Life’s a Riot With Spy vs Spy by Billy Bragg

Life's a Riot with Spy vs Spy, Billy Bragg's debut, came out in 1983 on Utility, an imprint of Charisma, and it's about as bare as rock records get: one man, one electric guitar, and a voice with no interest in sanding down its edges. Seven songs, spinning at 45 rpm, over in barely more than a quarter of an hour.

Bragg splits the difference between the picket line and the bedsit. "To Have and to Have Not" takes aim at the schools and the dole queue, while "The Milkman of Human Kindness" and "A New England" are love songs with the bruises showing, the latter later picked up by Kirsty MacColl for a hit of her own. It's folk and punk boiled down to a common root, and though it was short enough to pass for an EP, it counted as an album under the chart rules and reached number 30 in Britain in 1985.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.