Billy Bragg: Must I Paint You A Picture? The Essential Billy Bragg

This is getting quite depressing: yet another album that I bought on the basis of it looking like a bargain (50 tracks, including ten on the third "bonus" disc, for £9.99), rather than on the basis of me loving Billy Bragg. Which I don't, really.

Billy Bragg's songs from 1984/6 seem more rooted in their time than The Smiths' — a sign that I've listen to them less since then. Every decade or so, Billy comes up with a knockout song. I'm thinking of Sexuality and Half English. The latter, however, isn't included here for some strange reason. That means I paid a bargain 20p per track for a lot of songs that I'm not that bothered about. And now I know why Life's a Riot is so short: 20 braggsongs in a row is heavy going.

I'm trying to learn from this. Bob Dylan's latest is currently on Amazon for £5.99 in a deluxe version with two CDs and a DVD. But is it really any good? If Bob would allow it on Spotify or We7, I'd check it out. As it is, I'm resisting the temptation.

MusicBrainz entry for this album Wikipedia entry for this album Rate Your Music entry for this album Some metadata about this album at Last.fm Listen to this album in full at We7