Billy Bragg used to be a one-man-band. Armed with his update of Woody Guthrie`s machine that kills fascists, he`d take his custom-made “Portastack”, a rucksack rigged up with power supply, amplifier and speakers, plug in and busk anywhere, loudly. Like Johnny Marr he was trying to sound like a whole group. With Marr the melodics created by playing open strings between chords gave the impression that there were at least two people carrying the tune. Billy let feedback and distortion and anger fill in those gaps.

Billy started out singing an adolescent loser`s Blues, mixing youth`s confusion of head, heart and hormones, with politics. Smarting from failing his 11+. Commentating on the few opportunities open to him, and us alike, in last year`s trousers and his old school shoes. His poetry was similar to Weller`s but more comic in its self-depreciation, and sharper in its vitriol. Poetry he had started to write aged 12. Poetry an encouraging teacher had arranged for him to read on local radio. Hence “The Bard of” his hometown, “Barking”. His unrequited love songs were notes made in the margins of Physics O`Level textbooks, by a “Saturday Boy” who

“Never made the first team”, “Just made the first team laugh”

in a polyester blazer and a windsor-knotted tie. When he sang

“Do you think I only love you because you sleep with other boys?”

both his heart and his voice were breaking.

Songs that put Phil Ochs with The Four Tops, William Blake with Otis Redding. Open letters to real girls, that we all knew, who

“Never came to the phone”, were “Always in the bath.”

“Could it be an infringement of the freedom of the press to print pictures of women in states of undress”, Billy would bark from a tape in the car, and me and Dave would nod in a Rik Mayall “Right on Comrade” manner, while Anna & Lousie would point out that it was up to the woman if she wanted to get her tits out, that some women have great tits and like guys looking at them, and that it was none of Billy`s business.

“The Busy Girl Buys Beauty” catalogued the mundane we were supposed to settle for. When he sang of casual racism, fighting in the dancehalls and “A New England”, this is where we were living.

In and around Lou, Dave dated a lovely but crazy called Nina, who was housed on The Roundshaw Estate. A place where the council put the borough`s “problem” families. All of them. A “sink” I think they called it. A place where we risked a hiding and Dave`s car by just parking and waiting. A place where girls were put on the pill at 13.

Billy`s muses were Dylan and The Clash, and so his Folk was attacked like Rock & Roll, driven by the Small Faces riffs he`d co-opted as a kid. Punk in his stage delivery, according to his manager he became an “avenging angel” following the Conservative landslide in the 1983 general election. To bemoan “Thatcher`s Britain” might seem like a tired / empty cliche these days, but unless you were there to witness a “before & after” then you can`t really understand the irreversible damage that the Iron Lady and her government brought to the idea of community.

Billy`d got signed by entering Charisma Records` offices pretending to be a repairman, and he got played on the radio by taking a mushroom biryani to a hungry John Peel while the DJ was on air. He brought this determination to the cause of a defeated Left. He recorded Leon Rosselson`s tribute to the “Diggers” and “True Levellers” who in 1649 were slain for attempting to reclaim the common man`s right to grow the food to eat. He sang “It Says Here” live on BBC`s Breakfast TV, spitting out its “Bingo & tits” and “Those that own the papers also own this land” to a nation of apathy, mouths at toast and cereal, as if looking for a fight. A former recruit of the Queen`s Royal Irish Hussars (he bought himself out), he sang of the Falkland`s “Island Of No Return”. He performed at more miners benefits than anyone could count.

Bragg became the kind of figure that the tabloid press love to lampoon, the Maoist, Trotskyite, singer, donkey-jacketed, selling the Socialist Worker on picket-lines, and if you can`t see the truth behind that then they have won. He later put the foul shit uncovered by Operation Weeting to music. He took no notice at their attempts to undermine a public figure who was asking people to think. He supported causes from the Tolpuddle Martyrs to the Occupy Movement, squared up to BNP representatives on Dagenham`s streets, and offered an answer to the question of how to be white, British and proud in a far-right climate?

He sang “I don`t want to change the world…” but he did, and so did I. Though even then I knew that you can only do so incrementally, starting small, with your neighbour, working outwards, passing on an idea like a baton. Ripples on a pond.

No one writes couplets like “I saw two shooting stars last night, I wished on them but they were only satellites. It`s wrong to wish on space hardware, but I wish, I wish, you`d care”, anymore.

“She cut her hair, and I stopped lovin` her.”

We are walking through Hyde Park, on the way back from the Royal Oak. A horrible, cavernous, brightly lit, student bustle that I always seemed to end up in when I was already pissed. The lights were always too much. I needed the dark when I was drinking. I don`t know why we were there. I hated it. A collection of stereotypes, Mohawks and motorcycle jackets, Tie-dye skirts and patchouli oil, stone-washed denim and rugby shirts (on boys and girls), each occupying a corner of each room. The jukebox thankfully inaudible over the human roar. Maybe somebody had suggested picking up take-outs for the way home? Howard?

Street lit blocks of Victorian three-stories in competing states of disrepair. None of them abandoned, all of them occupied by poor of one kind or another. Crumbling garden walls, and absent gates. There are seven of us, Al and Carrie, Simmo, Tommo and Howard, and you and I, engaged in what passed for conversation, generally trying to out do one another with put-downs. Howard was the sharpest of wits, but Tommo ever ready and willing for battle. Generally laughing. My arm`s linked in yours, and I you`re wearing something of mine, an Aran fisherman`s cardigan that covers you like a blanket. You were showing off. Wearing it like a badge, because it was clearly not yours and borrowed from a member of the opposite sex.

On a similar night we had cut across the campus, and on the steps of the Union building there`d been a tramp asking students for a cigarette as they spilled out of the bar. We`d seen this from a distance and as we`d approached, one guy from a mixed group of men and women was toying with the tramp.

“What will you do if I give you a cigarette? Will you sing me song?”

The tramp had begun some toothless shanty, and the guy with the cigarettes and his friends had laughed.

“Will you get down on your knees and beg?”

And the tramp had got down on his knees.

“Give him a fucking cigarette!”

“Who do you think you are?”

“I said give him a fucking cigarette!”

and Tommo`d punched the guy with the cigarettes in the wind pipe, who`d fallen to his own knees, unable to breathe, most likely thinking that he was going to die. Tom`d then taken the pack of cigarettes, handed them to the tramp, and we had continued on our way.

You are looking up at me, the moon in your face. Sharp cut brunette fringe, smiling a big gum-revealing grin, and I keep trying to kiss you, but you keep stopping me. I think that you don`t want the others to see. I am too drunk to notice the large cold sore on your lip, and that we are on the street where Jo lives.