William Bloke is the seventh album by alternative folk artist Billy Bragg, released in September 1996, five years after his last studio album. It peaked at number 16 on the UK Albums Chart. The album's only single, "Upfield", reached number 46 on the UK Singles Chart in August 1996. The album's title is a pun on the 18th-century English poet William Blake.

Background

After the release of 1991's Don't Try This at Home, Billy Bragg became a father in 1993 and took time out to concentrate on fatherhood before recording William Bloke in 1996. Bragg has said that he saw the albums he made in the 1980s as "ideologically political" because that's how he viewed his country of Britain. However, by the mid-1990s, he felt that things had moved into "a less clear phase", and with his family life having changed completely, "those two things are what you're hearing on the album." The album's lyrics deal with themes such as lost idealism ("From Red to Blue"), lamenting the loss of childhood dreams ("The Space Race Is Over"), latent revolution ("A Pict Song"), romance ("The Fourteenth of February"), domesticity and fatherhood ("Brickbat"), and family values ("King James Version"). "Northern Industrial Town" was written about the Northern Ireland conflict. Bragg said in 1996, "It seemed to me that during the cease-fire I saw the first photographs on television of Belfast without any troops or police on the street. Suddenly I realized what a normal place it was. What was happening there was absolutely abnormal; it looked like Vietnam or Yugoslavia – but it ain't, and I wanted to write a song that reflected that realization." The lyrics to "A Pict Song" are by English poet Rudyard Kipling. The lyrics to "Goalhanger" use the first verse of "The Little Man Who Wasn't There".

Track listing

Adapted from album liner notes. All tracks written by Billy Bragg; except where indicated.

Personnel

Credits adapted from album liner notes.