Billy Bragg

Leeds Town Hall

4 Stars

It Would be a disaster for most singers to lose their range due to illness but, as Billy Bragg gamely admits, most people don't attend his gigs to hear him sing.

Sipping from a mug of herbal tea, with a packet of tissues to hand, the Bard of Barking launches into Way Over Yonder In The Minor Key. One of the Woody Guthrie lyrics that he set to music with Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, it features the words "ain't nobody that can sing like me" - highly appropriate, in the circumstances.

Bragg's voice has mellowed with age into a roughened oak that suits the Americana material on his latest album Tooth & Nail.

His updated version of "country music for people who like The Smiths" dominates the opening third of this two-and-a-half hour set, with the family politics of Handyman Blues marked by a gentle defiance and Chasing Rainbows etched with the whiskey-soaked sadness of CJ Hillman's pedal steel guitar.

The arrangements of these tracks may be mellower than when he broke onto the folk-punk scene 30 years ago but Bragg's political fire remains undimmed.

There Will Be A Reckoning is a gutsy anthem played full-throttle by his four-piece backing band, which stands its ground against old favourites such as You Woke Up My Neighbourhood, Levi Stubbs' Tears and a krautrock re-working of A New England.

In a set roughly divided into three - Americana, solo and punk rock - Bragg covers all phases of his career while acknowledging his limitations as a rhythm guitarist and soloist.

And he retains attention with the kind of between-song banter that makes the gig part political lecture, part stand-up comedy.

Talking about everything from cowboy shirts to his love of Lou Reed, his motivational belief in the power of collectivity reaches a pinnacle during the solo acoustic encore of There Is Power In A Union.

Performed in front of a Fire Brigades Union banner - "We save lives not banks" - Bragg proves that while he can't singlehandedly change the world, he can effectively unite audiences against apathy.

Susan Darlington