The Levellers

A Curious Life is the story of Brighton folk-punk legends the Levellers as told by their bassist and founding member Jeremy Cunningham, who we see feeding two seagulls in the back garden of his ground floor flat cat food spooned up and thrown out of the can at the start of the DVD.

By the very words of their frontman Mark Chadwick, the Levellers were always outsiders and Cunningham as a result makes for the perfect protagonist of this DVD; delightfully eccentric and wistfully nostalgic when rummaging through a pile of boxes of newspaper clippings and old photos amidst their chaotically organised archive. Sifting through old media clippings, mostly negative, in a pub toilet Cunningham recalls how an Andrew Collins 3/10 NME review made him feel compelled to send them “a shit in a box”. Barmy, yet endearing all the same.

In being such a large part of ‘A Curious Life’ it becomes abundantly clear how important Cunningham is as part of the band itself and its operation as a democracy in terms of decision making. Despite the apparent lack of any organisational structure within the band a shared sense of being outsiders drives them through; Chadwick describes the early days of songwriting and finding their identity as being “what we didn’t want to sound like” and the sound coming from a process of subtraction.

The period surrounding the release of ‘Levelling the Land’ and unlikely number one album ‘Zeitgeist’ will be of interest to many and also the coping methods that the band took in responding to their new found fame from the band refusing to re-release ‘One Way’ as a single despite pressure from China records to Cunningham’s battles with heroin and later on the subsequent split from China records and the creation of On The Fiddle records. It’s a very open and honest tale of the history of the band and the humility of the main band members shines through.

Longer term fans will find snippets of revelations including when Joe Strummer was invited in to play honky-tonk piano on record only for their producer to find it “awful” and to replace it without the knowledge of the band up to this date and casual fans will enjoy the ramshackle narration of a band going from falling out with Glastonbury founder Michael Eavis in 1992 (who describes the band as “slightly bogus travellers” pointing out that only one was a traveller. Cunningham concedes that the band “probably shouldn’t have called him a c***” on stage) to headlining the festival in 1994 and still sell out London Brixton Academy to this date.

Simon Friend recalls when he first became aware of the band as relating to them as a band who “were angry and shouted about stuff” in the DVD and it’s a perfect description of their appeal; despite never really having been media darlings or the in thing, they’ve managed to carve out an impressive career in their own inimitable manner. Well worth a watch.