Levellers - Chaos Theory (part 2)

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How do you keep the pace, touring all the time, and with such energy on stage?

Just ‘cos we like doing it I think; quite often beforehand we’re absolutely ruined, ‘cos we’re getting on, you know, we’re all knocking on forty, but when we get on stage we get that same rush and it’s always loud, and we settle into the groove pretty quick because we’ve played together for so long.

You were at the Big Session this year doing an acoustic set, with Dan Donelly helping out.

Yeah ‘cos Simon was ill at the time, and Dan Donelly literally stepped in at two days notice, he did a really good job.



Do the crowd at your acoustic shows act any different to those, say, at a ‘plugged in’ show?

The acoustic show starts slower purposely, and we try and build it up to a pretty frantic level by the end. When we do our own theatre shows we play two hour-long setlists with an interval, so people can buy their drinks ‘cos that what they do in theatres, and we can play our gentler songs that don’t really work at these kind of gigs. For me it’s better ‘cos we can play the folky songs acoustic and they sound better, and then for these shows we can play all the full on electric stuff and keep it ‘Bang Bang’ so for me it’s the best of both.

You’re headlining Wychwood Festival next year. Have you been before?

No, not that I know of; we haven’t headlined it before.

Do you prefer now to do these family festivals?

No, we still do T In The Park and Glastonbury, but we weren’t really aware of these smaller festivals until we started doing our own one, and now we’ve become a lot more aware of these things. For us if we haven’t got a new album out a lot of the big festivals won’t book you anyway, so for us it’s quite good because we can still keep ourselves in a lot of people’s minds by playing a few of the smaller ones instead of doing one of two of the really big ones.

You are one of the festival bands.

Yeah we manage alright, we usually do a mixture of the two, this year we did T In The Park and a couple of big ones in Europe and a couple of Wychwood style ones in the UK, then our own Beautiful Days. Next year we’re doing Bestival, which is similar to our Beautiful Days festival.

Why do you think festival popularity has soared; why is it now cool to get muddy and sleep in a field?

Because they started televising ‘em five or ten years ago, before that going to festivals was still a word of mouth thing, you would see Glastonbury in the NME or whatever with the line up. Glasonbury sells out before they announce the line up ‘cos everyone knows it’s gonna be good, same as ours sells out before we announce the bands because they know it is going to be three days of full on madness no matter who’s playing, and we do our best to get the best possible bands. It gets better every year because basically the festival makes more money every year and the money from the festival is a separate company to The Levellers, so the festival money rolls over to next year, we don’t take anything from it at all. It all rolls over into making it bigger and better next year, well not bigger ‘cos we keep it at fifteen thousand because that was always our remit, not to become one of the f*cking huge festivals that are like all the others, that was the whole reason for doing it, so we keep it at fifteen thousand.



We made extra money from putting in cash machines, which people were asking us to do, ‘cos the nearest cash machines are f*cking miles away, but we made extra money out of that so next year that goes into the pot for things like paying the headlining band, to get bigger headlining bands. The rest of the bands are just bands we like; some we have been asking for years, some won’t do it, some do it straight away. We’re not sure who will be headlining next year yet, we’re just throwing the names about at the moment.

What do you think is the secret to your success?

In the early days especially it was just because we had a very clear vision of what we wanted to do, and it had nothing to do with being a successful rock band or being famous or playing to a lot of people or anything it just was purely because we were very angry and we had something to say and we had a very firm vision of how we wanted to say it and how we wanted it to sound and what our image would be you know as far as artwork goes ‘cos I do all the artwork and it’s basically what’s carried us through and what’s made people interested because we tapped into, you know, there was so many other people like us in the country who didn’t have a who suddenly heard people singing about things that they had actually thought about themselves and so suddenly that’s why people started turning up and then maintaining that kind of success is just by keeping in touch with your fanbase as much as you f*cking possibly can, so that’s why we use the internet and myspace and the post and just everything to keep in touch with the people that come and see us. This year we have asked them what songs they want to hear so we’re playing what people want to hear this year; we kind of run out of ideas when we have a hundred songs - which ones do we play! So we play a song that we love playing and the others just ones that people wanna hear; it’s on the myspace, you can just vote for which songs you want and we’ll f*cking have a go.

What’s your favourite song to play live?

At the moment, it changes but at the moment I’m really liking the very first song we’re doing which is ‘A Hunderd Years Of Solitude’ which is on the third album we did; that’s sounding really good. It’s funny ‘cos I wrote it years and years ago and listening to the lyrics now, which I had forgotten ‘cos Simon sings it – I wrote the lyrics, Simon wrote the music for it – and listening to him singing it I was thinking f*cking hell, not much has changed, you know. It’s still relevant today even though it was written thirteen years ago.

Thanks to Jez for putting off his tea to speak to us. By the way the smart attire disappeared for the show!

library photos of the Levellers by Karen Williams

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