Beans on Toast – A Spanner in the Works

Say what you like about 2016 but if nothing else it was the year Billy Bragg, the last great political troubadour, made an album about trains. Where, you might ask, are the musicians telling it like it is? Sleaford Mods, you might say. We’ll give you that.

But you’ll have to give us Beans on Toast. His eighth album opens with 2016, a great hymn to the boiling awfulness of the year. Lyrically, it’s from the same stable as Scroobius Pip, albeit filtered through the folkier end of the spectrum. Yeah, he’s a bit hippy-dippy (check out the mellow electronica of I Can Be That Tree or would-be stoner anthem It’s Only Natural), he’s a little bit 'performance poet' (every song on this record would benefit from halving the word count) but for all that: his heart is in the right place, his politics are good and at times like this we need more people like Beans on Toast.

What’s more, with Money for War he’s gone and made a song as good as Whole Lot of Loving (our previous favourite Beans on Toast song). A Spanner in the Works might sell a fraction of what Adele or Coldplay do in 2016 but it shits on all of them from a great height. And if Billy Bragg doesn't have time to write the anthems of the age in which we live, then thank goodness we've got Beans to do the business.

Listen to: 2016, Afternoons in the Sunshine, Fear Mongering Clap Trap