a Socialism of the heart

Maybe you know this. All of Billy Bragg's albums have been reissued, repackaged, remastered and padded out with a second cd of demos, b-sides, etc. I've picked up three on the cheap so far. Some of the bonus stuff won't be getting a second spin, while some of it is pretty cool and I'm glad to be able to replace my tape copies with proper sounding cds. The artwork is kinda crap though and wastes space that could have gone to a biography, session notes, lyrics, an essay on Phil Ochs, an address for Greenpeace even (too 1988?), something...

One of my favorite memories is of seeing Billy Bragg play at a May Day festival in Finsbury Park, 1997. Looking around I saw guys with his haircut, fists in the air and singing along loudly. ("...there is power in a union...") I mention the hair because it's just a short sensible haircut, not one you get in order to look like Billy Bragg but you get probably because that's how barbers cut hair in North London. Tony Blair had just become Prime Minister and everyone seemed pretty jazzed about a Labor win. But what do I know about British politics? Margaret on the Guillotine, The Queen is Dead, Harrowdown Hill... I'm guessing it didn't go the way they'd hoped.

Billy Bragg has a book out now, The Progressive Patriot, which probably goes into some of those things missing from the cd booklets, and hopefully offers some insight as to what he thinks about the last ten years. I plan to read it someday but my to-do list is starting to generate it's own gravity as it is.