Live Review: Billy Bragg

So, a Billy Bragg gig a week after the country elects a doctrinaire conservative government? This could be well quotable. So many went in looking forward to the speechifying between as much as the songs themselves. 

But with the barricades already dismantled, things might be a little more conciliatory. “Perhaps it's a time for a bit of remembrance and contrition,” as he pondered. So it settled into those songs of relationships coming and going, and musings on how a guy with that Barking bark gets his latest album on the 'Americana' charts. No One Knows Nothing Anymore, indeed. Except for that inevitable woman in the crowd who keeps yelling for Shirley, too often. But Bragg's apparently random, stream-of-consciousness anecdotes (with attendant cups of tea) almost naturally take a left turn as he goes. Finding of Margaret Thatcher's death while in the wilds of Canada, and recalling his stock response, “No death should be celebrated – but yes, she was most the divisive Prime Minister in history” delivered with the tone of “Fuck, she was evil”, led into the melancholy Between The Wars. Explanation of the more accurate term “equal marriage”, a natural segue into the brighter and inclusive Sexuality.

And so it went. There's a murmuring underpinning every song, and it's only when he pauses you work out it's just about everybody singing along to every word. The natural end point of that through his encore recital of his first record, Life's A Riot, where its centrepiece, A New England, becomes true community singalong. The inevitable – and currently sadly ironic – Waiting For The Great Leap Forward comes with maybe even more gusto than usual. We sigh, and remember when and where we are. But for an hour or two, Billy's made it a bit better.