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Artist News Gigs & Festivals
Billy Bragg announces commemorative strike tour
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 27 February 2009
Billy Bragg has announced that he’s planning a tour of Wales to commemorate the miners’ strikes of the early eighties. The singer, who will play nine dates in locations such as Brecon and Cardigan, explained that he thinks it’s important to convey to younger people how those historical events are relevant to the current political and economic situation.
Bragg says: “My political education really was the twelve months of that strike. Once you go out into the coalfields and do these gigs and then go back and kip on someone’s sofa, they rightly want to know if you’re just some pop star from London who’s come up to sell more records or if you can actually walk the walk as well as talk the talk”.
“If we look again at our history we’ll understand there are other ways to respond to this economic situation other than passively. Once, people resisted the layoffs and the cutbacks by organising. That message needs to be restated – it’s a painful lesson to learn and each generation needs to be reminded of that”.
