Most famous people, asked about Marmite, manage a sentence. Billy Bragg put it in a song. On the title track of his 2002 album “England, Half English”, a record all about what it means to be English when your roots are tangled, he sings about a breakfast of “Marmite soldiers washed down with a cappuccino”. It is a throwaway line and a serious point at the same time, which is very Billy Bragg, and he might be the only person on this list who has set his Marmite love to music.
Does Billy Bragg like Marmite?
Yes, and he made it part of his idea of Englishness. The “England, Half English” lyric uses Marmite soldiers and a cappuccino side by side to picture a national identity that is mixed, borrowed and all the better for it. The Marmite is the English half of the breakfast, the cappuccino the rest of the world on the same plate. You do not reach for Marmite as your shorthand for home unless you genuinely eat it.
Who is Billy Bragg?
He was born Stephen William Bragg on 20 December 1957 in Barking, Essex, which is where the nickname “the Bard of Barking” comes from. He grew up in post-war east London, left school without much to show for it, and found his direction through music and politics after seeing a Rock Against Racism concert in 1978. There was even a brief, unhappy spell in the British Army in 1981, which he ended by buying himself out for £175 after a few months.
Billy Bragg’s music
Bragg’s sound is its own thing: folk, punk and protest welded together, often just a man and an electric guitar. His debut “Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy” arrived in 1983, and his song “A New England” became a hit for Kirsty MacColl. Across albums such as “Talking with the Taxman About Poetry” and “England, Half English” he has written love songs and political songs with equal seriousness, and he tends to refuse to separate the two.
Billy Bragg the activist
For Bragg the songs and the causes are the same project. He has campaigned for the left for decades, founded Jail Guitar Doors to get instruments into prisons, and turns up wherever a picket line needs a tune. He is also a lifelong West Ham supporter, an east London loyalty that sits neatly beside the Marmite. Both are the kind of plain, unglamorous English things he has spent a career taking seriously.
Billy Bragg’s notable work at a glance
- Life’s a Riot with Spy vs Spy (1983)
- “A New England” (1983, later a hit for Kirsty MacColl)
- Talking with the Taxman About Poetry (1986)
- England, Half English (2002), home of the Marmite soldiers line
- Tooth & Nail (2013)
