The Billy Bragg song that fused Nick Drake with Marvin Gaye
Before the age of 30, Billy Bragg had already released three albums that had positioned him as the admirable heir to Joe Strummer’s throne—a politically minded ex-punk with a tremendous songwriting talent and a willingness to make music that “mattered.” As a result, he’d become one of the more visible members of the “Red Wedge,” a collective of musicians that campaigned on behalf of the Labour Party—and particularly in opposition to Margaret Thatcher’s re-election efforts—in 1987. However, Bragg didn’t respond in the way many might have guessed when Thatcher proved victorious in the general election that summer.
“It didn’t disillusion me in terms of wanting to give up,” Bragg told the Australian newspaper The Age in 1989. “It made me want to rediscover my humanitarianism. I could have sat down and written an album of anti-Thatcher songs after the election, but it would have been a bit pointless. I would rather restate the personal before being buried in the deluge of political questions. There has to be breathing space for human beings.”
Coincidentally, Bragg also turned 30 while working on his fourth album, Workers Playtime, and he clearly seemed to be at a transitional point in his career—not necessarily demoralised or less idealistic, but certainly more mature and curious about new ways of expressing himself.
“You don’t have to be loud to be angry,” he said at the time. “There’s a tendency to equate radicalism with loud weird music. A lot of people realise now that political pop music doesn’t have to be harsh.”
Political music also doesn’t have to be overtly about the government. In Bragg’s case, the politics of sex and human relationships had always been topics in his songwriting, as well, but were brought into more of a concentrated focus on Workers Playtime. Similarly, while he’d already been name-dropping R&B icons like Levi Stubbs on his previous record, Bragg was now more boldly willing to try his own hand at writing songs that were more soulful and groove-based, with less reliance on the raw and unfiltered guitar sound that had defined his early work. He was also joined by a full band in the studio and a big name producer in the form of Joe Boyd.
Boyd was a fan of Bragg, but wasn’t initially aware of the artist’s desire to push into funkier territory. Instead, on his first day in the studio, the producer brought in a tape from one of his own recordings with the late folk legend Nick Drake, suggesting to the studio engineer that he wanted to create a similar sound with Billy.
“The next day,” Bragg later recalled in a 1990 interview with Knight-Ridder newspapers, “I got with the engineer before Boyd arrived and put on Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On?’ and told him I wanted [the music] to sound like that. I had just bought a Telecaster and I was deeply into the soul sound. In the end we sort of found a fine line between the two.”
The evidence of that seemingly bizarre fusion of Nick Drake and Marvin Gaye’s sensibilities can be found on one of the standout tracks from Workers Playtime, ‘Must I Paint You a Picture?’ Bragg proves he can deliver a yearning Motown call-and-response chorus and a slick Telecaster guitar line, but there’s also a slightly haunted bit of English folk vulnerability in there. Even lyrically, the song does a delicate dance, as the chorus is pure Gaye (“You know my love for you is strong, girl / You know my love for you is real”) while the verse is generally more from the Drake playbook: “And so I lost my ignorance / And now the bells across the river chime out your name / I look across to them again.”
It wasn’t the ferocious anti-Thatcher anthem that many fans might have been clamoring for, but several decades later, ‘Must I Paint You a Picture?’ is a far more timeless piece of work and still among the most beloved tracks in the Bragg catalogue.
