Mr. Love & Justice

He was born Steven William Bragg in Essex around the time Tommy Steele was climbing the singles charts with Happy Guitar and the Soviet Union was launching Sputnik 2 into space. Today, on the verge of the release of his eleventh and best album, Mr. Love & Justice, he is known as Billy Bragg by his loyalists worldwide yet he is still called Steven by his Mother and still referred to as the Bard of Barking by the press. He has worked, and worked is the operative verb here, alongside British parliamentarians, unskilled unemployed workers, members of the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame, young music hopefuls, unsung buskers in the street, incarcerated convicts, newly liberated refugees, punk rockers and striking dockers.

It’s been a quarter century since he took the stage for his first solo gig at North London Polytechnic, a concert advertising him under the first name Billy so his family wouldn’t spot his new career move. Since then our Billy has traveled the world and spoken to everybody twice. Billy Bragg has recorded hit singles, composed Top Ten albums, penned political anthems sung at rallies, kept alive traditional English folk songs, put his own spin on America’s greatest folk catalog and sung his heart out doing so. He has appeared on both MTV and late night highbrow chat shows, singing his mind on the first and speaking his mind on the latter. The Bard Of Barking has written essays for many daily newspapers of record and several notable weekly journals of comment. Perhaps his most memorable and eloquent journalism essay was his emphatic A Genuine Expression of the Will of the People, which was but one firm voice in the greater public campaign for the reform of the House of Lords.