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A New England — Kirsty MacColl
While I know “A New England is a Billy Bragg song really, for most of us Kirsty MacColl’s cover is the better-known version.
Her cover version was a 1985 Top 10 single in the UK and, in many ways, launched both her career and his.
Billy Bragg was relatively well known in the folk and punk scene by the early 1980s, with his own brand of radical politics going down well in the early Thatcher years. However he was much less well-known to a mainstream audience.
While he’s mellowed a little with time…as many of us do…Billy Bragg’s concern for the ordinary person in the street always shines through, whether or not you agree with his politics.
And he’s a generous collaborator. He’s on record as saying that Kirsty MacColl’s “shimmering pop version” of “A New England” is better than his original1983 album track.
Given Billy Bragg’s record of radical politics, it’s hard to know how much of “A New England” is a side-eyed reference to events in the world at the time and how much is, as he claims, semi-autobiographical.
Some elements are indisputably autobiographical. Billy Bragg wrote “A New England” when he was 21 and recorded it when he was 22, which gave him the perfect excuse to echo a line from one of his folk music heroes, Simon and Garfunkel…
