INTERVIEW: Levellers (May 2018)

“Perestroika, reform, glasnost”… 

Such was the unique historical backdrop against which one of Britain’s most enduring contemporary musical outfits emerged back in 1988. Still going strong three decades later – not to mention still kicking against the pricks in yet another age of despair-filled Tory rule - the Levellers have been celebrating their thirtieth anniversary in grand style with We the Collective, an acoustic album recorded at Abbey Road studios by no less a figure than legendary producer John Leckie.

Often a little overshadowed by their extensive library of up-tempo crowd-pleasers is a body of more adventurous material that the band have amassed over the years. It’s into this catalogue of riches that the sextet dive headlong on We the Collective, via a series of deep cuts and some serious reinventions of old favourites. Opening proceedings with a cheeky nod to ‘I Am The Walrus’ by the studio’s most famous proponents is the song from which the album takes its name, ‘Exodus’ - and it immediately becomes apparent that we’re not in Brighton anymore as the original’s Egyptian-tinged folk is transformed into an elegant orchestral paean to communal action by contributing string-players, the Moulettes. In its newest incarnation, an initially busky ‘Hope Street’ ultimately begins to resemble a malfunctioning carnival ride as woozy strings replace the sludgy metal riffs of the album cut. The primal fury of Zounds’ rousing punk anthem, ‘Subvert’ - previously only available as a live B-side - is tersely distilled into a two-minute statement of intent akin to a ticking time-bomb, while the usually strident ‘Liberty Song’ assumes a much more insidious tone at the outset before building to a moving crescendo in which the band mourn, plaintively: “The way we were is the way that I want to be”.

However, the album is by no means an exercise in what is admittedly resourceful nostalgia. Also contained are two new tracks which demonstrate conclusively just how relevant an outlook the band has maintained over the years: ‘The Shame’ pours scorn on politicians who wring their hands over an immigration policy in which they remain hopelessly complicit, whereas the acidic ‘Drug Bust McGee’ satirises those more unscrupulous members of Her Majesty’s constabulary who are content to shack up with the unfortunate souls they’re tasked with investigating. Combined with the canny track selections elsewhere, these two songs provide the glue which binds the Levellers’ past to the present.

Frontman Mark Chadwick always make for a good-value conversationalist these days, frequently going off on hilarious, splenetic rants about whatever happens to catch his ire at any particular moment. And yet it remains fascinating to me how he can still come across as slightly cagey in the initial stages of any interview - as if years of being misrepresented in the media have instilled a natural wariness towards even those who profess their allegiance to his endeavours. As what I’ve always suspected to be the artistic conscience of the band - not to mention their prickliest member when it comes to feeling that their more experimental efforts haven’t been given their due – I was interested to see if I could crack open the façade once again when we spoke shortly after the album’s release this Spring…

So let’s talk about We the Collective first of all. It seems a very regal way to celebrate the band’s 30th anniversary, a bit like when you played the Royal Albert Hall – was that your intention, or was it just a combination of circumstances?

…Yeeeeahhh, yeah, it is… Well, we could’ve done it in a squat in London - but no, we did it as it seemed natural, really. Yeah, it was… fortuitous. Firstly, working with John Leckie, and John did all his early work at Abbey Road and has got connections there – he said: “I want to record an acoustic album with you guys, how about we do it at Abbey Road, acoustically?” Which made a lot of sense to us.

It goes without saying that the record sounds absolutely fantastic – but obviously in your own studio you’re able to take your time and work out the kinks when you’re making an album. How daunting is it going into a place like Abbey Road, knowing that everything is going to be right there laid out in the open and there’s absolutely nowhere to hide? 

Well, yeah, it was sort of daunting, but it makes sure you get it right, basically. We rehearsed a lot in our studio with John, so when we got to the studio at Abbey Road, all we had to do was deal with the atmosphere of the place, which was great anyway. D’you know what I mean? It was just, like, microphones into a desk in a beautiful room, which you recognise the sound of anyway because of the records that we all know that were recorded there. So it was, like, capturing that atmosphere… we loved it, to be honest! We could’ve done longer there -  we were only there for five days, but I’d go back there and record another record any day. It’s just a brilliant place.

On top of that, you’re working with someone who produced what you’ve gone on record as saying is one of your favourite albums of all time, Radiohead’s The Bends. 

Yeah, yeah.

Given that you were in that situation with someone of John’s status, did you feel confident that you could pull it off, or were you sort of bluffing it the whole time?

Hahaha! No, no. Well, unless it sounds like it! No, we were very confident. We’re quite a movable feast as a band - we can do pretty much anything, given the right set of circumstances in which to do it. And so to record at Abbey Road with John Leckie was great, you know – yeah, it was fun. We always rise to the occasion. I think we have confidence in our abilities and our message, and what we’re on about in our songs – who we are and what we’re doing. We’re not sort of a paranoiac band; we’re very confident in what we do.

There are some serious reinventions here, including a handful of tracks that you wouldn’t necessarily have been obvious inclusions or you would think would stand up to this process; ‘Subvert’ being the most obvious example. What was the selection process for the tracks here – was it songs that you felt were the most emblematic lyrically in terms of your output over the years, or was it songs that you really wanted to mess around with?

It’s what worked, really, to be honest. It was a process where everyone had a list of songs they wanted to do, including John, and we worked them out and boiled them down to ones that would actually work, and suffer under the microscope of being that bare, naked thing. So, some of those acoustic tracks, you don’t want to make them again, you know – there were some tracks that we’d never touch, in that respect. But we didn’t really go for, like, the “Greatest Hits” – there were a few songs which have been singles, but that was it; two of them were B-sides, two of them were new… It’s just, like, songs that we knew would lend themselves to the process that we were undertaking.

I think ‘Exodus’ is the one that really stands out for me here – is there any one track on the album that you were particularly proud of how it came out?

‘Exodus’ is one – I really like ‘Liberty Song’, and I really like ‘Subvert’.

They’re the three I definitely would’ve singled out.

Yeah – well, they’re the three that I liked, but obviously it’s quite a Marmite record, really. Everybody loves ‘Elation’ – to me, it’s brilliant, I love it, but I’m not on it! But when I listen to it, it kind of trances me out. The vibe on it trances me out. It’s beautiful, it’s so good – so powerful. But it’s not the sort of thing you often listen to… it’s very much an “earphone moment”. A lot of it is. The thing is, it’s sort of designed to be played on vinyl.

And are there any songs that didn’t make the cut, where you maybe thought “I’d love to have a go at that” but you couldn’t quite figure out a way to make it work?

Yeah, quite a few, actually; quite a few. But the thing is, they’d been done acoustically enough in the past anyway, so it was just about resting the things that… Something like ‘Liberty Song’ is quite an electric song, so to turn that into an acoustic song was a real challenge – and it worked. But some of them, like ‘15 Years’, we did… and it’s alright; it’s good, but… kind of just, like… it’s alright. D’you know what I mean? It’s like, you have to be really careful. And some of the ones we picked, the B-sides, they just worked because they never quite saw the light of day at the time. So the versions that we did were better than the originals.

Was there ever a desire to do a song like ‘3 Friends’, which is really kind of “out there” in terms of the arrangement?

Yeah… yeah, I think we had a go at that! [Laughs]

It didn’t go well, I take it…?

Not really, no… well, I mean, it could have done – but the thing is also that we did quite a lot of collaboration within it with the Moulettes, who are friends of ours from Brighton who are fantastic string players, and all kinds of instrumentationists. And it’s also what tickled their fancy as well – some things really turned them on, and that helped steer the ship a little bit. They’re twenty years younger than us, they’re going: “Yeah, we want to do that one, this way” – we were like: “Alright… yeah, we’ll do that!”

I’ve seen the band perform acoustically a number of times over the years, and I’ve always been struck by how much of a showcase it provides for some of those tracks that maybe get a bit lost in the shuffle when it comes to putting a live set together. 

Yes, that’s right, yeah.

Do you feel that’s a side to your work that hasn’t perhaps gotten the recognition it deserves over the years?

Oh, I don’t know… That’s not for me to decide, is it, or for any of us to decide; that’s down to the wider world and whatever gets heard, or whatever gets picked up on. What we tried to do with We the Collective is make sure the lyrical content was out there first and foremost, so that it sounded like a cohesive album about the modern world – not just the world of twenty-odd years ago, but the world that we live in now. And I think we managed to do that, which was something that we thought was paramount, actually.

As a compendium of tracks, do you feel it’s sort of a manifesto for how the band feels – is it one of your definitive statements, as such?

Yeah, absolutely – we talk about… there are a lot of subjects within the songs, and they’re very contemporary; nothing’s changed, you know. The two new songs extra-contemporise that.

I particularly wanted to ask you about ‘Drug Bust McGee’. We’ve all seen the headlines over the last few years, so I assume this is a composite character, and not some real-life target of your ire like PC Keen?

No - it is a composite character. So’s PC Keen, by the way!

Oh, really! I was under the impression that he was a real-life person.

Yeah, he’s a composite character. But these are characters we’ve actually met, you know, or had contact with.

So it’s like “Tits McGee”, right?

Yeah, basically – I can’t actually name the names, because I don’t want to end up in a court of law! [Laughs] Or in the newspapers, anything like that – it’s a song, at the end of the day. It’s a song about real events that have really happened; these things are actual… It’s like, we’ve had close contact with these people, [but] that’s neither here nor there; it’s the fact that, as a subject matter, for people to realise that while doing innocent things – Earth First, and stuff like that – that they are being investigated for caring about their own planet by their own police force that they pay fucking taxes towards. Yeah? And they’re being seriously investigated – like, the Levellers have been investigated by the police on numerous occasions, and it’s like: [Angrily, rhetorically] “Why…?” Why are you looking at us like we’re a real threat to society…?

After all this time, does it ever fail to surprise you what some of these people and institutions are capable of?

[Emphatically] No! No, it will never cease to surprise me – it will constantly amaze me. But these organisations – their budgets are cut, like everybody else’s… I suspect they’ll be clipping their wings, as much as everyone else’s wings have been clipped – the whole of rich society’s wings have been clipped at the moment, strutting around like a wounded piggy… Innit!

I’ve asked you this before, then, but I’m going to ask you again now: how do you keep your head above water, in terms of the fact you’ve been doing this for such a long time and, like you said, nothing seems to have changed.

[Laughs] It doesn’t, it’s gotten worse!

Right! So how do you keep your sanity, when your entire message is about trying to improve things?

Who - said – we’ve kept our sanity…?!

Well, alright, then… how do you keep your focus, maybe.

Yeah, our focus remains undimmed. But yeah, we haven’t kept our sanity, there’s no two ways about it! [Laughs] The thing is, it’s like: the Levellers’ glass is always half-full. We’re optimists at heart; we always have been. And I think that’s probably what helps us through.

Thirty years. You’ve had your fair share of ups and downs during that time… highest high? 

Oh, Christ… Wait, are you talking about drugs…?! [Laughs]

Well, I was going to say career-wise rather than literally, but if that’s what you want to go with…

[Laughs] Career-wise… you know what, there’s… oh, I dunno. There’s been many. There’s been too many. Everyone expects you to say: “Oh, headlining Glastonbury, yeah, whooo!” …no. That wasn’t… that’s a media conception of a high. A high from our perspective would be putting our festival on for the first time and making it work – here we are fifteen years later, and it’s still going. That was a high. That’s something tangible you can actually hold onto.

Have you got an actual drug “highest high” story that you can recall…?

Highest high… not that I can recall… [Laughs]

Lowest low…?

Lowest low… Interestingly, to be honest, they come infrequently, but they do come. It’s just… it’s more existential angst than it is realities within the band. You know, things do happen to people – things happen within people’s lives, but they’re not really… As far as the band’s life is concerned, not really… You know, when we got dropped by Bugs Bunny [Warner Bros. subsidiary China Records, the band’s home during the 1990s] – that was like… (Trails off dejectedly) But that was a high! That was like: “Great! We haven’t got a record label anymore!” And that was like, fucking… eighteen years ago that happened, and we’re still here. So I don’t know, as far as the band is concerned. A low point can be, like, when your bus breaks down on the M25 or something, and you can’t get to a gig. That has happened – but we always get to the gig, you know? That’s the nature of the band – that’s what we do. We don’t really suffer the slings and arrows of misfortune well - we just get on with the chore.

The band has always exuded this collective sense of purpose, but I know that behind the scenes there’s been quite a lot of turmoil. Was there ever a moment when you considered packing it in, or even came close? 

No. No.

Was it simply never an option?

Simply never an option, no. We don’t… No. I mean, we’ve had quite a tough time since the beginning of this year, to be honest, for reasons I’m not prepared to go into – but the band itself is greater than the sum of its parts, and we just continue.

I assume the common denominator is the friendship – that’s deepened over the years, I take it.

Yeah, of course it has, yeah.

So you’re more united by adversity.

United by experiences. Many, yeah. United by that.

I’m loath to bring up the feud with the music press from the old days, but I was thinking the other day: given the position of respect or status that you seem to occupy currently (particularly within the folk scene), is it strange to you to have outlasted that, and to now be in a position where you’re seen as – for want of a better phrase – elder statesmen?! (Well, maybe middle-aged statesmen…) 

Oh, elder statesmen, for god’s sake. Let’s tell the truth! [Laughs] Well, honestly, I’m not sure how much that really… the Levellers do exist within its own bubble, you know? We’ve always been… we’re not like a rock band, we’re not like a folk band; we do a little bit of this, we do a little bit of that… We are able to transition between places, but we’ve never really aligned ourselves to one particular thing; we never aligned ourselves to being a hippy convoy band, we never aligned ourselves to being a fucking punk-rock band, or a punk-folk band, or any of those things! [Laughs] We’ve always been, singularly, the Levellers – take it or leave it.

I saw a terrific interview you and Jeremy did a while back where you were talking about ragging on all your Brexit-supporting fans. When it was posted on the band’s Facebook page, I got into a bit of an exchange with some gammon-faced bloke who commented saying something along the lines of: “Keep your personal beliefs out of the band”. I replied by saying: “Their personal beliefs ARE the band, you wally!” 

[Laughs] The thing is, we’re quite happy to put out the statements – what we don’t do is argue with our audience! We leave that to others, to argue amongst themselves. But we’re quite happy to put out a statement and go: “D’you know what? FUCK this, it’s stupid. You know it, I know it – if you’re not prepared to accept that, you’re a fucking moron”. But then, I’m not going to enter into a concourse of debate with them, because they’re obviously not capable of it – there’s no fucking point! I’ll leave that to people like you, who are up to the thing! [Laughs] Because literally, I still want them to come to my gigs in the fucking unkneeling, vain hope that they change their CUNTING minds!

I guess the question is, then: to know there are people out there who like what you do but apparently don’t really understand what you do - how do you square that, as an artist?

Well, you know what – people are people, and they’re entitled to their opinions. The fact that they’re, fucking… people can grab hold of anything from anything, if that’s what they wanna do. You know what I mean? It’s not for me to decide what they take from it. I hope they take what we’re actually trying to get across – but that’s not always the case. And that’s been the case since the very beginning. From the very beginning – you’re going back to the debates with the media from years ago, it’s like: they didn’t really understand what we were about, because people don’t actually understand common sense, strange as that may sound, because that’s what we are on about. Bloody common sense. You know, it’s like: “Orrrrh, common sense, like Nigel Farage…” – that’s not fucking common sense, that’s an ideologue. We’re talking basic common sense, which is like, looking after each other, and looking after the planet you fucking live on.

Was it frustrating then to be accused of being that very thing yourselves? I remember ‘One Way’ once being described in the press as something like “A statement of failed ideology”.

Yeah, well, it can be taken as such; it can also be taken as a really fascist statement as well. It can be taken any way, and that’s absolutely… not cool with me [laughs], but people are gonna do it, aren’t they? They’re gonna do it.

Do you still feel misunderstood?

Uhhhh… [thinks] …yeah.

By who?

I don’t know, really – I think by the more intellectual parts of the broadsheet media and the BBC… people like that, yeah. Because literally, we’ll play to more people than anybody will play to in a year, we’ll play to 100,000 people this year, yet some band who’ll come along and play to, like, 5000 people will be all over the media. You know what I mean? So we’re kind of ignored. But d’you know what, we’re a big underground band, and that’s kind of where we exist – and we’re probably happier there, thinking about it.

Creatively, the band’s still a potent force – the last couple of records have been really strong, and everyone seemed to agree that they bear comparison with your ‘classic’ albums from the 90s. Is there anything left that you still really want to achieve? What keeps you hungry?

The job itself, to be honest – just doing it. And calling it a job does it a disservice – it’s just working. It’s like working. We like doing what we do: we like playing to an audience. We like entertaining a crowd. Informing a crowd, and having a good time doing it.

This is maybe a bit of a loaded question, but do you feel like you’re maybe poised for a bit of a comeback in terms of mainstream acceptance? I only ask since we seem to have, for the first time in a while, someone at the head of one of the mainstream political parties who – superficially, at least – seems to chime with a lot of the band’s egalitarian principles.

Errrr, I’m not so sure about that. We’ve always existed outside of politics - it’s like, people go: “Oh yeah, the Levellers, they must be socialists”… we’re not. It comes as a real shock to people. We might be leftly-leaning, but we’re not… we’re anarchists. We’re anarchists in the truest sense of the word, in as much as we exist to inform and educate. So therefore, how many systems have we been through? Everyone got really excited and said, “Oh, the Levellers, you must be really happy now in 1997 when Tony Blair’s in charge”… I’m like: “No, I’m not…!” [Laughs] He’s a devil in disguise!

Did you see all that coming, even back then?

Oh, god, yeah. I said so at Brixton Academy at the time.

I take it you never got an invite to Downing Street, a bit like Noel Gallagher did…

Of course not…!

Too outside of the mainstream for New Labour’s liking.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, way outside of it. But I have been invited to represent political parties in the past.

Really…?

Yeah, yeah, from all of them – from Liberal Democrats, the Green Party, Labour Party – and, indeed, the Conservative Party.

…Unnnnnbelievable. Unbelievable!

Well, there you go! It’s like, “Represent us as a local councillor and we’ll take you on from here”. Like, er, no.

I remember when a Massive Attack song got used at the Tory Party Conference a few years back, and they issued a very public statement basically saying: “How dare they use our music to promote their bullshit”. Were you not tempted to go full-flamethrower on the Tories and issue a quote like that?

Er… well, they have used our music in the past, and so’s the Labour Party. To be honest, it’s… it’s up to them what they do! [Laughs] Millwall used to use our song to sing on the terraces. It’s their music – once we’ve released it, it’s theirs; it’s whoever wants to do with it what they want. As anarchists, we can’t really go around going “You can’t use it like that!” It’s like, you can’t say that – it’s literally like: alright; you’re using it like that… that’s your abuse.

As usual, a couple of questions for my own amusement at the end here. I didn’t get the chance to speak to you when your last solo record [Moment] came out, and I thought it was an absolutely brilliant album that marked a real high-point for you as a writer. And yet! Pretty much every time I’ve met you over the years, you’ve either been drinking, or drunk, or hungover. While All the Pieces was very much about you, Moment seemed to go out of its way to deal with the issue of alcohol by skirting every which way around it. Did it feel like it was too much to go there directly, or did you feel that the subject was better left addressed through different characters and misdirection?

Er… well… yeah, yeah. [Cackles] Interesting. Interesting! I’m not always pissed when you see me, am I…?

You have been whenever I’ve met you, yeah.

- Nooooo…!

Pretty much, yeah.

[Laughs] That’s Evil Robot Mark, that’s not me. I’m on the tour bus reading Proust!

What was the deal there, then – because it was almost an alternative to rehab, wasn’t it? Make that record, or go to rehab.

Well, to be honest, in Moment I really addressed it directly with ‘Waterfall’ - the first song on the album is: that’s me. That’s me, talking directly about boozing and what it’s like. And how actually being shit it really is.

You don’t have to answer this, but I’m hearing what I’m guessing are kids in the background – are you pretty much sober nowadays?

Er… mostly. Mostly, yeah!

Was that the turning point, the kids?

Well, I’ve had kids for years. So no! [Laughs] No, is the answer to that one! No, no, no, they’re like the turning-on point: like, “Oh, for fuck’s sake, I’m going to the pub!” [Laughs]

When I interviewed you for Levelling the Land’s 20th anniversary, I asked you if you thought that album was the band’s best work. You were pretty much the only member of the group I spoke to that day who disagreed with that. I have my own theory about what you might say in answer to that question, so I’m interested to see if it squares up with your actual reply. Looking back over thirty years, what do you think is the band’s best work? What are you proudest of on an artistic level?

On an artistic level, that’s easy: that’s the quality. That’s where I come at it from – I come from an artistic point of view. So I must say it’s Hello Pig.

Yeah. I would’ve said you’d think it would probably be split between the half of Mouth to Mouth that’s stuff like ‘Chemically Free’, ‘Elation’ and ‘Too Real’…

[Animatedly] Yep. Yeah.

And then the half of Hello Pig that’s ‘Happy Birthday Revolution’, ‘61 Minutes of Pleading’ and ‘Gold & Silver’. Would you go with that?

I would, yeah. That’s where we’re, like… we’re at the outer limits of our talent, if you know what I mean.

And is that where you prefer to exist as a writer…

Yeah.

…or just as an artist?

Yeah. It is, as an artist. As a writer, I prefer to write songs that fucking hit home straight away to anybody in the street. Who go: “Yeah. I fucking knew that. I thought that. I’ve always thought that”. That’s what I wanna do. But that’s, fucking… that’s the gold marrow.

You’ve talked to me in the past about Stephen Stills and the other people you really admire. Have you ever thought about what your potential legacy might be? (That’s maybe too much of a big question to end on…!)

Er, d’you know what, it’s essentially impossible for me to say, isn’t it? The thing is [with] legacy, you can disappear down a fucking plug-hole of history quite easily – many greats have, many fantastic people that you’ve never even heard of. I’ve played with some fantastic musicians and songwriters over the years, whose legacy will never even be known. So it’s impossible to say – and that’s the sort of, like… that’s within the remit of those that write history, isn’t it? Not within the people that are actually living in it, if you know what I mean.

I guess the thing I’m getting at this point is that it all just comes back to this idea of the band remaining in control of what it does in and of itself.

Within its own destiny, yeah. But the band’s always been in control of its own destiny. And for people to maybe look back in history and go: “Ooh yeah, there was this little-known band called the Levellers, that actually did everything. Because they did it exactly, correctly and rightly without fucking anybody over – in fact, making people’s lives better. That’s the kind of legacy I’d love to be remembered for, but whether or not we’ll get it, that’s not down to me…

I guess we’ll wait and see…

[Laughs] Yeah, well… I’ll be long dead!


We the Collective is available now via OTF Recordings.