The English singer-songwriter Billy Bragg, capable of composing superb melodies and writing meaningful lyrics, is perhaps the hero who best embodies the healthiest side of the punk revolution. A melancholy proletarian troubadour of a universal epic, his ballads may constitute the most mature and committed songbook since the Clash.

Bragg rose to prominence with Life's A Riot (Utility, 1983) as a solitary punk devoted to an obsessed and sharp satire of contemporary customs.

Whether generational anthems (A New England, one of his signature songs) or biting satires (Busy Girl Buys Beauty), poignant elegies (Milkman Of Human Kindness) or mournful portraits of domestic life (Lovers Town Revisited), his songs, accompanied only by guitar, announce a bard who is both profound and engaged. In his Spartan simplicity, Bragg, playing solely with the guitar (with cascading, scratchy rock and roll riffs), manages to fuse the melodic talent of Richman with Costello’s polemical rhetoric, passing through the ragged and militant street-folk classics of David Peel and Country Joe.

The most introspective ballads on Brewing Up (CD Presents, 1984) sometimes verge on the somber ballads of Cohen (Man In The Iron Mask, another career highlight) and sometimes on the nostalgic vignettes of the Kinks (Saturday Boy), alternating between adolescent confessions (Love Gets Dangerous and A Lover Sings) and mature reflections (Brewing Up). Bragg is an ambivalent figure: urban singer-songwriter and street rocker, existential storyteller and revolutionary militant, cursed poet and proletarian hero, yet he has the merit of blending these contradictions with truly authentic sincerity and passion.

The sorrowful social ballads (Days Like These) and martial political slogans (Between The Wars, the biggest hit of his career) of the two 1985 EPs mark a transitional moment.

On Talking With The Taxman About Poetry (Go Discs, 1986), he finally began arranging his own songs and perhaps found his best form: the moving tragic odyssey of Levi Stubb's Tears (another signature song), the apocalyptic ode of Help Save The Youth Of America, the serenade of Greetings To The New Brunette, and the Bob Dylan-style political sermon of Ideology.

The Short Answer, Must I Paint You A Picture, She's Got A New Spell, and Valentine Day Is Over are the gems of Workers Playtime (Go Discs, 1988), an album finally arranged in a rock style.

After the collection of socialist songs The Internationale (Utility, 1990), came his more professionally produced album, Don't Try This At Home (Go Discs, 1991), and his musical tracks, Sexuality and Accident Waiting To Happen, reflect the changing times. North Sea Bubble is one of his most aggressive tunes, almost a wild rock and roll, but the excessive arrangements (almost Spector-like) prevent Cindy Of A Thousand Lives and You Woke Up My Neighborhood from expressing their noble, populist heart.

After a long hiatus, during which he started a family, William Bloke (Cooking Vinyl, 1996) portrays him as the somewhat pathetic adult who may have been overtaken by the times without ever finding his identity. Upfield is the lively single of the moment, as over-the-top as the previous one, while From Red To Blue and Pict Song are the tired and repetitive protest songs carrying his message for the end of the century. Bragg reflects melancholy in Northern Industrial Town and The Space Race Is Over, pursued by the passing of time that changes the cards under his nose. Abandoning the misplaced arrangements of the previous album, Bragg fiddles with themes perhaps too personal.

On Mermaid Avenue (Elektra, 1998), Bragg, accompanied by Wilco, sets to music the last lyrics written by Woody Guthrie. Surprisingly, it is also one of his best albums. Bragg manages to blend Guthrie’s socialist epic with his pub-pop spirit, the first’s pained rigor with his sarcastic anger, the sage composure of the bard with his youthful exuberance. Bragg roams from the satirical tirades of David Peel (Christ For President) to the measured proclamations of John Lennon (I Guess I Planted), from the fairy-tale chant of Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key to the solemn The Unwelcome Guest that closes the heartfelt tribute. Bragg would like us to believe that the elderly, austere Guthrie would have joined in the chorus and honky-tonk of Walt Whitman's Niece, or dived into the playful rhythm and blues of Hoodoo Voodoo, or compromised with the semi-pop of California Stars, but it is clear that it is the heart of the Essex lad beating here, not that of the Oklahoma bard.

Mermaid Avenue II (Elektra, 2000) boasts Bragg's heartbreaking rendering of Hot Rod Hotel (Chris Isaak, crossed with Jim Morrison and a spanish mandolin mixed with ghostly keyboards), My Flying Saucer (John Denver's nostalgy filtered through Buddy Holly's verve) Remember the Mountain Bed (a lengthy Dylan-ian dirge), Black Wind Blowing (a guitar-only number halfway between a Donovan lullaby and a middle-eastern psalm). Bragg's political persona erupts in You Fascists, played at the sound of a loud and pounding rock and roll.
Bragg's most eccentric number is Against The Law, an old-time ramble that borrows from Taj Mahal and Bob Marley.
Musically, Bragg's band has several moments of sheer post-modernistic genius: Airline to Heaven recalls the bouncing folk-rock rambles of Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, Secret of the Sea is an airy pastiche of Beatles' pop harmonies and Byrds' jingle-jangle, Someday Some Morning Sometime is a dreamy soft-jazz serenade. Jeff Tweedy and Jay Bennett steal the show and Bragg is left to sing their music. Except for Feed Of Man, a dark John Lee Hooker-style boogie, Blood of the Lamb, a slow marching-band waltz, the mood is rarely as depressed as Woody Guthrie would have wanted them. The performers are just too "musicians" to sink in the lyrics' abysses of sorrow.

England Half English (Elektra, 2002) is Billy Bragg's "world-music" album, not only because of the exotic instruments but mainly because of the rhythmic exuberance. The back-up band is top-notch, the material (that harks back to his militant roots) is not.

Must I Paint You A Picture (Rhino, 2003) is a career anthology.

After a six-year hiatus, Mr Love & Justice (Anti, 2008) is a bit too relaxed, as if it were a band playing at a barbeque. None of the songs is tedious, but none stands out either.