Stephen William "Billy" Bragg (born 20 December 1957) is an English singer-songwriter and left-wing activist.His music blends elements of folk music, punk rock and protest songs, and his lyrics mostly deal with political or romantic themes. He has been called the "Bard of Barking".


Bragg was born in 1957 in Barking, Essex,one of the sons of Dennis Frederick Austin Bragg, an assistant sales manager to a Barking cap and hat maker, and his wife, Marie Victoria D'Urso, who was of Italian descent;Bragg's father died of lung cancer in 1976,his mother in 2011.Bragg was educated at Northbury Junior School (now Northbury Primary), and Park Secondary Modern (now Barking Abbey Secondary School) in Barking, where he failed his eleven-plus exam, effectively precluding him from going to university.He put his energies into learning and practising the guitar with his next door neighbour, Philip Wigg (Wiggy); some of their influences were The Faces, The Small Faces, and The Rolling Stones. Bragg was particularly influenced by The Clash, whom he'd seen play live in London in May 1977 on their White Riot Tour, and again at a Rock Against Racism carnival in April 1978.The experience of the gig and preceding march helped shape Bragg's left wing politics, having previously "turned a blind eye" to casual racism.

In 1977 Bragg formed the punk rock/pub rock band Riff Raff with Wiggy. The band decamped to rural Oundle in Northamptonshire in 1978 to record a series of singles (the first on independent Chiswick Records) which did not receive wide exposure. After a period of gigging in Northants and London, they returned to Barking and split in 1980.Taking a series of odd jobs, Bragg became disillusioned with his stalled music career and in May 1981 joined the British Army as a recruit destined for the Queen's Royal Irish Hussars of the Royal Armoured Corps. After completing three months' basic training, he bought himself out for £175 and returned home.Bragg peroxided his hair to mark a new phase in his life and began performing frequent concerts and busking around London, playing solo with an electric guitar under the name Spy Vs. Spy (after the strip in Mad magazine).


His demo tape initially got no response from the record industry, but by pretending to be a television repair man, he got into the office of Charisma Records' A&R man Peter Jenner.Jenner liked the tape, but the company was near bankruptcy and had no budget to sign new artists. Bragg got an offer to record more demos for music publisher Chappell & Co., so Jenner agreed to release them as a record. Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy (credited to Billy Bragg) was released in July 1983 by Charisma's new imprint, Utility. Hearing DJ John Peel mention on-air that he was hungry, Bragg rushed to the BBC with a mushroom biryani, so Peel played a song from Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy although at the wrong speed (since the 12" LP was, unconventionally, cut to play at 45rpm). Peel insisted he would have played the song even without the biryani and later played it at the correct speed.

Within months Charisma had been taken over by Virgin Records and Jenner, who had been made redundant, became Bragg's manager. Stiff Records' press officer Andy Macdonald – who was setting up his own record label, [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go!_Discs]Go! Discs[/url] – received a copy of Life's a Riot with Spy Vs. Spy. He made Virgin an offer and the album was re-released on Go! Discs in November 1983, at the fixed low price of £2.99.Around this time, Andy Kershaw, an early supporter at Radio Aire in Leeds, was employed by Jenner as Bragg's tour manager. (He later became a BBC DJ and TV presenter, and he and Bragg appeared in an episode of the BBC TV programme, Great Journeys in 1989, in which they travelled the Silver Road from Potosí, Bolivia to the Pacific coast at [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arica,_Chile]Arica, Chile[/url]).Though never released as a Bragg single, album track and live favourite "A New England", with an additional verse, became a Top 10 hit in the UK for Kirsty MacColl in November 1983. Since MacColl's early death, Bragg always sings the extra verse live in her honour.In 1984, he released Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, a mixture of political songs (e.g., "It Says Here") and songs of unrequited love (e.g., "The Saturday Boy"). This was followed in 1985 by Between the Wars, an EP of political songs that included a cover version of Leon Rosselson's "The World Turned Upside Down". The EP made the Top 20 of the UK Singles Chart and earned Bragg an appearance on Top of the Pops, singing the title track. Bragg later collaborated with Rosselson on the song, "Ballad of a Spycatcher".In the same year, he embarked on his first tour of North America, with Wiggy as tour manager, supporting Echo & The Bunnymen.The tour began in Washington D.C. and ended in Los Angeles. On the same trip, in New York, Bragg unveiled his "Portastack", a self-contained, mobile PA system weighing 35 lbs (designed for £500 by engineer Kenny Jones), the wearing of which became an archetypal image of the singer at that time. With it, he was able to busk outside the New Music Seminar, a record industry conference.

In 1986 Bragg released Talking with the Taxman about Poetry, which became his first Top 10 album. Its title is taken from a poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky and a translated version of the poem was printed on the record's inner sleeve. Back to Basics is a 1987 collection of his first three releases: Life's A Riot With Spy Vs. Spy, Brewing Up with Billy Bragg, and the Between The Wars EP. He enjoyed his only Number 1 hit single in May 1988, a cover of the Beatles' She's Leaving Home, a shared A-side with Wet Wet Wet's With A Little Help From My Friends. Both were taken from a multi-artist re-recording of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band titled Sgt. Pepper Knew My Father coordinated by the NME in aid of the charity Childline. Wet Wet Wet's cover dominated radio airplay and its video was shown over three consecutive weeks on Top of the Pops; in week four, Bragg went on the programme to play his cover, with regular accompanist Cara Tivey on piano.Bragg released his fourth album, Workers Playtime, in September 1988. With this album, Bragg added a full backing band and accompaniment, including Tivey on piano, Danny Thompson on double bass and veteran Mickey Waller on drums. Wiggy earned a co-production credit with Joe Boyd.In May 1990 Bragg released the political mini-LP, The Internationale on his and Jenner's own short-lived label Utility, which operated independently of Go! Discs, to which Bragg was still contracted. The songs were, in part, a return to his solo guitar style, but some featured more complicated arrangements and included a brass band. The album paid tribute to one of Bragg's influences with the song, "I Dreamed I Saw Phil Ochs Last Night", which is an adapted version of Earl Robinson's song, "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night", itself an adaptation of a poem by Alfred Hayes.Though the album only reached Number 34 in the UK Charts, Bragg described it as "a reassertion of my rights as an individual ... and a childish two fingers [to Go! Discs boss Andy Macdonald, who'd recently signed a distribution deal with entertainment industry giant PolyGram]."

His sixth studio album Don't Try This at Home was recorded in the shadow of the build-up to the Gulf War and subsequent ground war, inspiring the track "Rumours of War". Although there is social comment ("The Few", "North Sea Bubble"), it was intended as a more commercial pop album, released in September 1991. (Bragg called it "a very long-range attempt to convert the ball between the posts."). The first single was the upbeat "Sexuality", which, despite an accessible video and a dance remix on the B-side, only reached Number 27 on the UK Singles Chart. Following overtures by rival label Chrysalis, Bragg and Jenner had been persuaded by Go! Discs' Andy and Juliet Macdonald to sign a four-album deal for a million pound advance; in return he would promote the album with singles and videos. A more commercial sound and aggressive marketing had no appreciable effect on album sales, and after a grueling, 13-month world tour with a full band (the Red Stars, led by Wiggy), and a period of forced convalescence after an appendicitis, Bragg left Go! Discs in summer 1992, paying back the remainder of his advance in return for all rights to his back catalogue.Bragg released the album William Bloke in 1996 after taking time off to help new partner Juliet Wills raise their son Jack. (There is a reference to him in the track "Brickbat": "Now you'll find me with the baby, in the bathroom.")After the ambitious instrumentation of Don't Try This at Home, it was a simpler record, musically, more personal and even spiritual, lyrically (its title a pun on the name of 18th-century English poet William Blake, who is referenced in the song "Upfield").

Around that time, Nora Guthrie (daughter of American folk artist Woody Guthrie) asked Bragg to set some of her father's unrecorded lyrics to music. The result was a collaboration with the band Wilco and Natalie Merchant (with whom Bragg had worked previously). They released the album Mermaid Avenue in 1998, and Mermaid Avenue Vol. II in 2000.The first album was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Contemporary Folk Album category. A third batch, Mermaid Avenue Vol III, and The Complete Sessions followed in 2012 to mark Woody Guthrie's centennial.A rift with Wilco over mixing and sequencing the first album led to Bragg recruiting his own band, The Blokes, to promote the album live. The Blokes included keyboardist Ian McLagan, who had been a member of Bragg's boyhood heroes The Faces. The documentary film Man in the Sand depicts the roles of Nora Guthrie, Bragg, and Wilco in the creation of the Mermaid Avenue albums.A developing interest in English national identity, driven by the rise of the BNP and his own move from London to rural Dorset in 1999, informed his 2002 album [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/England,_Half_English]England, Half English[/url] (whose single, "Take Down The Union Jack" put him back on Top of the Pops in the Queen's Golden Jubilee year) and his 2006 book The Progressive Patriot. The book expressed his view that English socialists can reclaim patriotism from the right wing. He draws on Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling for an inclusive sense of Englishness.In 2007 Bragg moved closer to his English folk music roots by joining the WOMAD-inspired collective The Imagined Village, who recorded an album of updated versions of traditional English songs and dances and toured through that autumn.

In December Bragg previewed tracks from his long-awaited forthcoming album Mr. Love & Justice at a one-off evening of music and conversation to mark his 50th birthday at London's South Bank.The album was released in March 2008, the second Bragg album to be named after a book by Colin MacInnes after England, Half English.The same year, during the NME Awards ceremony, Bragg sang a duet with British solo act Kate Nash. They mixed up two of their greatest hits, Nash playing Foundations, and Bragg redoing A New England. Also in 2008, Bragg played a small role in Stuart Bamforth's film A13: Road Movie.In 2009, Bragg was invited by London's South Bank to write new lyrics for Ode To Joy, the final movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (original libretto by Friedrich Schiller), since adopted as an international anthem of unity. The London Philharmonic Orchestra performed it at the Royal Festival Hall in front of the Queen and Bragg met her afterwards to earn "brownie points" with his mother, also in attendance.He was involved in the play Pressure Drop at the Wellcome Collection in London in April and May 2010. The production, written by Mick Gorden, and billed as "part play, part gig, part installation", featured new songs by Bragg. He performed during the play with his band, and acted as compere.

Bragg was invited by Michael Eavis to curate the Leftfield stage at Glastonbury Festival in 2010.,which he has continued to do in subsequent years.He also took part in the Bush Theatre's 2011 project Sixty Six Books where he wrote a piece based upon a book of the King James Bible. Bragg performed a set of the Guthrie songs that he had set to music for Mermaid Avenue during the Hay Literary Festival in June 2012,he also performed the same set on the Friday night of the 2012 Cambridge Folk Festival.On 18 March 2013, Bragg released his latest studio album, five years since Mr. Love & Justice, titled Tooth & Nail. Recorded in five days at the home studio of musician/producer Joe Henry in [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Pasadena,_California]South Pasadena[/url], it featured 11 original songs, including one written for the Bush Theatre, and a Woody Guthrie cover. Stylistically, it continued to explore genres of [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americana_]Americana[/url] and Alternative country, a natural progression since Mermaid Avenue (1998).The album was a commercial success, becoming his best charting record since 1991's Don't Try This at Home.

In February 2014, Bragg started a series of "radio shows" on Spotify, in which he talked listeners through self-curated playlists of "his favourite tracks and artists, and uncovering some little-known musical gems."On 14 April 2014, Bragg put out Live at the Union Chapel, a souvenir album and DVD of a show he played on 5 June 2013 at the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_Chapel,_Islington]Union Chapel[/url] in London, featuring songs from Tooth & Nail as well as favourites from his back catalogue.