It’s 14 years since James Dean Bradfield’s last solo album, The Great Western. While that record was partly bound up in ideas about the Welsh psyche, Bradfield travelled further afield for album number two, Even In Exile, working with playwright and poet Patrick Jones (Nicky Wire’s elder brother) to examine the life and work of Chilean activist and artist Victor Jara in what Bradfield describes as a “loose concept album”. Jara was tortured and killed in 1973 under Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship. In 2018 eight retired Chilean military officers were sentenced to 15 years in prison for his murder.
Bradfield against a portrait of Chilean activist and artist Victor Jara, the subject of his new album.
MARK GUBB/PRESS
“Maybe I’ve finally absorbed all my influences the way I should have. I think I’m happy with stuff falling through me now.”