Wisely, Billy Bragg ignored the advice of every record company mogul in London and, after a short spell of bashing his head against a table, proceeded on his chosen course of penning songs and performing them solo with a voice that would aggravate seals and a guitar style to set the teeth on edge.

Eventually a vaguely-interested Charisma released a seven-song set called 'Life's A Riot With Spy Versus Spy’. Later they thought better of it and allowed Billy to be snapped up by aspiring indie label legend Andy MacDonald of Go! Discs.

Billy recalls:

"Charisma said to MacDonald 'Billy is a Charisma artist, we believe in Billy and we're going to build his career up. MacDonald said 'I'll give you £1500' and they said ‘all right!’. Probably the best 1500 quid he's ever spent. I don't think he ever paid it either!"

While the Go! Discs re issue of 'Life's A Riot' was to astound all by topping the indie chart for months, Billy still caroused up and down the country carrying his guitar and astronaut-style backpack containing his one-man PA system. He gigged here, there and everywhere.

He won friends and a degree of fame for his garrulous repartee but most of all for his songs: wryly observed and latently melodic tales of everyday life. At worse, Billy was a good laugh. At best, he struck a chord somewhere near the heart.

"Great lyrics you can learn from. I learned the art of saying it all in three minutes (he pulls down a copy of ‘Motown Chartbusters Volume Three’, the one with the silver cover). On here are entire emotions in three minutes. I learned a directness from punk rock and the fact that the answer to the world's problems isn’t that we all join hands and sing a song.

"I'm a terrible one for little bits of information. Writing down one line and piling them up. I've probably got one in my pocket now (he fiddles with his trousers, extracts a piece of paper from his pocket and reads...) ‘crying in front of the TV isn't enough'. I sit here and go through them. If what I write doesn't move me and say exactly what I want to say, I’ll throw It in the bin.

"A communication of ideas is all you can really hope for in a good song. A song like 'To Have And Have Not’, I'd like to think could be listened to by people in Adelaide and they'd understand how I felt in England when I wrote it."

A great moment in Billy’s career was at a sparsely attended gig in Liverpool when: "this huge scouse bloke came up and said 'do you know who you remind me of?’ I thought, here we go, Paul Weller. But he said ‘John Lee Hooker’. I went 'yeah! that's the stuff'.

"Another time I got a letter from a girl who explained to me the whole of her break-up with her boyfriend and finished off by thanking me for being there in the room with her when no-one else cared. I can remember being in that position when all I had was to go back to my room and Elvis Costello’s ‘Alison’. I'd put it on again and again and feel sorry for myself for three hours. To have written a song that can affect someone like that, really is job satisfaction."

A few cynics have said that Billy owes his ‘success’ to appearing in the right places at the right time with the right (ie left) politics and the right lack of a high-class haircut.

Perhaps closer to the truth is Billy’s plain determination to play in many places many times, and a degree of luck, talent and good fortune that has got him where he is today (a tiny flat in west London).

Although it's possible that sections of his expanding audience pick up a political attitude as they pick up a suit of clothes, donning the ideology they consider de rigueur for the moment.

"But that’s their problem not mine. If I sang all political songs then I might be in a position like that. I’m not a political songwriter. I just try and reflect the society I’m a part of. I could turn out as many soppy love songs as soppy political songs if I wanted."

He proudly shows me a miner’s lamp with which he has been presented by a Nottinghamshire Miners Support Group in appreciation of his efforts during the strike, when he played dozens of impromptu benefit gigs.

"I’ve been politicised over the last year by meeting people with ideas way ahead of mine. Discussions that have sparked off thoughts and channels and answers to things that I thought were intangible for a long time. The miners’ strike has politicised me, ten months of doing benefits and talking to people. That's how you change society, by meeting people and discussing ideas. I don't claim a copyright on that but If my songs make people think... then it’s a start.

"I take every opportunity to get across to as many people as possible. I’ve done breakfast time TV when I reviewed the newspapers and played 'It Says Here’ live. I’ve got letter from a guy accusing the BBC of letting a Marxist on the television spouting left-wing propaganda. That’s proof of the fact that over the cornflakes we’re winding people up who'd never normally hear Billy Bragg and his music.

"Obviously very few people go to gigs and have their complete political outlook reversed, but you can put questions and ideas in peoples’ heads.

"My ideas communicated to someone else is giving them the weapon of knowledge, probably one of the most powerful weapons in the world. I don’t worry about preaching to the converted, I just never let the converted stay easy. You have to have a go at them as well. You don't stick to a dogma.

"At the end of ‘Between The Wars’ I say 'sweet moderation heart of this nation, desert us not’. I’m sure all the audience would class themselves radicals and not moderates but it's the moderates I’m singing to. I want the moderates to realise what a fucking extreme thing nuclear war is and what an extreme thing it in to have a war to resolve the crisis of capitalism. The converted can find this out for themselves, they probably know it already. I'm giving my perspective. The Sun says this, the Daily Mirror says this, Billy Bragg says this... make your mind up.

If appearing solo is a form of nakedness then Billy’s onstage bandinage with the audience reduces possible tension and (usually) develops an atmosphere of bonhomie, an ideal setting for the delivery of his songs. Meanwhile, hecklers are welcome! The Bragg fellow has a charming lack of self importance.

"I have great difficulty taking myself seriously although I take the songs seriously. That's a legacy of two or three years trying to get peoples’ attention and break down the barrier with the audience. You gabble between songs and then they listen.

"I learned that there is a certain feeling about being on stage and it’s at its most powerful solo. That's why I do it. I don't mind walking out in front of a thousand Slade fans or 1500 Echo And The Bunnyman fans in Los Angeles, it's a challenge. If every night it was 'here's Billy down from the mountain with his tablets', it would get boring.

"If the audience is really supplicant to me, I play the songs I don't normally play to make it more difficult for myself. There has to be a bit of a tightrope so at the end you feel you've achieved something. Even if it's only singing 'Man In The Iron Mask' in tune.

"I think some people do see me as something new and original whereas actually I’m the latest in a long line of ideas communicators that goes back beyond record companies, videos, and right back past the blues and folk music. A generation has grown up without seeing how powerful and emotional one man playing can be.

"It doesn’t have to be Duran Duran, big lights and big venues. Pop stars start getting wacky when they lose contact with reality. When they have no contact with the public and they don’t have to get up in the morning and go out to buy milk for their cornflakes."

A present thrill is Kirsty MacColl’s recording of Billy's 'A New England', nibbling at the UK charts as we speak. Billy is full of appreciation (and even surprise) that someone should like his material enough to cover it.

Away from Billy's own bare and basic rendition (“minimalism – you want it, we’ve got it"), Kirsty's Steve Lillywhite production allows the ‘songish’ qualities (tune, melody and all that stuff) to burst out dramatically.

"If there's anything to be proved by having Billy Bragg in the charts then Kirsty proves it for me and gives me the freedom and justification for doing what I want to do."

And what Billy Bragg wants to do, perhaps above all else, is to please the punter in a positive way: and at a price they can afford. Both 'Life's A Riot' and its sequel, ‘Brewing Up With Billy Bragg', have been sold very cheaply.

The attached ‘Pay No More’ stickers have rankled sections of the record retail industry. The Bragg investigative unit has intercepted a major record shop chain’s in-house memo which expresses disgust at the fact 'the only people being done a favour are the customer’.

"Talk about red rag to a bull,” screams Billy, "that’s their way of saying ‘you’ve done your bit, stop pissing about and join the club'."

Billy hasn't joined the club, continues to piss about (more confidently and successfully than ever) and admits:

"In a climate where everybody else is either stuck in a job they hate or not working at all, I'm doing what I’ve always wanted to do and I’m getting paid for it.

"I’m a lucky little bastard."