Bananarama are one of the most successful girl groups of all time. Consisting of Sara Dallin and Keren Woodward, the band’s third original member Siobhan Fahey left in 1988 to form Shakespears Sister. The trio reunited in 2017 for a tour but new album, In Stereo, sees them back as the long-standing duo. The pair have been friends since their school days.
new music interviews
Guy Oddy
Cosey Fanni Tutti was born Christine Newby in Hull in 1951. She is a musician, performance artist and writer and is best known for her time with COUM Transmissions, Throbbing Gristle and Chris and Cosey. Her memoir Art Sex Music came out in 2017 and her second solo album, Tutti is released on 8 February.
GUY ODDY: I really like your new album, Tutti. I understand that it started life as a film soundtrack but then you reworked it as a standalone piece. How do you feel about it now that it’s all finished?
Tim Cumming
With books including Mountains of the Mind, The Wild Places, The Old Ways and Landmarks, Robert MacFarlane has established himself as one of the leading writers on landscape in the English language, continuing a literary tradition that contains talents as diverse as John Muir, Robinson Jeffers, Edward Thomas and Laurie Lee. His 2017 collaboration with the artist Jackie Morris on a large-format book of poems for children called The Lost Words: A Spell Book has now been adapted for stage, with Morris creating brand new art works for a UK tour, beginning on Friday 8 February at Snape Maltings, and featuring eight leading folk musicians – Karine Polwart, Beth Porter, Jim Molyneux, Kris Drever, Seckou Keita, Rachel Newton, Kerry Andrew and Julie Fowlis. Here, Robert MacFarlane discusses the development of Spell Songs out of the pages of The Lost Words, and Julie Fowlis and Seckou Keita talk about putting those spells to music.
TIM CUMMING: How did the collaboration with the eight musicians for a stage version of The Lost Words come about?
ROBERT MACFARLANE: It came about by a series of chances and wonders, like many of the best things. Two years ago, I first heard the extraordinary, eerie voice of Kerry Andrew, singing “Little Wren” – her very modern version of a very old folk-song, “The Cutty Wren”. It bewitched me, instantly and deeply, and Kerry and I fell into conversation. I subsequently, presumptuously, asked her if she might consider setting and singing a version of the “Wren Spell” from The Lost Words. She did so, and made something wondrous of it. In the November after The Lost Words was published, Jackie and I played her “Wren Spell-Song” on stage at the Hay Festival. Sitting in the audience were Caroline and Adam Slough, founders of Folk By The Oak… Kerry's setting bewitched them, and Spell Songs was born! Through it all has danced that tiny, beautiful, elusive bird, the wren.
What was your involvement with it and what has your role been in working with the musicians and artist for the stage show?
The book The Lost Words was itself a collaboration between me and the artist Jackie Morris, who I think may actually be a magician. She lives on a clifftop in West Wales, with a dog that looks like a wolf and a cat that looks like a leopard, and she can conjure birds onto the page out of just water and coloured inks. So both Jackie and I have been much involved with Spell Songs from the beginning. Jackie and I were both present with all the musicians, bar Seckou Keita, in Greta House in Keswick last autumn, where the project was first developed. We all went on a walk up Cat Bells above Derwent Water, and the clouds split to show us sun as we reached the summit. Omens and blessings don't get much better than that. During those days in Keswick, I felt an absurd sense of insane good fortune, to be working with people of such creative power and talent. 
Will the musicians be using your Spells, or adapting them? Are you working with them on new texts?
I obviously wrote the lyrics of the 20 "spells" in The Lost Words, many of which have been adapted by the musicians. From the beginning I encouraged them to feel pretty much full license in terms of interpreting, adapting, and reworking the texts. I also gave the musicians seven or eight new poems (songs, spells) I'd written, including a Selkie summoning song, a protest 'charm' called Heartwood, written to save trees in danger of unjust felling, and spells for “Egret”, “Snow Hare”, “Peregrine” and “Silver Birch”. Many of these new works have ended up getting set and sung as part of the performance, which makes me very glad. Part of the joy of watching the project unfold has been seeing musicians match up with particular creatures, or songs. Julie Fowlis singing my “Selkie Song”; Jim Molyneux working with the “Lark Spell” (a song of sadness and hope)...well, as a writer, one doesn't get much luckier than this, really.
What do you expect to see and hear when it reaches the stage?
I have no idea and – perhaps oddly – I am trying to keep my hands over my ears until the premiere at the Southbank. I sort of want to hear it all for the first time, with full force, there and then, surrounded by my parents and my friends, and next to Jackie.
Words migrate from many sources and this musical stage project envelops English, Scottish, Senegalese cultures. In what ways do you think the journeys of words reflects human journeys and migrations?
Words, like waves, have fetches. They have travelled great distances to reach us, and often the histories of their journeys are inaudible or invisible, or can only be dreamed back. The same is true of people, and groups of people. Migration, movement and metamorphosis are at the heart of language history and at the heart of human history, too. I love the fact that Seckou Keita plays a tune called “Clarach”, meaning “Osprey”, celebrating the flight of a bird that, like him, has migrated from sub-Saharan Africa to Britain. So yes, we are very much celebrating movement and trans-nationality in these songs.
I wanted to use language that tasted good in the mouth, that writhed and chimed and sung and flourished in the mind’s ear as well as the mind’s eye
The Lost Words has been a huge cultural phenomenon. How would you describe the power of spells – ie, poetical word craft as opposed to analytic/descriptive word craft?
The distinction I'd make is between words that are written to be spoken or sung aloud, and those designed to be read silently on the page; i.e the difference between oral and written culture. When we were making The Lost Words, I would always send every spell to Jackie with the instructions at the top: “To be read aloud...”. I wanted to use language that tasted good in the mouth, that writhed and chimed and sung and flourished in the mind’s ear as well as the mind’s eye. So in a way these were songs before they were anything, and it has been wonderful to hear from so many tens of thousands of children and parents who have read or performed them aloud to one another.
Can words bring about a re-enchantment?
Yes, of course. Language is a world-making force; discourse shapes what we do and make and dream. But it can be used for ill as well as good. I am interested exclusively in its capacity for good; ways it might make us see more sharply what we value; name into knowledge what we might lose. We will not save what we do not love, and we rarely love what we cannot name.
What do we lose when we lose once vivid and loved words?
Language is always new-making, and it is in its nature to continue to coin fresh-minted terms. Many words that mulch down into history, and vanish, are not losses we should mourn. But it seems to me at this time of huge ecological damage, and of extirpation, extinction and disappearance of diversity going on around the world – including in the cities, woods and fields of Britain – that we should wish to hold onto, and renew, a basic natural literacy. The Lost Words was imagined as an act of creative dissent, and beautiful protest, against the loss of everyday nature and its common names.
What was the process of working with the artist like – would your spell words change in light of the art work?
On the whole, I wrote before Jackie painted. But that was not in any way because her art was secondary to my words; merely that this was the way the rhythm of our process developed. The very last spell was “Dandelion”, and I got stuck on it; I knew I wanted to write about the many names of Dandelion and its traditional role as a time-keeper, but it wasn't until I saw Jackie's dandelion painting – set against a green-goldleaf background – that I realised a Dandelion is a clock in two senses; not just the seed-head, but also the leaves, when seen from above, which spoke out like the hands of a clock that keeps many times. That inspired the final spell, which begins “Dazzle me, little sun-of-the-grass! / And spin me, little time machine!”
Will you appear at any of the gigs or on the record?
I'll be doing a Q&A before the Southbank performance, and I'm writing some of the liner notes for the album, but in terms of voice – no. No one would want that. I have the musical ability of a lead ingot, and my singing voice sounds like a fox knocking over a dustbin...
Overleaf: more from Julie Fowlis and Seckou Keita
Jasper Rees
“I want to be a man without any past,” said Michel Legrand, who has died at the age of 86. He had perhaps the longest past in showbiz. Orchestrator, pianist, conductor, composer of countless soundtracks, who else has collaborated as widely - with Miles Davis and Kiri Te Kanawa, Barbra Streisand and Jean-Luc Godard, Gene Kelly, Joseph Losey and Edith Piaf? When I visited him at his house at his splendid classical manoir 100km south of Paris, on the mantelpiece in the large white sitting room four familiar gilt statuettes stood sentry. The oldest was for “Windmills of My Mind”, the best original song of 1965.
A child prodigy at the piano, he converted from classical to jazz under the nose of his disapproving teacher, the composer Nadia Boulanger. Initially he worked as an orchestrator; his earliest triumph was I Love Paris, a set of jazz standards which sold seven million copies in two years. At 26 he recorded with Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans. Then for 10 years he composed for the Nouvelle Vague directors, while his soundtracks from English-language films stretched from The Go-Between to Never Say Never Again via Portnoy's Complaint. Among his enduring works are musicals made for the screen. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg was an unexpected success in 1964, followed by Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (1967). He returned to the form in Yentl. Legrand’s Oscar for the score (the film’s only nomination) tells its own story.
Deep into his 70s he composed his first stage musical with Marguerite (2008), updating to occupied Paris the story familiar from La Traviata, Marguerite and Armand and sundry films. Then the Cornish theatre company Kneehigh retrieved The Umbrellas of Cherbourg from the archives. As Legrand’s classic score came alive again for a new audience, he looked back in a long biographical interview.
John Williams conducts Michel Legrand at the Boston Pops
JASPER REES: Do you approach music-making without any regard to genre? You’ve worked in so many different fields.
MICHEL LEGRAND: That makes me more than happy. I’ll tell you why. The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (pictured below: Joanna Riding in Kneehigh's stage version) and Yentl, two musicals, it seems to me that it’s impossible to say this is the same composer who made those two things. And people say, “Ja but we hear eight bars of your music and we recognise.” Bullshit. It’s friendly but it’s not true. I cannot eat the same meal every day. I cannot do the same thing every day all the year long. For instance in the Fifties I was an orchestrator and I was pretty famous. I worked with Barbra Streisand, I worked with people in America, in Paris. And then after 10 years of that work or nine years I started to be less interested because I have written so much so I started to be less good. And I said to myself, “OK, now I know I have to stop.”
So I stopped. I said, “No records any more, no nothing, forget me.”So for six months or a year I had no job, no money, no work, nothing. And one year later I was really lucky. There comes in France the New Wave of film directors. They wanted new people, new technicians, new everything. So we were two or three new musicians and I spent 10 years in the Sixties with the film directors, and had a great time. We started to shoot a movie without having any money, without even a producer, not knowing if they were going to pay anyone. I loved it. After 10 years I stated to be less interested, less good, and I thought I have to quit. So I called every director and said, “Forget me, I’m finished.” I called Jean-Luc Godard and said, “Jean-Luc, I don’t want to work, it’s over.” He said, “No no no, I’ve finished a movie, I want you to score it.” I said, “No, Jean-Luc, no, it’s over.” “No no!” I said, “I’ll do it but it’s the last time.”
I flew to America. I had no work, so I rented a house and I waited and then one day I did The Thomas Crown Affair, first Oscar, a big success and after that it was easy for me to work there. And after a certain amount of years, same thing. I had enough. I don’t understand how even a composer for film, how can he devote his whole life. I don’t know how John Williams, whom I love very much... I said, “How can you do the whole of your life the same thing? I have to change, I have to move.” Something that I found a long time ago, when you’re not in danger, your work is not very interesting, because I can search for months if I have time, slowly, nicely, from 9am to 8pm and trying and writing. But when for instance like when I have to do Summer of 42 movie, it was Friday afternoon in Los Angeles. The producer and the director took me to the screening. I said, “I love it, When do you need it? He said, “Wednesday.” I said, “Fine.” Wednesday I recorded it and I was finished by Sunday night. Because when they have no time to do something, a very short time, you come up with something much more extraordinary than if you have searched for two years. That’s what I think.
When you discovered jazz as a student of classical music, what did your professors say?
Nadia Boulanger – she hated it. She fought with me and said, “No no no, this stupid ridiculous music with three chords, don’t talk to me about it, no no, you are a classical musician, Michel.” She was doing some dinner at her home and she liked me very much as her student. She invited for dinner with three people like Paul Valéry, Jean Cocteau – it was extraordinary - so I was in the dark listening. At the end of the dinner she’d say, “One of my students is going to play something for you.” So every time I played jazz, because in front of her guests she couldn’t throw me out.
Did she ever forgive you?
I hope she did. She was Minister of Culture at the government of Monte Carlo with the Prince and when I was very young I did a concert there at the Opera with Gene Kelly and Gene onstage with a girl dancer told the complete story of modern dancing. And I was in the pit with an orchestra and Nadia Boulanger was there that night so she called me up afterwards and said, “OK, I forbid you to play jazz but this time it wasn’t too bad.” She forgave me.
Although you listened to it as a child, was your upbringing in classical music?
Before the war when I was a very young boy my father was a nice instinctive musician, a very gifted guy, but he left my mother when I was three years old. My mother had to go out to work so I was alone at home. My older sister was in school and I was too young to go anywhere and all day long I was bored to death. I hated the world of grown-ups, I hated the world of children because it’s so cruel, so rude, so I stayed at home. Miraculously my father forgot an old piano at home so I spent all my days at the piano. All the time I was listening to the radio. I heard a rhythmic song, so I tried to find the melody on the piano, then I tried to find the harmonies underneath. My only reason for living was this piano.
So my mother was a very bright woman, so seeing that she gave me some teacher and I entered the Conservatory when I was very very young, I was nine years old, much too young. Officially I couldn’t come at nine years old so I had special intervention of my teachers. I did extraordinary work. I have great memories of working at the Conservatory because I hated the world, I refused to go to school, I never went to school, never, but when I entered the conservatory at nine years old that was my planet because the only thing they were doing was music everywhere in this big building. And I said, “That’s my life.”
Did you know it would be your professional life?
No, I knew that my life was music but I didn’t know what.
Did you know how good you were?
Good no but I knew how gifted I was because everything was easy. My colleagues worked one week on something and I could do it in two hours.
How early on did you have melodies pouring out of your fingers?
No. Melody didn’t pour naturally. In the Fifties when I started professionally to write orchestrations, arrangements, for Piaf, for Yves Montand, for everyone, I was not writing songs of melody at all. It started when the film came in 1959, ‘60, when I had to write scores for movies. I always wrote 30 or 40 different things and then I proceeded by elimination day after day until one or two or three resisted until the very end.
Why don’t the French like musicals?
I was very bad towards films. In the Sixties I made a hundred French movies. In the Seventies and Eighties I made a hundred American movies. So I was really concentrated on films. But in 1963 or 1964 I was one of the first persons to see West Side Story onstage, which I loved. French people are not musicians. Not because they are not by instinct, they are like everyone, but there is no musical education at all in France. Art, painting: nothing. Literature: enormous. France is a country of literary people. That’s all. Music: nothing. French audiences know nothing about music so when they see people singing onstage they don’t understand why. It’s exactly what happened. I was extremely surprised and I still don’t know why when we did with Jacques Demy The Umbrellas of Cherbourg in 1964 it was such a success. I swear to you. When we were writing it, everybody was saying, “Jesus Christ, how can you expect people in a dark theatre to stay 90 minutes listening to people singing? Do you feel better today and how is your stomach? It will never work, never.” We couldn’t find the producer to do the film. So everybody said, for weeks and weeks and for months. So we were sure that it was going to be a flop and the first day it was a success. We had no money even to promote it
Barbra Streisand is very temperamental and very demanding so people don’t like it very much
Have you ever wanted to have control of the lyrics, especially in a foreign language?
I don’t have this pretension but I’m very sensitive on lyrics, so very often I said to lyricists, “I’m not sure this is exactly right.” But I’ve never wanted to have control. Especially with the Bergmans, my American lyricists who are really extraordinary [Alan and Marilyn Bergman wrote the lyrics for “The Windmills of My Mind” and Yentl]. I was really ecstatic about their work. I chose to work with extraordinary lyricists of course.
Did you know what they mean by “Windmills of My Mind”?
Yeah, because I asked them. With [Norman] Jewison we decided to have a song. I said to Norman, “Why don’t we have a song when they’re on the glider? “So I called the Bergmans. I said, “I would love to have something which moves all around, like an airplane.” The windmills of my mind, I love that idea very much.
"Windmills of My Mind" from The Thomas Crown Affair
How often do you write to words?
I did it. I prefer to write the music first of course. But it happened to me for instance in Yentl. We had nine songs in it, I think three of the songs come from the lyrics first.
Why is that film not loved?
It is very well done, I liked it very much. But it’s funny because Barbra Streisand, her colleagues, she’s not liked over there. So for instance when the film appeared to be nominated for the Oscars, not one nomination. Just one, for the score. And that’s not nice because she deserves more than that, better than that. But she is very temperamental and very demanding so people don’t like it very much.
Barbra Streisand sings "Papa Can You Hear Me?" from Yentl
Are you able to cope with that?
Very easily. She’s a 12-year-old little girl. I have to tell you, because we have done so many things together – records and piano and afternoons singing – she knows me so well, she knows that I can get her to do anything just like this, so she trusts me, she has confidence, so life is very simple. We are like two kids playing the same game. And she is so sweet and lovely. For instance, one little anecdote. During the recording of Yentl, one session we had 120 musicians, four pianos, eight guitars, symphony orchestra. And we recorded the first take, marvellous, and then Barbra came to me and said, “Michel, I would love to try it half a tone lower because today I feel a little tired.” So she said, “Have it re-copied and we’ll do it tomorrow.” I said, “No, we’re going to do it now.” She said, “It’s impossible.” I said, “Yes, we will right now.” So she goes back to the booth and I didn’t know how to tell the musicians how to transpose, because half a tone is the worst. So I said, “OK guys, it was beautiful, do exactly as well as you did before, with just one tiny little change, three, four!” They had no time to react. And they did it. Pretty well. She was amazed at what they did. For her it’s magic but for us it’s simple.
It’s quicker to list the people you have not worked with. Has there ever been a time when you have not liked working with someone?
Interview continued overleaf
Kieron Tyler
Norway’s Hedvig Mollestad Trio reset the dial to what jazz fusion sought to do when it emerged, and do so in such a way that it’s initially unclear whether they are a jazz-influenced heavy metal outfit or jazzers plunging feet-first into metal.
Jasper Rees
Chas Hodges has died at the age of 74, bringing to an end a career that reaches back to the very beginnings of British pop music. He was best known as one half of Chas and Dave. The duo he formed with Dave Peacock were the poster boys of rockney, a chirpy fusion of three-chord rock'n'roll and rollicking Cockney wit.
Joe Muggs
Ryuichi Sakamoto has conquered underground and mainstream with seeming ease over four decades, never dropping off in the quality of his releases. Indeed his most recent projects, following his return to public life after treatment for throat cancer in 2014-15, are among his best.
Matthew Wright
Over 30 years after he made his debut as a solo artist, woodwind multi-instrumentalist Courtney Pine is still Britain’s most prominent and influential jazz musician. He had a crucial role in reviving interest in jazz in the 1980s and 1990s, and has been an important role model for black British musicians.
Thomas H. Green
Jeremy Cunningham (b.1965) is bass player and a founding member of The Levellers, as well as being a visual artist in his own right. During the 1990s The Levellers, and most especially their 1991 album Levelling the Land, became a phenomenon. The group were punk-influenced folk-rockers whose songs were often polemic and political. It was no coincidence that their main flush of popularity was during the premiership of John Major. They became a focus for anti-government feeling, especially among those affiliated with the travelling and festival communities (remember Major’s “New age travellers? Not in this age. Not in any age” speech from the 1992 Tory conference).
The band have put out eleven albums, eight of them Top 40 hits, including their latest, We The Collective, an acoustic re-rendering of highlights from their back catalogue, with a couple of new numbers thrown in. It made No.12 in the UK album charts earlier this month. To this day, their 1994 appearance at the Glastonbury Festival remains one of the biggest crowds ever drawn to the Pyramid Stage and in 2003 they launched their own Beautiful Days Festival in Devon, which has gone on to great success.
While Cunningham would be the first to point out that the band is a collective effort with no member more important than any other, his dreadlocked form seems emblematic of The Levellers and what they represent. He was, after all, the only member of the band to adopt, for some years, an itinerant road-living lifestyle. I meet him in the Metway, the band’s Brighton headquarters, also home to their record label On The Fiddle. With his reddish dreads piled high on his head, he sips herbal tea on a sofa. He has a presence that is both gentle and fierce, edgy yet friendly and forthright, punctuating his conversation with a distinctive cackle.
THOMAS H GREEN: What was the thinking behind the new acoustic album?
JEREMY CUNNINGHAM: Basically we’d pretty much written three quarters of a new electric Levellers album and came to a standstill. We wanted a crowbar that would kick us over creatively, to be able to move onto the next phase. Because it was coming up to our 30th anniversary the powers-that-be were very keen on us doing an acoustic album, rearranging the old songs, putting a few new ones on as well.
What was it like working with John Leckie [famed producer of Stone Roses, Radiohead, Muse and others]?
Really good, he’s a lovely man. On our first day together his eyeball fell out [laughs]. It wasn’t quite as dramatic as that! We were playing through stuff and his retina got detached. He had to be rushed to hospital and lay in a strange position for ten days before he could come back, so we got on with it ourselves, did the major arranging. By the time he came back with his eyeball back in place we played him the songs and he was like, “They’re all shit! That’s shit! That’s rubbish!” He wasn’t quite as blunt as that but he is quite blunt and we like that. Me and Mark said, “Is there anything you do like?” He ummed and ahhed. We went through all the songs we were going to play really thoroughly with him doing a bit of musical guidance. We want our producers to give us musical guidance - they just can’t fuck with the lyrics. He was really good. As soon as we all got to know each other a bit better, even some of the songs he didn’t like, he appreciated why we wanted to do them and started to work on them with enthusiasm. We only work with producers that become the seventh member of the band otherwise there’s no point. You might as well just get an engineer. For this album we needed guidance and we’re massive fans of him and the records he’s done.
Is he doing your new studio album proper?
Quite probably.
Tell us about the two new songs on We The Collective, “The Shame” and “Drug Bust McGee”.
“The Shame” was written immediately after the body of that little Syrian child washed up on that Greek island. Simon wrote the song. He was just appalled – “I’m going to write this song and put everyone to shame.” In the meantime I’d written a song kind of about it as well but he came back really quickly with the complete song and it pissed all over what I’d done so that was one of the first songs, all written for the new electric Levellers album. They were ones we thought most appropriate to use in this situation. He played it to Leckie and he was like, “Fuck, that doesn’t need any work done, just sing it.” Mark wrote “Drug Bust McGee” at a very similar time, about undercover police getting involved with protesters, deeply embedded, having kids with them, then bolting and the women concerned having the rug completely pulled from under their feet.
Watch the video for "Shame" by The Levellers
What book are you currently reading?
I read history. I’m reading two actually. My main field is I’m very into early medieval history. I’m reading The Dictionary of Irish Saints by Pádraig O Riain, a very famous early medieval scholar. Then I’m reading, on and off, a massive 900 page commentary on The Book of Revelations from The Bible. It's by Craig Koester, the Anchor Bible Commentary. It’s amazing, not religious, it’s a historical commentary.
They sound quite heavy, those books.
Oh, they’re weighty. I’ve been reading for 20 years about this stuff.
The Levellers have a special relationship with their fans. Is that a fair thing to say?
It’s a nice thing to say. I’d like to think so.
It seems to exist outside the parameters of the usual fan/musician relationships…
I think that’s why they like it. We’re just normal. We go out and drink in the same pubs. We don’t really give a fuck about all that. We learnt our lesson early from bands like The Clash. Joe Strummer, who we were lucky enough to play with, said, “My ego destroyed this band and I should have kept in touch with the people that mattered,” so we were always very conscious of that and still are. We do a festival each year – Beautiful Days – and the fans are the shareholders.
What was it like working with film director Alex Cox on the video for “Too Real”?
Brilliant. Love Alex Cox, he’s amazing. We were big fans of his from Repo Man then he did Sid and Nancy. Around that time he was introducing an alternative film thing on the telly – Moviedrome – and we went, “Oh, maybe he’d be interested.” We didn’t know him but liked his general vibe. We asked him and he was all over it. Not only the video; he hung about for quite a long time and got deeply involved. The “Too Real” thing, he wanted to film it in Liverpool, his home town. It gave him an excuse to get some of his mates in – and some of ours. it was an absolute pleasure.
Watch the video for "Too Real" by The Levellers, directed by and featuring Alex Cox
[Noticing poster on wall for Levellers documentary A Curious Life] I haven’t seen that…
That’s my mum and dad in the poster. The film was done by Dunstan Bruce who used to be singer in Chumbawamba. He was with us about three years, just hanging out. It ended up with me being the main one in it but that was only because Mark had just had a baby, Jon [Sevink, Leveller's fiddle-player] was moving, and everyone was busy. I ended up being the narrator but it’s about the band. Dunstan got heavily involved. We were touring a lot at that point. He did blogs with us, live blogs on tour. That was eight years ago now, when he started it. The film came out in 2015.
In the late Nineties I had an enjoyable relationship with China Records and the music they released. It was home to yourselves, Morcheeba, The Egg, Zion Train and others. That changed when they were bought by Warner Brothers. How was it for you?
We didn’t know anything about it, we just suddenly found ourselves on Warners. It was basically because Derek [Green, China MD] ran out of money due to a messy divorce, sold the company to Warners. They really wanted Morcheeba and we were kind of a bit of a bonus but they didn’t really know what to do with us. We found ourselves on a major label writing the most obscure leftfield album we’ve probably ever written and it all came on top. We hated it and bought ourselves out of the contract. It cost us a lot of money and they were glad to see us go as I don’t think we made them any money either.
What is The Levellers relationship with the States, in the sense of, how does the band go down there?
In some parts very well but in terms of making an impact it would be like a mosquito on a giant, the impact we’ve made on the States.
But if you tour there you pull a crowd?
Yeah, yeah, the last one we did we went to specific areas we knew we’d be well-received, which is mainly the cities of the north-east and down to Washington DC. We’re not talking big shows, we’re talking 500 capacity, maybe a little more in New York. But when you get to the Midwest it’s a different country.
Some of those states, while they have weird politics, the music culture is very folk/roots orientated, so you’d have thought The Levellers would go down well. They like a good hoedown.
They do but they don’t like politics. We really confused them down there by having a fiddle player and a guy playing electric guitar and singing about radical stuff. They just couldn’t get their heads round it. We thought it would be a great fit. We went out there to support Public Enemy and Rage Against the Machine, two great bands, we just went down like the proverbial lead balloon.
Like in The Blues Brothers, in a cage with beer bottle being hurled at you?
Not quite that bad but getting onto it. It’s one of the only shows I’ve seen Mark just walk off stage; “Fuck you cunts” and he just walked off. That has never really happened before or since. And that was in Nashville the home of country music. It was educational, definitely.
Very few bands that have been around for any time have mixed age groups of fans. How about The Levellers?
There’s a broad spread. Because we’ve been going for so long, it’s the people who got into us in the ‘90s… and then their kids. There’s a surprising amount of young people, then there’s a lot of older fans and some original guys who came and saw us when we were unknown. People get their own lives, drift off, then come back. Its mental and it’s lovely. I’ve done it myself with bands. You can meet your mates and have a beer, that’s half what it’s about for the older guys. The younger ones just want to be blown away by a great live show.
Very few successful bands retain the same line-up, decade after decade, but you lot have have. Is there a secret to your longevity?
Yeah, the total is bigger than the sum of its parts and we’re very aware of that. Ever since the start we’ve all been paid equally, we distribute everything equally, doesn’t matter who wrote the song, so we don’t argue about money. We’re very aware that the noise we make is bigger than any individual.
Overleaf: watch the video for the single "Drug Bust McGee" by The Levellers
Russ Coffey
Joan Wasser – aka Joan as Police Woman – is known as a sophisticated songwriter and a pretty groovy person. But most of all it’s her gorgeously warm voice that's earned her a cult following. Over seven albums her angst-ridden vocals have explored heartache and compulsion with a blend of soul and indie-rock.