison. Bragg has now also performed on the band’s forthcoming album.

The new 12-track album has been produced by Grant Showbiz and features Bragg’s band The Blokes, comprising the celebrated Ian McLagan - of Small Faces, Bob Dylan, The Faces and Rolling Stones fame - on Hammond organ and piano, together with Ben Mandelson (lap steel guitar and bouzouki); Lu Edmonds (electric guitar and vocals); Martyn Barker (drums) and Simon Edwards (bass).

They are joined by the legendary Robert Wyatt, the guest vocalist on a track called ‘I Keep Faith’ recorded in South Thoresby, Lincolnshire. The collaboration came about when Bragg, in search of fresh rhubarb for a crumble, was in nearby Louth where he met Wyatt who lives in the town. “I hadn’t seen him since Red Wedge (the 1986 Labour Party youth vote initiative),” says Bragg. “He found me some rhubarb and then came along to the recording session and sang beautiful vocals to the chorus of ‘I Keep Faith’ – it was like angels singing!”