Workers Playtime

British folksinger Billy Bragg began as a questioning if not quite angry young man with a shredding electric guitar, mixing social and political issues with the usual romantic frustrations. 1986’s *Talking With the Taxman About Poetry* initiated a musical expansion that finds full fruition on this 1988 follow-up. Produced by legendary veteran folk-rock producer Joe Boyd (Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, R.E.M.), the album was Bragg’s sweetest, most textured release to date. Politics still inform a few numbers (“Rotting on Remand,” an a cappella “Tender Comrade”) but the real gems are the heartfelt paeans that open the album (“Got a New Spell,” “Must I Paint You a Picture”) and finish it (“The Only One,” “Waiting for the Great Leap Forwards”). Bragg\'s voice conveys honest emotion and melodic nuance throughout.

By the time Billy Bragg began recording Workers Playtime in the fall of 1987, he'd gone from a rabble-rousing leftist songwriter and D.I.Y. one-man punk band to a bona fide pop star in the U.K., and had won a sizable cult following (and a major-label recording contract) in the United States.