What's so bad about the Levellers?

Completely OTM

They were a terrible band.

Funny though, I was just thinking about them today; wondering what had happened to them - and all the other crusties.

Except that was David Stubbs in Melody Maker...?

LEVELLERS
Winners of the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards 2011
present
Levelling The Land Live
The 20th Anniversary Tour – March 2011
Featuring special guests THE WONDER STUFF
Classic Album To Be Reissued March 14th On Rhino Records

This week the Levellers were awarded the ‘Roots Award’ at the BBC Radio 2’s annual Folk Awards at The Brewery in East London. Presented by Radio 2’s Jeremy Vines, he stated that the award was for a band who “stays true to folk and where it came from. Taking punk and folk together, brash guitars with the true bite of folk soul. Only the strong survive and The Levellers have done it by staying true to their roots.”

Their year continues with their era-defining album ‘Levelling The Land’ performed in its entirety for the very first time, and reissued by Rhino Records March 14th, followed by an extended encore of live favourites from the Levellers extensive back catalogue. Featuring the hit singles One Way, 15 Years and Far From Home plus The Game, Liberty Song, Sell Out, Another Man’s Cause, Riverflow, Boatman and the incendiary Battle Of The Beanfield.

‘Levelling The Land’ is reissued March 14th by Rhino Records as a double disc featuring 5 bonus tracks and their classic Glastonbury live set from 1992.

Jeremy Vines endorses staying true to your root

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y7JX8D1Kb88

I know this band raises the ire of many (the other thread about them is titled Seriously, is there anything worse than The Levellers? and even the press release I excerpted above says "Then as now, Levellers may have been hated, but they were also adored.")...

However I interviewed them back in the day, a bunch of crusties in posh Manhattan offices of their record company looking comcomfortable but still friendly. Surprised they didn't do a little more in the US since that was in the middle of Lollapalooza and the label seemed keen to push that disc.

I still remember listening to this song on cassette, over and over, drunk off my ass on the Subway home from Manhattan one night.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cV6ILIal5Aw

I still have the cassette.

Surprised they didn't do a little more in the US since that was in the middle of Lollapalooza and the label seemed keen to push that disc

I think you really needed to be English to get the Levellers, also you probably needed to be politically aware at the time they were at their peak. They tapped into a very English history of ingrained scepticism and organized resistance which meant an awful lot to a lot of people at the time. I was never a big fan but I used to live in Brighton where some (maybe all?) of them came from and in that town there were thousands of people for whom the Levellers made complete sense. People who knew that the police weren't out to do them any favours and that organized resistance was something important and necessary. There is this strain of passionate idealism in Brighton (they just elected the first Green Party MP in Britain) that comes across totally in the Leverllers' music. You can call it over-romanticized all you like but the fact of the matter is that things like the Battle of the Beanfield did happen and represented a nadir in the activities of the police and the government which I for one found completely unbelievable and shocking.

I was agnostic on their music but I still think "15 Years" and "This Garden" are great tunes.

don't think there's really a perfect US equiv to the Levellers to help explain why they catch so much heat but I think jam bands might be the closest - if you encounter it a lot and aren't part of it it seems really really stupid and annoying, but with an Atlantic Ocean's distance it probably just looks a bit weird and dishevelled

xp, sort of

How have The Wonder Stuff managed to sink to a being a mere Levellers support slot?

someone should do a Levellers Vs New Model Army thread methinks

or the Levellers vs Slade the Leveller vs Slade

A couple of those tunes are not terrible. Their aesthetic and "politics" and all that went with was the main cause of the recoilment in horror. Still are.

And probly some terrible chippy class envy stuff that I know much better than to get into on here.

I know it's lame to hate on a band because of their fans, but maybe justified when their music makes people like this happy:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2349/2321678654_dd3dfd6dd7_o.jpg

That young man is currently working to bring down global capitalism thru the medium of getting a job in a bank.

Their aesthetic and "politics" and all that went with was the main cause of the recoilment in horror

Well the Levellers and the scene that went with them would have said that conventional politicians had failed them. Their interests and activities lay outside the political/democratic process, and that was a position that, as I said, made perfect sense to a lot of intelligent and clued-up people.

I really don't wanna start ranting about the Levs cos I seem to have the opposite opinion to you on 9 tenths of everything and I don't want you to thing it's personal :)

When I am out and I see a fox I think of "This Garden" - also when anyone says anything about blood, sweat and tears.

I quite liked The Levellers in their heyday but I could happily go the rest of my life and never hear them again.

I have a softer spot for The Wonder Stuff but I still don't think I'd be arsed paying to see them.

Well the Levellers and the scene that went with them would have said that conventional politicians had failed them

do you know who else felt this?

that's right, hitler

Peggy Mitchell from Eastenders as well.

what were the Levs' demands apart from freedom to smoke weed and drink scrumpy wherever they saw fit?

something about compulsory Ozric Tentacles gigs on the NHS as well iirc

i just googled the lyrics to 'one way'

not doing that again

At this point, Miles became disenchanted by the Levellers' communist approach to money - all of the band's earnings being put together in a fund from which the members were paid the same amount every day. After being refused more money to buy food one day (having spent his day's allowance elsewhere) Miles quit the band.

"Elsewhere" just means "on a big bag of weed", right?

what were the Levs' demands apart from freedom to smoke weed and drink scrumpy wherever they saw fit?

Well the freedom to drive in a convoy of beat-up old vehicles around the English countryside in an admittedly irritating manner without having yourselves and the said vehicles trashed by police would presumably have been one of them.

I don't like hip-hop, reggae, soul, funk or R&B.

― margana (anagram)

How have The Wonder Stuff managed to sink to a being a mere Levellers support slot?

sacking the reformed band by means of announcing tour dates for Miles Rhymingslang's solo band under the Wonder Stuff name was probably the turning point

reissuing the 1991 video collection with a photo of the new band on the sleeve would have cemented it

jeeeeeeesus, on googling it turns out the new lineup has been RE-RECORDING the original band's albums as "20th Anniversary Editions," including re-recording old b-sides as "bonus tracks"

also latter-day PWEI drummer and big beat solo star Fuzz Townshend has joined for this Levellers tour, lol

jeeeeeeesus, on googling it turns out the new lineup has been RE-RECORDING the original band's albums as "20th Anniversary Editions," including re-recording old b-sides as "bonus tracks"

this is not new, Squeeze did it as well. it's so that they regain the rights to their old stuff

it's quite common to re-record your old stuff for small-label hits cash-ins and the like - think it's far more likely so it's so they don't have to share royalties with the sacked original members (or their estates!), in this instance. cf they're surely not going to regain the rights to their original videos by putting a PHOTO OF THE NEW MEMBERS on a collection of MOVING IMAGES OF THE OLD BAND

anyway, the Levellers

I didn't mean regain the rights to the actual old recordings themselves, I meant being able to sell the (new versions of) the old albums and make £ from them

I know, just illustrating that Hunt seems to have other motives demonstrated elsewhere

ANYWAY

Can't believe that affable poet-genius Miles Hunt turned out to be a Miles Hunt.

Stoned teenage boys insisting that Julie is the most beautiful song ever and making you sit through the neverending bagpipe solo or whatever the fuck finished the song for 10 minutes. THAT'S what's so fucking bad about the Levellers.

LET ME LISTEN TO BJÖRK!

I carry no torch for the Levellers but it's wrong to pretend that all their fans were middle-class poseurs. There were a lot of people in the squatter/traveller scene they represented that were a long long way from working in a bank, or indeed having a house. They did come from a genuine counterculture, however annoying it may have been (and however bad most of the songs were).

My gf at the time was really into this band/scene, so I tried to get into it a bit but it wasn't happening. And then when I announced that I thought Back to the Planet were quite fun she was aghast.

They like sold out totally.
They were a very interesting cross between folk & punk that I was going to follow gigs by. Their drummer broke a limb playing football, when he recovered their next tour was with New Model Army whose fans started following them.

At some point they took of in a different, I think more commercial though possibly anthemic, direction and I lost interest.
Think the early stuff is pretty interesting though.

Perhaps we need a "WTF happened to The Wonder Stuff thread". They were still able to play O2 Academy-sized venues for their anniversary tours of their first two albums, suggesting that fans may not care enormously about former members not being there (Paul Clifford and Martin Bell being the only two who remain alive who are not present today).

Unless you've got a very committed fanbase you can only milk a reunion for so long.

Or even a fake reunion.

Levellers basically sounded like The Alarm with added fiddles and mandolins.

They were not too bad, but I prefer The Alarm. Now there's a truly underrated Welsh band!

I hope you never breed.

The Wonder Stuff were a fake reunion? Bob Jones had died in 1993 and his replacement Paul Clifford never rejoined for the reformation, though Gilks, Bell and Treece did. Bell and Gilks (who died after leaving the reformed band) left a couple of years later and were replaced. Did it really matter that much?

Levellers basically sounded like The Alarm with added fiddles and mandolins.

^ This is not totally untrue, but maybe the Levellers had a little bit more substance in their songs rather than all that vague fist-shaking stuff about 68 guns or making a stand or whatever it was that the Alarm were on about.

Not that the Levellers avoided that totally, but they did do some songs about actual things iirc.

Number of ways of life, rising cost of mung bean patties, that kind of thing.

Did a crustie run off with your wife, NV? I'm sensing a lot of rage here.

The fact that we're living in an era where one might need an excuse to laugh at a crustie is quite sad.

However we must ALWAYS live in an era where we can laugh at anyone who used to have dreadlocks.

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