Levellers - Dance Before The Storm - George Berger

LEVELLERS - DANCE BEFORE THE STORM -

GEORGE BERGER

They used to live on this big traveller's site on the outskirts of Amsterdam called The Last Bus Shelter. I didn't know them personally but I had a few friends who did and they were always very complimentary about them. The first time I ever saw them play live was at the Treworgey Tree Fayre in 1989 where they played by candlelight in a marquee to a small but appreciative audience. I remember them doing a cover version of Police On My Back and me thinking this was a band who had something special about them. To be honest, I was never really enamoured by their music but it was obvious their hearts were in the right place. And then I saw them next on the main stage at Glastonbury Festival in 1994 and the audience reaction to them was what I can only describe as phenomenal. That whole field was undulating, heaving and jumping unlike any other time I'd seen it before. This was their audience all in one place on a massive scale. This was the match made in heaven. That evening Glastonbury was the Levellers' spiritual home and it was like the Levellers were Glastonbury's spiritual band. It was genuinely a sight to behold.

Ah yes, the Levellers. The band the music press loved to hate. The Levellers. The band that invited a thousand jibes at the mere mention of their name. The Levellers. The band that still to this day provokes hostility from a legion of armchair critics. You thought The Alarm were bad? Here's the Levellers. You thought Chumbawamba, Steeleye Span, Ed Sheeran, Mumford and Sons, etc, etc, etc were bad? Here's the Levellers. And here's Dance Before The Storm, written by George Berger, the official story of the Levellers.

I have no axe to grind here at all, I might add. I hold no prejudice or no fear or loathing of the band in the slightest. In fact, as a band and as individuals and even as an institution (for that is what they are now, particularly in regard to their annual Beautiful Days festival) the Levellers have my utmost respect - even if I don't get off on their music. For they have moved into and now occupy a sphere where they represent a certain common good beyond the realm of music where values, integrity and politics are just as important if not more so and where these things are displayed if even subtly because they are genuinely believed in rather than them being a 'hearts on sleeve' pose used cynically to push product.

There is no hypocrisy when it comes to the Levellers. What you see is what you get and it's precisely this that in hindsight caused so much upset with critics. The Levellers once held up a mirror to the 'music biz' and the music biz didn't like what it saw and so tried to smash it. The Levellers were that mirror.

George Berger used to be the vocalist of anarcho punk band Flowers In The Dustbin who rather than Crass always had a lot more in common with Adam And The Ants and Poison Girls. Berger has also written a book on Crass although Dance Before The Storm is the superior one for the fact that between the lines of his Crass book there was a sense that he didn't actually like Crass or at least he kind of resented them in a way, whilst with the Levellers you can tell he genuinely likes them. He's a fan.

Where exactly did the Levellers come from, you might wonder? Well, it's not too much of a surprise to read they were birthed from a gene pool of punk, Crass, The Waterboys, Dexys Midnight Runners, and The Pogues. The most important ingredient, however, is Brighton without which they could probably never have happened. Brighton being a sort of elder sister of Hackney and parts of Bristol, if you know what is meant by that?

But if writing about music is like dancing to architecture, what is it when writing about the Levellers? Well, it's like being given a gun and being asked to shoot at a sitting duck. It's like being given a gun and a barrel of fish then left to your own devices. A weapon called the word doesn't do justice to the fun on a plate to be had. For example, how can you not be amused by a review of a Levellers album that described the band as a 'horrible, grubby, beardy, little band... you know what they sound like. Fiddles and things.' Or from the NME that described a 'fairly sickening nightclub scene where someone tells Farquar, or whatever the singer's called, that she loves him before fantasising about the world bombing Brighton and the introduction of a police state.' Or from What's On magazine where they wrote 'But what does the song sound like, you say. Who cares? It's the Levellers, for God's sake.' 

The thing about this kind of vitriol from the music press, however, is that it's almost a given that when a band is so intensely disliked you just know there's going to be something of interest about them. So too for the Levellers but if it's not their music then what is it? In his book, Berger suggests the Levellers are the final revenge of punk rock, which is probably a bit over the top. He also says they are the actual inheritors of the Crass legacy, which is debatable and probably not true. Also that A Weapon Called The Word is a 'glorious debut album', and that by 1991 the Levellers were 'far and away the best live band in Britain, maybe the world'. Which is feasible, I suppose. At a push.

Leaving aside these debates, the obviously interesting thing about the Levellers is their support of counterculture, particularly around travellers and free festivals, this being the thing that drew the most ire from their critics. According to vocalist Mark Chadwick it was his encounter with festival culture, particularly the Elephant Fayre in Cornwall in 1981 that cemented his realisation that this was the way of life for him. The aforementioned Treworgey Tree Fayre eight years later was apparently the first 'big' festival the Levellers played at and from there they went on to play the Wango Riley stage in the traveller's field at Glastonbury before eventually playing the main stage. Along the way, of course, was the Battle of the Beanfield in 1985 where the core of the Stonehenge festival crew were beaten to a bloody pulp and their vehicles destroyed by crazed police high on hate, prejudice and ultra-Thatcherism.

Anyone who had a heart could not fail to side with the Beanfield victims and be shaken at how the full violence of the State was utilised to attack defenceless men, women, children and even babies in a bid to decommission a way of life. Unfortunately there were a lot of heartless people around at that time, with certain journalists with an eye on a future job at the Daily Mail being instrumental in depicting travellers as somehow less than human and deserving of even less sympathy or support. Against this tide of conservatism the Levellers stuck out like a sore thumb.

At the same time, a curious thing about the ire being aimed at the Levellers is that it wasn't also being aimed at the Levellers' peer groups such as Culture Shock, RDF, or Back To The Planet and it needs to be asked why? The answer, of course, is pretty clear: None of these other free festival-type groups were attaining the same level of success as the Levellers and it was all being done - especially in regard to the huge audiences the Levellers were pulling - without the seal of approval and without the slightest bit of help from the music press. It was sheer spite and vindictiveness on the part of the press essentially and nothing less.

A protracted war was being waged culminating in a strange concession with Melody Maker newspaper offering the Levellers the front cover and the centre pages of their next issue to do with as they please. It was a bizarre and unique proposition and one that any band would probably sell their granny, their teeth and the right arm of their drummer for. So what did the Levellers do? According to Berger they had a meeting in a pub, got pissed and then got their friend to write an article urging people not to buy Melody Maker but to buy fanzines instead. Which was fine though probably a pointless effort that would go unheeded. Much better it would have been to urge people to create their own fanzines but then apparently the article had been rushed and not properly thought through, not helped by the author getting pissed in the pub alongside the Levellers and having to write it the next day. And how does Berger know all this? Because Berger was that author.

For all this, the Levellers are indeed a much more important band in the scheme of things than most others due not to their music but their extracurricular band activities involving their support of traveller and festival culture and not least their work around the Criminal Justice Act of old - actual government legislation that effectively outlawed a way of life. In his introduction to Dance Before The Storm, Berger says the world of the Levellers is an important one and unless it's recorded now it will be wiped from the face of history like so many important worlds before it. In an increasingly conservative and mono-culture world it's a very valid point and in itself justifies the time and the effort put into writing his book. Indeed, it justifies its very existence and why it deserves to be read. Dance Before The Storm is a job well done.

John Serpico