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

Beautiful Twisted Night - Marc Almond

BEAUTIFUL TWISTED NIGHT - MARC ALMOND

As Plato is quoted as saying, at the touch of love everyone becomes a poet. And so too in regard to Marc Almond who as evidenced by his book, Beautiful Twisted Night, has also been touched by love and has also become a poet though not through the love of any one particular person. No, Marc has been touched by the love of the city - the cruel, dirty, heartless, selfish, souless city where the hustler is hero and the loser is saint, where the ugly is beautiful and the beautiful more beautiful. The city of secrets, neon, fantasy and desire, of darkness, sex, drugs and twilight glamour.

As Marc in his introduction explains: "When I became successful I was given so many keys to so many cities. People had listened to my songs and read the themes of my lyrics, so they knew where to take me and who to introduce me to. Prostitutes, hustlers, porn stars, strippers, gangsters, pimps, dominatrixes, transsexuals, madams, subculture celebrities, superstars and even Satan worshippers - they have all danced in and out of 'my beautiful twisted night'." Marc's songs became a reflection of this life as his life in turn became a reflection of his poems and songs.

Published in 1999, Beautiful Twisted Night is not only a testament to Marc's talent as a wordsmith but also to his prolificacy. It's a collection of his poetry and prose that throws into confusion any distinction between what makes a poem and what makes a lyric for a song. Is there a dividing line? A point of cross-over? Are song lyrics simply bad poetry and if so does bad poetry make for good lyrics? Is a poem a hymn and can a hymn be a lyric and vice versa? Is anything too stupid to say simply sung instead? I'd say 'Yes' to that one but as a proviso there are also some things that whilst they can easily be said are actually better when sung. 

And then there's Marc Almond whose words work just as well as poetry as they do lyrics, and just as well as words on a printed page as they do when accompanied by music. It's a rare thing. A rare act. An almost exclusive club to belong to. In fact, in the context of Leonard Cohen's Tower of Song, whilst most occupants are paying rent to lodge there Marc Almond owns a whole floor just a few down below from the one owned by Hank Williams.

For the record, I might suggest that actually Marc's prose is even better than his poems/lyrics because it's here that he has more room to breathe and expound even when talking in a kind of veiled Polari. He does it really well, particularly for example when on the subject of Piccadilly rent boys where he shines a spotlight upon the characters though always a compassionate and tinted one.

London, New York, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Barcelona, Rio, Bangkok, Berlin, Hamburg, St Petersburgh, Beirut, Tokyo, Paris, Rome and Amsterdam. Ah yes, Amsterdam. Marc has passed through them all, making the acquaintance along the way of the exotic, the erotic, and the plain psychotic. Down into the backstreets, the cellars, the red light districts and the bars with one eye on the gutter and the other on the stars. All noted, recorded and praised over the course of over forty albums, an autobiography and this very good book - Beautiful Twisted Night.

John Serpico

Antonio Gramsci and the Origins of Italian Communism - John M Cammett

 ANTONIO GRAMSCI 

AND THE ORIGINS OF ITALIAN COMMUNISM - 

JOHN M CAMMETT

There's nothing like a bit of Gramsci on your daily commute. It's where I do a lot of my reading: On the train to and thro from work as the world goes by outside. And therein lies the only difference between me and my fellow commuters: Where they all tend to be surfing social media on their iPhones, there's me with my nose stuck in a book about the origins of Italian Communism. It doesn't in any way make me a better (or worse) person of course just because I'm reading a book because it's each to one's own at the end of the day. It's horses for courses. Same song difference dance. Or as Elton John once put it: 'While the other kids are rocking round the clock, I'm hopping and bopping to the Crocodile Rock.'

But I digress.

Antonio Gramsci was born on the island of Sardinia in 1891 where his parents scratched a living in what was an economically backward area even by southern Italian standards. Poverty and crime were endemic and life was brutal, and it was from these origins that Gramsci developed a natural instinct of rebellion against the rich. After gaining entry into the University of Turin from a special scholarship fund for needy students his writing began in earnest, contributing to the weekly organ of the Turin section of the Socialist Party and then to the national socialist newspaper, Avanti.

Gramsci was a thinker, a contemplator whose analysis was always innovative, cutting and precise. Small wonder then that by 1921 at the age of thirty he was serving as a national leader of the Italian communist proletariat.

John M Cammett's book, Antonio Gramsci And The Origins Of Italian Communism swerves and weaves around and ploughs through the ins, outs and intricacies of the 57 Heinz baked bean versions, splits and factions of Italian Communism with exhaustive attention to detail. He eventually reaches the stage in Gramsci's life where following the attempted assassination of Mussolini, the Fascists pass the Exceptional Laws which orders the immediate dissolution of all opposition parties. After establishing a Special Tribunal for the defence of the State, mass arrests are carried out with Gramsci being one of the first to face the Tribunal. On the advice of the prosecutor, Gramsci is sentenced to twenty years of imprisonment on charges of treason with the prosecutor declaring "We must stop this brain from functioning."

Ironically, it's actually in prison that Gramsci gets to do some of his best thinking particularly in regard to the concept of cultural hegemony, all recorded in 2,848 pages of manuscript to be later published years after his death as The Prison Notebooks. If Gramsci was already considered to be an intellectual, these prison notebooks cemented his position as being one of the masters of twentieth-century political thought.

Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony is the process by which predominance is obtained by consent rather than force of one class or group over other classes or groups. But how to explain this so it makes sense? How to explain a Universal Truth? 

As Cammett in his book puts it: "Hegemony is an order in which a certain way of life and thought is dominant, in which one concept of reality is diffused throughout society in all its institutional and private manifestations, informing with its spirit all taste, morality, customs, religious and political principles and all social relations.'

I'm loathe to quote Wikipedia at the best of times but as they put it: "Cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society - the beliefs and explanations, perceptions, values and mores - so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As the universal dominant ideology, the ruling class worldview misrepresents the social, political and economic status quo as natural, inevitable and perpetual social conditions that benefit every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.' And then 'Hegemonic culture propagates its own values and norms so that they become the 'common sense' values of all and thus maintain the status quo.'

Hegemony, as Gramsci points out, however, is a two-way street and so just as bourgeoisie and conservative values are cast as common sense values held by all and of benefit to all - subsequently justifying and maintaining a world of massive and terrible inequality, values that are actually of benefit to the proletariat could easily replace them. This, however, needs to be done from below, from the lowest social classes though potentially in conjunction with other progressive social elements and some parts (and the accent is on 'some') of the petty bourgeoisie and the intelligentsia. 

The working class, as Gramsci puts it, must create its own Enlightenment.

The significance of cultural hegemony cannot be overstated and though it doesn't explain everything, it explains so much: The present day culture wars, the rise of Trump, how the news is depicted, advertising, the manipulation of algorithms, social media and memes, deference, stereotypes, lifestyles, the acceptance of the unacceptable, the normalization of the immoral, etc, etc, etc.

Cammett's book is probably not the best place to start when trying to understand Gramsci's ideas but as a way of understanding where Gramsci has come from and subsequently where his ideas have come from it serves its purpose. Above all, it serves as a testament to his life and presents the case that Antonio Gramsci is very much deserving of our respect.

John Serpico.