Billy Bragg to celebrate 40 years of music and massive new box set

nme.com:

Billy Bragg has announced a new box set to mark his four decades in music, ‘The Roaring Forty’ – find all the details below.The singer-songwriter and left-wing activist is due to release the career-spanning collection on October 27.

Its deluxe CD version will comprise 14 discs, with the vinyl edition coming as a 3xLP (40 tracks) or a single ‘primer’ LP (13 tracks).According to a press release, the 300-song CD box set is made up of Bragg’s 12 studio albums to date as well as a host of non-album singles and B-sides, session tracks, rare live recordings, collaborations and previously unreleased material from the past 40 years.It also boasts a large format book containing images of 40 significant objects from the musician’s career, including his debut NME cover, the hand-tinted flyer to his first solo gig, the original lyrics to ‘A Lover Sings’, the Red Wedge manifesto, his membership card to the Smokey Robinson & The Miracles fan club, along with with commentary from Bragg himself.In a statement, Bragg recalled of first starting out: “It seems like just the other day that I was handing John Peel a mushroom biryani and asking him to play my first record.

The music business has changed dramatically since then, but my belief in the power of the song is undimmed.”In the early 80s, I realised if I wanted to hear music that said something about the state of the world, I’d have to make it myself.