The singer-songwriter’s brand of stubborn protest songs with a strain of tenderness has kept him relevant for 40 years. Here he talks about why he’s fighting for trans rights, his late-night tweeting habit and his forthcoming tour – with his son

Recently, Billy Bragg showed his two young granddaughters a little promo film he put together celebrating his 40 years of making records. The girls were nonplussed by the early scenes on picket lines and spiky festival stages, but towards the end, recognising an avuncular white-bearded bloke with a guitar, they brightened: “Look, it’s Grandad Bill!” they chorused. “It was actually all Grandad Bill,” their father pointed out, but they weren’t having any of it.

Meeting Bragg at the station car park in Weymouth – not far from where he lives along the Dorset coast – and heading up to a cafe on the headland overlooking the sweep of the bay, I sympathise a little bit with their sentiment. The first time I saw the singer in the flesh was sometime late in 1984, when he was giving it his full “one-man Clash” performance on student stages at miners’ benefits. Even at the time that felt like it might be a hard act to grow old with; yet here he is in the seaside retirement resort, still fighting the good fight.

Having set the stage for some of the world’s most iconic bands over its wild, debauched lifetime, Mojos is still drawing crowds more than 50 years later

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Behind a painted red, blue and yellow 1900s-era shopfront, an indie-pop band called Little Guilt is stepping onto a small stage framed with velvet curtains. They’re launching their new single to a sweaty throng of 20-somethings at Mojos Bar on a Saturday night in North Fremantle. It’s a scene reminiscent of Berlin, or perhaps even Austin: a heady blur of mullets, moustaches and midriffs, pool table flirtation, graffitied toilets and hazy conversations, surrounded by crumbling paint likely older than the punters themselves.

This fresh-faced crowd mightn’t know it, but they’re standing on hallowed turf for Western Australian music. Since the late 1960s, Mojos has been a testing ground for some of the country’s (and the world’s) most loved bands including homegrown icons Tame Impala, the Triffids, the Farriss Brothers (who later became INXS), Pond, Jebediah, Spacey Jane, John Butler, Abbe May, San Cisco and too many others to name.

From a young Paul Kelly and bop dancing in the streets to legends like Ray Charles, music fan and photographer Brian Carr has spent 50 years documenting the notable and not so well-known musos who make up Melbourne’s vibrant live music scene. He has now published a book, Music City , from his extensive archive

Singer’s attorney says agreement gives his client the ‘freedom’ that ‘she desired’

Britney Spears and her estranged father have agreed to settle a legal dispute that continued between them even though it had been more than two years since a court had terminated the conservatorship that put him in control of the US pop star’s life.

Terms of the settlement between the singer of chart-topping hit Womanizer and Jamie Spears weren’t disclosed in statements that their attorneys distributed to media outlets on Friday.

The singer, 58, on staying sane, why he isn’t afraid of getting his hands dirty and how the internet gave his most famous song a new lease of life

Being 10 years younger than my older siblings meant I was bombarded with music from a young age. My older sister, Jane, and brother, John, played records relentlessly. My sister was obsessed with Motown, but also prog rock. The first band I ever saw live was Supertramp.

My dad ran a little garden centre and it made me realise that if you run your own business, you can run your own life. I inherited his work ethic. We all worked at his garden centre after school and at weekends. I was never frightened of getting my hands dirty, often literally.

My parents divorced when I was five and it had a huge impact on me. We lived at my dad’s house for a bit, because my mum had a breakdown. She had five children in total. The middle one, David, died of meningitis. I think she’d had enough and went to live at my grandma’s. The whole experience left me scarred. It made me realise anything can happen at any time and you can’t even rely on the biggest thing you want to count on: your parents being there for you.

The internet gave Never Gonna Give You Up a second life. There’s a generation of people whose kids are saying to them, “Oh, I love this tune,” and the parents are going, “How do you even know who this bloke is?”

Singing on stage with Foo Fighters was surreal. The first time it happened was at a festival in Japan. Dave Grohl had seen I was on the bill on another stage and, when they were playing, suddenly invited me on to sing Never Gonna Give You Up. I was a bit jet lagged and I’d had a few beers. Then I’m singing my song in front of tens of thousands of people.

I’m pretty boring away from the spotlight, but that’s why my life works. When I’m in the spotlight, I’m full of adrenaline and emotion. When I’m off stage, my favourite thing to do is to go for a walk.

My ambition for the future is to remain sane. Seriously. My plan to achieve this is by doing less.

One of the pitfalls of a pop career is that you do something exciting and then think, “We have to do it again – but with more lights.” Some artists can do that. Others need to take stock. I think one of the keys to sanity is having a sense of perspective. It can’t all be Glastonbury.

I can guarantee that Never Gonna Give You Up will not be played at my funeral. I certainly won’t be playing it and I don’t think anyone else will be playing it either. I don’t even know if I want to be remembered. I think the music almost lives in its own world. I’d prefer to be remembered for being a decent person.

Royal Opera House; Wigmore Hall; Milton Court, London
A fearless central performance anchors Katie Mitchell’s busy yet insightful Donizetti revival. And two chamber concerts serve as a vibrant prelude to this year’s BBC Proms…

“Agency” is a current buzzword in opera, well-worn but still valid and usually preceded by “female”. Women, abused, controlled, dying, were long assumed to have no free will. A radical rethink, of history in its entirety, and of opera, has put this expectation in the dock. One of the sharpest cross-questioners, scrutinising every hardened attitude, is the British director Katie Mitchell , whose work has been seen (alternative wording: “has divided audiences”) across Europe since the mid-1990s.

Her production of Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), as troublesome as it is unnerving and perceptive, has returned to the Royal Opera House for a second revival. The soprano Nadine Sierra excels in the title role (her fellow American Liv Redpath will give three performances). Sierra alone, leading a uniformly strong ensemble, would be a reason to see this show. Giacomo Sagripanti conducted, with chorus and orchestra on passionate form and a notably lovely solo flute obbligato in the celebrated mad scene.

The lead singer on hitting it big, how things fell apart, and the joy of the 1980s revival

Born in Liverpool in 1957, Carol Decker is the lead singer of T’Pau. She was fronting Shropshire band the Lazers when she met BT engineer and musician Ronnie Rogers, with whom she would go on to form T’Pau. Together they became one of the biggest-selling groups of the 1980s, with tracks such as China in Your Hand and Heart and Soul . The group split in 1992 but have since had a renaissance as part of 80s nostalgia tours. They perform at Let’s Rock Scotland and Let’s Rock Leeds festivals this summer.

T’Pau were on tour in Switzerland when the NME decided to cover us. Their vision for the shoot was: the band are at the height of their success with the world at their feet, but Carol is a pizza girl at heart.

(Total Pleasure/Virgin)
Recreating the noises in her head, Annie Clark’s first fully self-produced album ranges across styles and emotions, and is her most direct yet

Worth remembering: Annie “St Vincent” Clark’s college band was called the Skull Fuckers . The guitarist is no stranger to coaxing hairy sounds out of her instrument, nor to drilling down to uncouth feelings within. After a series of albums with slicker sound palettes, she has gone dark and heavy for her seventh studio , All Born Screaming ; heavy-hitter Dave Grohl plays apocalyptic drums on a pair of tracks. Clark’s first entirely self-produced work, it aims to recreate the noises in her head without a filter. Gloriously unstable modular synths often figure. Apparently it took dozens of vocal takes to strike the right timbre of desolation on Hell Is Near, the bleak first cut.

At the other end of the record, the title track highlights the suffering in the human condition – and simultaneously, the fact that the pain means we’re alive. In between, Clark touches on lust, loss and death in a more direct manner than her highly stylised personae often allow for. From the noisy low end of lead track Broken Man, through Flea ’s prowling industrial pop and the superlative goth jazz, Bond-like theme of Violent Times , it’s a loud and unapologetically varied work.

From a mural in Birmingham commemorating poet Benjamin Zephaniah to the Observer’s favourite food shops: the best original photographs from the Observer commissioned in April 2024