OK...Back To The Planet, Senser, The Levellers...

Back to the Planet were crap, as were the Levellers.

I believe New Model Army could be lumped in there too, but they pre-date those other bands, and did a lot more frowning and grimacing, thus they were hugely cooler.

Someone sing "One Way" without feeling self-conscious. I DARE YOU

PWEI were fucking brilliant. The best dance / rock crossover band evah!
I defy anyone to prove that PWEI didn't rock harder, funk funkier, do weirder electronics, have better melodies and drop more trendy late 80s early 90s buzzwords than anyone else in the history of pop.

Why is it people always hate bands with a sense of humour? Even if you don't appreciate it, don't let it blind you to the other qualities.

PWEI were great fun.

Senser were ace but haven't worn well - agreed re: ADF, they'd be nowt without "Switch", "Age Of Panic" et al.

BTTP were pretty terrible but kinda exciting at the same time (I was 17 and impressionable) - loads of fun live, and the Orbital remix of "Daydream" is definitely worth searching.

Levelling The Land is still a great righteous pop record - file with New Model Army - but yes, the irony of thousands of student layabouts singing "One Way" in unison wasn't lost on me. The album before, whatever it's called, is good too, and a bit less cheesy.

The Poppies were ace. Shame their official greatest hits album cocked it up by putting album versions of all the singles on instead of the poptastic single mixes.

And we've got this far without anybody mentioning Chumbawamba! A small victory *whisper*Anarchy's pretty good*whisper*...

Melody Maker 26th August 1995
THE LEVELLERS - ZEITGEIST
David Bennun

The two faces of the town both I and The Levellers cal home meet across a pedestrianised shopping street. Opposite an upmarket delicatessen, specialising in pricey, imported cheeses, sits The Kensington pub, and outside The Kensington pub sits a large and dusty chunk of Brighton's crusty coterie. The pub and the shop have an arrangement by which drinkers can order from a menu of exotic sandwiches, but I suspect this fails to put much business the deli's way. On the rare days when there's a table free, I like to doff my linen jacket, wash down brie and sun-dried tomatoes on olive focaccia with a cold bottled continental beer, and peruse The Times over the wheezing drone of the ever-present and inept didgeridoo player, the ramblings of crusty top dogs hoding court, and the slavering skirmishes between the top dogs' dogs. It's like an excursion into the past.

The weekend crusties have all got haircuts and mod gear now. Only the hard core remains; where once they looked merely grotesque, they now look grotesquely dated, as sadly anachronistic in the Nineties sunshine as the tiny sects of goths or teds that occasionally clutter up the pavement. And so it is with their standard bearers, The Levellers. Of course, The Levellers were always hopelessly out of date anyway. This is what has endeared them to the legions of smug drop-outs who embrace a fictitious past - one of happy, land-loving, free-roving agricultural communities - in preference to an unwieldy future whose most appalling prospect is not a lack of employment but the prospect of it.

The Levellers' penchant for folk music always had a footling, fuddy-duddy preciousness to it, reminiscent of chunky jerseys and pewter tankards, or of librarians gathering to play long-defunct madrigals. Even their punkish leanings were pre-empted by earlier (if no drearier) raggle-tagglers like The Men They Coudn't Hang and New Model Army. Only The Waterboys ever managed to invest electrified British folk with grandeur rather than bluster. (this does of course reveal a lack of knowledge of the territory pre-80s, but I'll let him off - RPC) But, by an accident of timing, it was The Levellers who captured the zeitgeist with backward music for backward people. Appropriately enough, now that their significance has tapered off, now that even the word zeitgeist is embarrassingly outmoded, they've given it as a title to their new album. One step behind, as ever.

The album itself could be by Del Amitri or any other bland acoustic rock group. It has the brash, rebellious bravura of an advert for Country Life butter. More than ever, I puzzle at what frightens John Major's Tories about the crusty hordes. Why should one set of dull, humbug-ridden conformists so alarm another? Like Communists and Cathoics, bigots and black ultra-militants, like Nazis and New Age cultists, these supposed adversaries have far more in common than they realise. There is nothing on "Zeitgeist", nothing in the woolly, sentimental morality, to upset the most stereotypical reader of the Daily Mail. The Levellers' music now sounds as innocuous as their quaint, nostalgic yearnings always have.

Buy it for your parents.

(I remembered this piece after being alarmed by the way an ageing-hippie friend with strong crusty connections appeared to find some common ground with the right-wing loons on the political newsgroups, incidentally - RPC)

But ... I never listened to the Levellers. And this kind of disuades me from ever starting. Correct me if I'm wrong.

Chumbawumba are great! BTW

Interestingly a guy from Senser just turned up on a friend of mine's Facebook page - and it turns out he's a far right wanker. Never trust a hippy.

i thought senser had played benefits for the ant-nazi league?

Times change.

ah, here you go...

https://images.991.com/large_image/image-522551b.jpg

a very long time ago when I just started my whole website thing I was offered an interview with jeremy from the Levellers.
now, the problem was I fucking hated the band (Still do), however, this was a big thing for me.
so, I did the phoner.
and the fact is, Jeremy was proper lovely, and we ended up chatting re aliens and shit.

Levellers playing in Hull this summer, looking forward to being as far away from the city as humanly possible

Conservative party propaganda film The Eternal Crusty: montage of Levellers band members walking about some infernal hippy shitfest looking like lost neanderthals with dog-shit encrusted dreads. "This is what Corbynistas look like, they live like rats and will spread disease, plague, leprosy, typhoid fever, cholera, dysentery, utopian socialism etc...

The drummer from back to the planet is a top notch techno producer / DJ nowadays, he plays as D.A.V.E the Drummer and produces under another 10 pseudonyms

drummer from the levellers has had a horrific time recently - his son got killed by a bus when him and his mates were out mucking about late one friday night down on the seafront. year above my eldest at school, fucking awful business

top notch techno producer / DJ nowadays,

tbf "nowadays" is the last two and a half decades