★★★★

SURPRISINGLY, Billy Bragg could see the good side of Donald Trump's win.

As the famously left-wing singer joked during Shine A Light, his acoustic show based on folk songs about the US railroad: "At least he'll get the trains to run on time . . . although I realise that's a touchy subject down here!" Indeed. An evening of songs about rail travel might have been a difficult sell in Brighton.

But Bragg and his collaborator, US musician Joe Henry, showed how these wonderful folk songs still matter. Bragg, not a natural singer, harmonised well with the more able Henry on some of the best tunes in the genre, from Jimmie Rodgers' Waitin' For A Train, Hank Williams' Lonesome Whistle and Leadbelly's Midnight Special to Dylan's Tonight I'll Be Staying Here With You and John Hartford's Gentle On My Mind.

Trump's shock win ("like Brexit but with guns and nuclear weapons" said Bragg) overshadowed this unashamedly rabble-rousing evening. Henry said it proved these old songs were "still relevant. Everyone in them is struggling. And Americans today know what that means". Both guitarists did a solo set, too, with Bragg dusting off Between The Wars, Accident Waiting To Happen and There Is A Power In The Union, which got the biggest cheer of the night.

The highlight, though, was Henry at the piano for the elegiac Our Song, with its apt lines, "This was my country/ This was my song/ Though it started badly and it's ending wrong". But back to trains. As Bragg put it, in America's past they meant freedom and hope. The poor could hop on and go and start a new life – just like migrants from war-torn Syria were doing now.

He was preaching to the converted but it was still worth pointing out.