As anyone who might have scrolled through the tracklisting on The Roaring Forty, the recent mammoth boxset celebrating his career, Billy Bragg has crossed paths with an expansive array of artists over four-decades and more as a cherished UK singer-songwriter and activist. One of the more eye-raising entries in the tale is the time that Bragg and R.E.M. frontman Michael Stipe were roommates in Czechoslovakia in 1990. Allow Bragg to pick up the thread, as relayed to this writer recently:
“We were! That was an interesting experience for both of us. I’d been behind the Iron Curtain but I’d never been to Czechoslovakia and we were there while the Velvet Revolution was coming to its zenith so the place was just absolutely alive and both of us were really excited.”
