“Brickbat” by Billy Bragg

"Brickbat" comes from William Bloke, Billy Bragg's September 1996 album and his first studio record in five years, its title a pun on the poet William Blake. The gap had a reason: Bragg had a child in 1993 and stepped back to concentrate on being a dad, and "Brickbat" is where that new life shows, a song about domesticity and fatherhood from a writer who had once seen his albums as ideologically political.

He has said the record catches two shifts at once, a political moment that had turned murkier and a home life that had changed completely. Grant Showbiz produced and Andy Peak engineered, and Bragg's own guitar and voice sit alongside Diedre Cooper's cello and strings from Terry Disley, a gentle setting for it.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz.