Billy Bragg review – from bard of Barking to golden voice

Here’s a controversial opinion about Billy Bragg: the man has a beautiful voice. On Mid-Century Modern, a track from his most recent studio album, 2021’s The Million Things That Never Happened, his mahoganied lower register fills Edinburgh’s palatial Usher Hall with warmth. If the loveliness of the delivery knocks you momentarily sideways, the song’s sentiment swiftly grounds you. “Freedom’s just another word for acting with impunity,” Bragg croons.

Accompanied on mandolin and keyboards, he plays Way Over Yonder in the Minor Key, a Woody Guthrie lyric he set to music alongside the US band Wilco circa 1998. The song tells of a boy whose silver tongue gets him in trouble with a girl’s mother. “There ain’t nobody that can sing like me,” runs the chorus; Bragg delivers the line sonorously, without a wink.

Since he first set foot on stage in the early 80s, there have been few British pop voices more instantly recognisable, and instantly polarising, than Bragg’s. Hailing from east London, the young singer refused to code switch from the off. Punk had made accents from the Thames estuary cool; Bragg’s everyman tones – nasal, plain-speaking – proved that Barking could produce balladeers as well as cars. And if his voice grated, that probably said more about the listener’s unconscious biases.

One snap conclusion would be that Bragg’s mature songwriting reflects his oakier, more mellifluous voice. His current tour supports The Roaring Forty, a box set (of various sizes) summing up four decades of guitar-slinging activism. It feels tonight as though some of his early work might be pitched down an octave or so. But not so diehard fans would mind – and if they did, there is a run-through of his 16-minute debut album, Life’s a Riot With Spy vs Spy, complete with the original guitar he played it all on, for the encore.

But while the years have mellowed his delivery, it’s not the whole story: the secret beauty of Bragg’s voice was there in the 80s too. You might argue you haven’t really heard the bard of Barking sing until you’ve heard him sing in Spanish.

Perhaps the most surprising of all the night’s many flashbacks comes via a brief pre-gig clip of footage from Nicaragua in the 80s, part of an opening 40-minute film that whistle-stops through Bragg’s career. He sings Nicaragua Nicaraguita – the de facto anthem of the Sandinistas, who overthrew the Nicaraguan dictator Somoza in 1979, a track later recorded on his 1990 album The Internationale. There’s none of the self-conscious hesitancy typical of anglophones tangling with a foreign tongue, just heartfelt eloquence – and solidarity.

If Bragg’s golden voice is an unexpected bonus tonight, in every other way the singer remains marvellously, unequivocally himself. There are songs of protest and romance, drawn from all corners of the discography. (This all-seated venue reflects the state of the fanbase’s joints, but it’s a vibe killer: one lone dancer tries to get the stalls up on their feet without success.) Then there are the explanations of his songs – plus quips, digressions and some clarifications of his previous statements.

The Wolf Covers Its Tracks ends with a shout of “end the invasion of Gaza!” to howls of agreement. Bragg then riffs about his brown suede “shacket” (shirt/jacket) – a term he had to Google when he read it in a review. He checked the definition with his own personal style counsellor, Paul Weller, whose voice on the phone he jokingly approximates as an East End gangster.

Sexuality, Bragg’s 1991 song, has been updated in recent years to reflect the current climate. “Just because you’re ‘they’, I won’t turn you away,” he sings, “if you stick around, I’m sure that we can find the right pronoun.”

Bragg’s X feed remains a steadfast harbour in defence of trans rights, a stance he expands on tonight. He has refashioned Sexuality as a song of “allyship with our trans and non-binary siblings”, in part to get “geezers my age” up to speed.

He’s troubled, he explains, by anti-trans activists basing their arguments on the idea that biology is destiny. “Forgive me for dragging everybody back to the 70s,” he says, “but surely ‘biology is destiny’ is the maxim that the patriarchy has been using for the last 2,000 years to deprive women of their rights. I think my 25-year-old self would be very disappointed in me if I didn’t get my arse in gear over this. Our trans siblings need cis allies.” As an afterthought, he adds: “I support the rights of girls and women to be safe in their spaces, 100%,” but that trans women can also be safe in those spaces.

“The threat to women, to girls and to trans women all comes from the same place,” Bragg specifies, “and that place is male violence, and this is the issue we should be making our fingers bloody every night on the internet stamping out.”

The Roaring Forty tour, then, is no mere nostalgia trip. Earlier this year, Bragg wrote a song, Rich Men Earning North of a Million, in response to the viral song Rich Men North of Richmond by US singer Oliver Anthony. Anthony’s song was a howl of frustration at the difficulties ordinary people faced that blamed elites. But it also denigrated obese people on welfare and became popular with rightwingers.

Bragg’s riposte clarifies who the real enemy is: rich men, for sure. And his solution remains much as it has been for those four decades: there is a power in a union.