The world needs more Levellers fans. Unfortunately I can’t say this offering will win over anyone new; but it will reaffirm the adoration of us current followers.
Recorded earlier this year at Reading’s Hexagon, this is a twenty-three song set, half ‘best of’ and half obscurities. It’s not the Levellers’ best live performance though, the band don’t show the same enthusiasm they did on the preceding Wake The World DVD. There’s a minimum of chat with the crowd and at times it seems as though it’s jarringly rushed or cut headlong into the next song so that everything would fit in before curfew. The visual mixing gets somewhat off-putting at times as well, unaccounted black & white moments, pixellated cuts, maximum contrast—it all seems a little too much as though someone has just discovered effects filters for the first time and wanted to use them all.
Where this DVD wins out though is in the extras. We have more live action with a set of acoustic tracks from the Buxton Opera House in 2004 and the simply wonderful Joe Strummer birthday tribute from the encore of the Levellers] set at the Beautiful Days Festival in 2005. Billy Bragg’s monologue about The Clash, the originating punk ethics of the Levellers and the route to political change influenced by the music we listen to sits so much better with me than the main gig’s satirised Bush soundbite intro.
The other winning extra feature Part Time Punks takes us back to 1993 Tour Diary footage and should act as an education for anyone not old enough to remember times when simple sloganeering cut through to the heart of matters without the spin and pish that the media throw so gratuitously over issues today. To those of us old enough to remember when music could still be political and good fun to dance to, this will serve as a reminder that maybe we still could change the world.
Buy this for disc two with its look back to when the Levellers were a punk band first and pop/folk second and for the great Clash covers at Beautiful Days. Forget Bush’s ‘war on terror’, or anyone who looks at him funny, the world needs fewer insane extremists and apathetic youngsters, the world needs more bands like the Levellers to rabble rouse.
