Billy Bragg-William Bloke (1996)

 

Artist: Billy Bragg

Title: William Bloke

Label: Elektra

Format: CD

Cat #: 61935-2

Year of Release: 1996

Country and Year of Edition Issue: US 1996

Sold Price: $2.99

Listed Condition: VG+/VG+

Sell Date: 9/26/20

Discogs Last Sold: 9/7/20 $1.75 VG+/VG+

Low: $0.99

Median: $2.00

High: $5.18

Current low price: $1.11 VG+/VG+

Current Number on Sale at Discogs:  18

Have/Want: 241/12

Where Sold: Gaithersburg, MD

Time it took to sell: 8 years

Where and When Bought: online maybe half.com, under $5

Gwiz-gau Letter Grade: B

Sad To See It Go?: No

Every once in a while there is some artist I liked and fell off the radar with that someone is excited to see, so I rediscover them.  Billy Bragg is someone I’ve seen 3 times with decade plus stretches between them,  the last time about 10 years ago in Austin by chance at a daytime South by Southwest showcase in a bar.  I was a huge fan in the late 80's when Billy was just one man with an electric guitar and fell off when he started to back himself with a band around the time the "Sexuality" video was a hit.  I first saw him at The Living Room in Providence with my old friend Will in 1987.

At the end of 2000 I got a date with a bartender who was a big Billy Bragg fan to see him at the Bottom Line, a long running NYU area venue that closed a while back.  I can't remember if we went to set 1 or set 2, but I'm pretty sure it was set 2.  The only clue is I seem to remember "The Milkman of Human Kindness" being played and getting there waiting for the first show to end, pointing to set 2, but this is a foggy foggy memory.

Half.com was a great source for old major label titles around that time.  Like Amazon before they put controls in there was a "race to the bottom" of critics selling their promos and America selling their unwanted CD's, with the half floor going to 75 cents plus shipping and Amazon going down further.  I bought the entire Billy Bragg back catalog used to catch up before the big date as I only owned the Back To Basics compilation Elektra put out from his indie years.  A pile of used CD's arrived to my place in the Navy Yard from different sources.  William Bloke was one of them.  I dutifully played it once upon arrival and filed it away not having much impact on me.

I was looking through the jpegs on my desktop yesterday of the last month of sales that I deemed 'B' albums.  These are often the most difficult to write about and often require relistening to have anything beyond a sentence to say.  Even then it becomes a chore for The Reverse Collector.  They are records that were bought to complete a discography, played once and filed away.  William Bloke is one of those titles.  I listened to it about a month ago in headphones and fell asleep before the order shipped out, so I thought I'd give it another shot with the rip on my hard drive. 

The album opens with an ode a friend's domestic tranquility and the personal political quandary of voting for pocketbook issues vs political aesthetics.  "From Red To Blue."  It should be noted this is the BRITISH connotation, Red is Labour, Blue is Conservative unlike the United States political map.  That would be a weird conceptual number, perhaps more original, but it but this is not about a young conservative getting a cock ring.  The album closes with "Goalhanger," a Football (again UK) political analogy to close the album.

Bragg had a five year break between this one and Don't Try This At Home, but it doesn't scream COMEBACK the way the commissioned Guthrie album with Wilco did a couple years later.  That album got all the glory, this one got none.  Perhaps you could say with Mermaid Avenue, Bragg became the Goalhanger he was berating just a couple years before if you want to use a musical analogy for artists and critics.  But I bought that one new and liked it better, so who am I to judge?

The Reverse Collector, that's who!