I don't mind the Shovellers. I saw them in 1995, and 'One Way of Life' and '15 Years' are excellent tunes.

Me, I’m bridling at being called decent.

The Levellers were a band I was never a fan of, but one of my mates who was quick to pass his driving test was. This meant that I’ve heard that album (“Levelling The Land”) more times than I care to remember and could probably sing along to every song if forced.

Some relief was gained when me & another passenger were able to turn our driver onto “Straight Outta Compton” & “Eazy-Duz It” at about the time we’d grown sick of them ourselves.

Still, I suppose he’d swapped the espousal of one shit lifestyle for another.

Thanks SR, I do realise that not everyone here is a bloke or has a family / mortgage.
Don't worry sowe2boro I wasn't calling you decent specifically!

I'm a bit of a dickhead, I've got no mortgage and they're far from my favourite group - in fact I haven't listened to them of my own accord for several years.
But obviously I was trying to make the point that they're just ornery folk like you and I and as such don't really warrant the mud being slung at them.

They aren't the best group in the world and some of their fans are probably tossers.
Could say that about...well every group around - past and present.
So what?

Anyway, whatever. I'm sure they don't really give two shits what I or anyone else here thinks about them so it's all by the by.

I dunno about mudslinging, diablers. (Speaking as a bloke with a family and a mortgage, like.) Almost everyone's been saying they've heard the Levs are really nice guys. It's just a lot of us think they're shit. And you're allowed to think, and say, bands are shit, surely? Even if they consist of lovely fellas?

I remember that documentary, incidentally. I think it's feeding into my image of them as nice guys, because I remember they were awfully nice on that. The parents were (or were represented by the producers as) archetypal Squares, who thought bands were all about corrupting young girls by feeding them drugs (whereas in fact scientists now know that that's film directors). Instead of which the band did lots of has-anyone-seen-this-girl announcements for them and generally behaved with scrupulous rectitude at all stages.

I've heard The Levellers like to drown puppies and sell boil-in-the-bag baby snacks over the internet.

I'm picturing a 'Lovely Fellas' competition now. There's a catwalk parade, one at a time, with Father Ted announcing, "David Gray" <smattering of applause> "Mark King out of Level 42" and so on.

Did they also not get quite stroppy with their record label in the mid 90s when they tried to market them as being a Britpop band?
If only they were anywhere near good enough to hold their heads up in the esteemed company of Sleeper or Heavy Stereo.

I thought they were horrible, not as horrible as I thought Republica were, but horrible all the same.

So as expected, then. Not universally popular on OTF.

Going back to a point that I made in my original post - do others on here think that folk/roots based music has a credibility problem in England in comparison to the Celtic nations?

Yes, I think it does, though with some caveats. First, things have eased a lot since when the Levs had what passed for their heyday. Secondly, I reckon a fair few bands have smuggled vaguely folky influences in: the slower stuff by the early Stones, Robert Plant's scales and progressions when he wasn't being bluesy, some of Floyd, the witchier end of Goth (I mean, "whisky and the Devil and the witching hour", come on, he's practically got his finger in his ear).

But to a large extent, the real folk music of England is pop.

The Prodigal's needed here, I feel.

I think English folk probably has had an image problem in England - perhaps in part due to associations with dubious/archaic notions of 'national identity' - whereas the celtic brands have always been well liked in England. And the American takes on folk music have generally been welcomed and critically adored, at least at a cult level, from the politically engaged 60s lot to the psychedelic/postmodern takes of recent years.

I've always had the impression that folk was still pretty mainstream in the 70s: your John Martyns and the like. I get the impression that comedians often came through from the folk scene too, which suggests it was still popular pub-level entertainment: you could never stop Jasper Carrot or Billy Connolly bursting into song at some point on their 80s shows, for example. That always felt out of place to me as a kid, like the boring bits in Bagpuss.

Lucia Lanigan wrote:


I think English folk probably has had an image problem in England - perhaps in part due to associations with dubious/archaic notions of 'national identity' - whereas the celtic brands have always been well liked in England.

That's something similar to what I was thinking. A couple of years ago I was at a festival in Letterkenny, the nearest town to where I live. It was the final years of the Celtic Tiger, and although Donegal never really received the full benefit of the boom years, the place was still awash with money in comparison to its poverty stained history.

So at this Fleadh, historywoman and me were sitting outside one of the pubs and immediately in front of us were a group of lads who were the epitome of the brash, new modern Ireland. Flaunting their relative wealth, dressed in designer gear and dripping with bling. And then, out of the pub came the strains of olde Oireland - The Fields of Athenry.

Yet without any seeming sense of irony, these lads started to sing along to the words and chorus. There was something incongrous about a table of flash young men singing a song about peasants being transported to Australia for stealing corn to feed their kids - but, as historywoman reminded me, maybe I take lyrics far too seriously at times.

So I'm getting back to this point again - this sort of thing is a regular occurence in Ireland, but it's difficult to see the same thing happening too often in England.

Does England even have an equivalent of Fields of Athenry?

We'd need colonial invaders for that, which we've not had for a while. Nationalism here would be the bullies celebrating rather than the bullies fighting the power - it might come out in some vague way in sport songs, I guess, but I don't know any apart from the ones about Ashley Cole and his special phone.

historyman wrote:
Does England even have an equivalent of Fields of Athenry?

We had a thread on that; English rebel songs against the Normans. I remember E10 Rifle and I, between us, came up with

Armoured knights and rois and reines
Came to take away our thegns
But every man will stand behind
The men inside the shires.

I've been listening to a lot of Miles Davis and James Brown today, both of them, to a man, cunts. Both of them musical geniuses.

I guess what I'm saying is that unless there's some chance of The Levellers ushering in a bright new tomorrow or they're my next door neighbours, I don't really care whether they're nice blokes or not any more than I care whether David Cameron or Tony Benn have great taste in music.

Why do people need everything about their lifestyle choices vindicated? (And it is a lifestyle choice if it's got a haircut to go with it.) Being into music that reflects your political, philosophical and moral beliefs in this day and age is fucking insane.

Music that reflects your mood, your level of energy or even how sexually aroused you are maybe...

I dunno, I think I enjoy Beethoven just slightly more because he was a radical, and Wagner just slightly less because he was a racist. If I'm honest. It's only marginal, but it's there.

Plus I've a soft spot for lefty pop when it steers clear of lecturing or agitprop and talks about people's lives, as with A Design For Life or Common People. They work as songs, but the fact that the anger in the lyrics is so exactly on the money is part of the reason they work as songs.

Whereas

"And we'll petrol-bomb the State
We'll blow away the hate
But we'll do it in our minds"

is just some weakass shit.

But Wagner is just the popular choice for racist composers isn't he? No one gives a fuck about the Nazi employed Karl Orff. Read his biog at Allmusic.com, it doesn't mention the fact that he was gainfully employed during WWII removing the 'Jewishness' from pieces of German classical music.

No one doesn't go and see art exhibitions by Kandinsky because he was an anti-semite.

It's like trainers and sweatshops. No one buys Nike because they're made in sweatshops but who actually stops buying Adidas, Asics, New Balance, Vans, Reeboks as well?

I think it would be harder for you to name any pre-WWII composer who would meet today's standards of racial tolerance than actually naming all of them who were racist in some way or other. It's more a sign of the times than anything else.

Yeah, I don't think the Beethoven/Wagner thing is really all that rational of me, though "insane" would be pitching it a bit strong.

The bit I do think is rational is the bit that has to do with the words. "Alle Menschen werden Brüder", "You'll never live like common people", "This town is coming like a ghost town", "Libraries gave us power": just because these sentiments are political doesn't mean they can't reflect your mind. Your mind is partly political. It's only if you structure your whole artistic sensibility around what is and isn't right on that there's a problem.

"Insane" is a bit strong granted.

And I agree with the second bit of what you say entirely. Pulp and Manic Street Preachers are not party political or even overtly espousing one political philosophy.

The Levellers' way of life is an orthodoxy though. "There's only one way of life - and that's your own"?

Disingenuous cunts.

Spearmint Rhino wrote:
diabloingles wrote:
Decent blokes with families and mortgages (like the rest of us) who believe in what they do and don't really give a fuck what others say about them.

Not everyone has families and mortgages, you know.

Decent was the active word here.