Levellers

Brighton, 1988, and a name out of 1647

The Levellers formed in Brighton, East Sussex, in 1988 around four players who are all still in the band: Mark Chadwick on lead vocals, guitar, banjo and harmonica; Jeremy Cunningham on bass and bouzouki; Charlie Heather on drums; and Jon Sevink on fiddle. The name was lifted from the seventeenth-century English political movement that argued for popular sovereignty, a wider franchise and equality before the law — a borrowing Cunningham confirmed outright in 2014, and one that set the terms for everything the band has written since.

Simon Friend joined in 1990 on guitar, mandolin and vocals, completing the five-piece that made the records most people know. Keyboard player Matt Savage came in during 2003. Friend has been on hiatus since 2021, with Dan Donnelly taking the guitar and mandolin chair from that year.

The first album, A Weapon Called the Word, arrived in 1990 on Musidisc. The jump came with the move to China Records in 1991, which the band stayed with until 2000 before shorter spells on Eagle Records and, from 2006, their own imprint On The Fiddle Recordings — the label they still release through.

The record everything else is measured against

Levelling the Land was released in October 1991 and reached the UK top 20, peaking at number 14. It is the record that carried the band out of the squat-and-free-festival circuit and into arena-scale touring, and it still supplies the bulk of the set: One Way, Fifteen Years and Far From Home were the singles, but The Game, Liberty Song, The Boatman, Riverflow and Battle of the Beanfield have had longer lives on stage.

Its reputation has outgrown its chart position. One reviewer of the anniversary edition argued flatly that the album "is not regarded as a classic album, as it should be", and the folk-punk template it set — fiddle lead, punk tempo, a political lyric sung by a full room — has been copied by a generation of British bands since.

Cunningham's reading of why it endures is less flattering to the country than to the record. Speaking in June 2026, he said: "The tragedy is that Levelling The Land's lyrics still mean exactly what they meant then, because nothing has changed."

A number one, a factory and a festival

The 1990s ran steeply upward. The self-titled Levellers reached number two in 1993; the band headlined Glastonbury in 1994 to a crowd reported at around 300,000, which has been claimed as the largest in the festival's history. Zeitgeist went to number one in 1995, and Mouth to Mouth reached number five in 1997.

In 1994 they bought a derelict Brighton factory, the Metway, and turned it into offices, a recording studio, rehearsal space and bar. It remains the band's headquarters and is the reason they have been able to run their own label and their own release schedule rather than waiting on anyone else's.

In 2003 they founded Beautiful Days, held every August at Escot Park in Devon, and they have hosted it since. In 2011 they took the BBC Radio 2 Roots Award. Later records kept charting — Letters from the Underground at 24 in 2008, the acoustic-and-orchestral We the Collective at 12 in 2018 — with Peace following in 2020 and Together All the Way in 2023.

2026: the remix, the run, and album twelve

The 35th anniversary edition of Levelling the Land came out on 16 October 2026 through Warner, as a three-CD set and a single LP of the new mix. Al Scott, who produced the 1991 original, remixed it from the multitracks after a call from Sevink, restoring low-end the record company had stripped out at the time. Reviewers found it "cleaner" and "a bit more sharp", with the bass and drums harder to miss.

The extras are substantial rather than decorative: five B-sides including Last Day of Winter and a cover of The Devil Went Down to Georgia, nine unreleased outtakes, and twelve demos from a cassette Heather turned up after nearly thirty years. The demo disc is the interesting one — it shows what Scott actually did to the arrangements, and at least one reviewer rated the demo Battle of the Beanfield above the released take. The Spill Magazine gave the set 4.5 out of 5.

The band are not treating the anniversary as the end of anything. Cunningham said in June 2026 that they were working on a twelfth studio album with ten songs developed. Chadwick released a third solo record, Ouse Dragon, in 2026 — a far quieter, more experimental thing than the band.

Their position on what they are for has settled into something plain. "We accept we are entertainers, but we also still want to comment on the world around us and try and make it a better place," Cunningham said. "We do get a lot of letters from fans who have gone on to do great things — so we have been responsible for some small positive changes."

The LTL35 tour

The anniversary run opened on the continent in mid-October 2026 — Maastricht's Muziekgieterij on the 17th, Depot in Leuven on the 18th — before the UK and Ireland leg began with two nights at Holmfirth Picturedrome on 20 and 21 October. It takes in Mandela Hall in Belfast on 22 October, the band's first show there since 2007, Vicar Street in Dublin on the 23rd, Glasgow Barrowland on the 24th, York Barbican on the 29th, Venue Cymru in Llandudno on the 30th and Blackpool's Empress Ballroom on the 31st, before a November stretch at Rock City in Nottingham on the 19th, The Prospect Building in Bristol on the 20th and the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith on the 21st.

Demand has been heavy: both Holmfirth nights, Leuven, Glasgow, Llandudno, Nottingham and Bristol were marked sold out ahead of the run. Essex punk duo The Meffs open every date; Ned's Atomic Dustbin join for Glasgow, Llandudno, Blackpool, Bristol and London.