Tuesday 3rd july

Billy started out doing a sort of homegrown punk, strumming on a solitary electric guitar and singing his strange little songs, raw and unedited.  Short, pithy and always to the point – he was as leftwing as they come, a leading light of Red Wedge in the eighties, a sworn enemy of Thatcher and despite a degree of fame and fortune still true to his beliefs.   And from the earliest songs there was also an amazing degree of honesty about sexual relations with girls, the hopeless fumbles and besotted unrequited love of the young was starkly dissected, and we nodded and understood that that is exactly how it was.  As he has grown older he has charted the trials and tribulations of growing older too, but he has never become cynical, always offering us hope over despair.  And he is unashamedly English, though often ashamed of English bigotry and short-sightedness.  He is also a great individual thinker, appearing quite regularly on Question Time and running rings around the tired political hacks on the panel.  He has never stopped singing in an English Accent too, where most sing a sort of transatlantic American drawl, Billy is never afraid of his own Thames Estuary voice. So from his earliest songs where he was looking for ‘A New England’ to his later more thoughtful songs where ‘Sometimes He Sees The Point.’  Billy is always there, commentating on our lives, and what it is to be human, and always the staunchest defender of the faith.