ALBUM REVIEW - LEVELLERS — LEVELLING THE LAND (35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
WORDS RICK E
LEVELLERS
LEVELLING THE LAND (35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION)
OUT 16TH OCTOBER 2026 VIA WARNER MUSIC UK
ORDER HERE
Some records document a moment; a precious few end up defining one. Levelling The Land belongs firmly in the second camp.
Released in the autumn of 1991, as the long hangover of the Thatcher years met the early rumblings of a new crackdown on anyone who chose to live off the beaten track, it gave voice to a whole swathe of Britain that the charts had largely ignored: the travellers, the squatters, the free-festival crowd, the dole-queue idealists and the kids in army-surplus jackets who wanted their folk music loud, fast and furious. Thirty-five years on, it still sounds like a manifesto set to a fiddle reel, and it still fills fields. That this anniversary edition arrives at a moment when so many of the album's preoccupations, from the right to roam to the cost of other people's wars, feel uncomfortably current is not the band's doing. It does, however, make the timing feel less like a nostalgia exercise and more like a reminder.
Every great British folk-rock story needs its roots, and the Levellers' go back to Brighton in 1988, when a core of Mark Chadwick, Jeremy Cunningham, Charlie Heather and Jon Sevink started making a racket under the name of a band of 17th-century radicals who had argued for the rights of ordinary people during the English Civil War.
Two self-released EPs led to a deal with French label Musidisc and a 1990 debut, A Weapon Called The Word, before a bruising split with that label sent them into the arms of China Records.
Along the way, original guitarist and mandolin player Alan Miles stepped away from the relentless touring, and Simon Friend, a singer-songwriter already familiar to the band from acoustic support slots, stepped into the gap. Levelling The Land was the first album to carry Friend's fingerprints as a writer, singer and multi-instrumentalist, and it shows. Cut with producer Al Scott over the summer of 1991 at Ridge Farm, a residential studio in the Surrey countryside, it landed on 7 October that year and went into the UK album chart at number 14. What followed is the stuff of festival legend: a debut on one of Glastonbury's main stages in 1992, a record-breaking Pyramid Stage headline slot two years later, a chart-topping album in Zeitgeist in 1995 and, eventually, their very own festival in Beautiful Days.
This brings us to the reissue itself, and the obvious question of why a band would tinker with a record so many people hold dear. The answer lies in the limitations of the era. As Sevink tells it, studio practice in the early nineties meant low frequencies were routinely pulled back so that the average television set or car stereo would not buzz itself to pieces, and Levelling The Land paid the price.
So, he rang Scott and suggested going back to the source tapes and mixing the whole thing afresh, and the producer needed no persuading. The brief, by the band's account, was to bring the record up to date while keeping faith with the version fans have lived with for decades: more weight underneath, more width across the speakers, and nothing that would jolt a lifelong fan out of their seat. It is worth remembering this is not the album's first return to the shelves; it came back as a double-disc edition in 2007, paired with the BBC's recording of that 1992 Glastonbury set, was repackaged again by Edsel in the early 2010s, and got the box-set treatment for its quarter-century in 2016.
What sets this edition apart is the new mix and, for the completists, a genuinely unearthed treasure. The single LP presents the remixed eleven-track album, while the three-CD set pairs it with a second disc of B-sides and unreleased session material and a third made up entirely of demos, sourced from an old tape Heather turned up after Sevink asked the band to root through their old cassettes. Cunningham's instantly recognisable sleeve art remains, as it should. Sevink himself is refreshingly unsentimental about the milestone, shrugging off the anniversary and arguing instead that these are “songs as relevant today as they were in 1991.” It is hard to argue.
One Way opens the album, and it is still the song most people would name if asked to sum the band up in one go. A number one on the indie chart that stalled at 51 in the national singles chart on its first release, it nonetheless became something far bigger than a hit: a rallying cry, a campfire singalong and, for many, a personal creed. Its message is disarmingly simple, the idea that the only life worth living is the one you choose for yourself rather than the one others have mapped out for you, and that simplicity is exactly why it has endured. Musically, it is the template for everything the band would become, all driving acoustic strum, Sevink's fiddle darting between the lines and Chadwick's vocal pitched somewhere between a sermon and a shout. If the remix delivers on its promise, this is the track where you would expect to hear it most: a thicker bass and kick drum pushing underneath what was, in its original form, a comparatively lightweight low end. Either way, it is still the song that closes a thousand festival nights with arms around strangers.
The Game keeps the momentum and shows how quickly the band had grown in confidence. It is a lean, muscular piece of folk-rock that swaps the open-hearted uplift of the opener for something a little more wary, and its interlocking guitar and fiddle lines are a reminder that, for all the talk of the Levellers as a movement, they were also a genuinely tight band. Over the years it has become one of the songs the faithful expect to hear live, and it is easy to see why: the arrangement rolls forward with a kind of unstoppable purpose, and the chorus practically invites a crowd to take over. It is not the album's most celebrated moment, but in many ways, it is its connective tissue, the song that proves the opener was no fluke and that the band had a full album's worth of conviction to spend. Heard back-to-back with One Way, it establishes the pace and tone of the whole record: urgent, unvarnished, and determined to be heard.
Fifteen Years is the album's great late arrival. Absent from the earliest pressings, it was added to later versions of the record after it became a top twenty hit in the spring of 1992, reaching number 11 as the lead track of an EP, and it is now impossible to imagine the album without it. It is also one of the band's most unflinching songs, a bleak character study of a man whose years of drinking have cost him the woman he loved and very nearly everything else, delivered at a breakneck gallop that makes its subject matter hit all the harder. That tension between the misery of the story and the sheer propulsive energy of the music is a Levellers trademark, and nowhere is it better deployed than here. An outtake version has already been shared ahead of the reissue, offering a tantalising glimpse of the song in a rawer state, and it serves as a neat taster for what the expanded edition has to offer. In the context of the full album, it remains a gut punch dressed up as a knees-up, and the fact that so many sing along to it with a grin only adds to its strange power.
The Boatman brings the pace right down and reveals the band's more pastoral heart. A gentle, rolling folk song built on an unhurried melody, it daydreams about a freer life drifting along the canals and rivers, while admitting that the narrator's fate is, for now, in other people's hands. It is a song of longing rather than confrontation, and it offers a welcome breathing space after the whirlwind of the opening trio. Its quiet charm has seen it become one of the most loved songs in their catalogue, and live it tends to turn a heaving crowd into a swaying one. There is real craft in its restraint; the band resist the temptation to build it into a grand finale and instead let it drift, content to be small, warm, and human. For anyone who only knows the Levellers as the band who made the fields pogo, it is a timely reminder that they were always capable of tenderness, and that the folk in folk-rock was never merely decorative.
Liberty Song is the sound of the band snapping back into fighting shape. Co-written with Miles before his exit, it is one of the album's most punk-spirited moments, a fast, defiant blast about freedom and the forces lined up against it. There is a bristling energy here that recalls the band's roots in the squat and free-party scene, the sense of a group playing as though their lives depend on it, and the chorus is built for the moment a crowd raises its fists as one. It is also a neat illustration of how the band blended influences: the rhythm owes as much to punk as to anything in the folk tradition, yet the melody could have come straight from a pub session. The result is something that belongs entirely to the Levellers. On an album full of anthems, it is one of the most direct, and it remains one of the songs most likely to set off a mosh pit at a Levellers show thirty-five years on.
Far From Home was the album's second single, and it is one of its most poignant moments. Released in late November 1991, it is a campfire hymn to the life the band and their audience had chosen, sitting by the river, having burned their bridges with conventional living and feeling no great urge to go back, and it resonated powerfully with a generation who had taken to the road. Musically, it balances wistfulness and momentum beautifully, with the fiddle carrying much of the emotional weight and Chadwick's vocal caught somewhere between nostalgia and defiance. It is also, tellingly, the song that dominates the bonus material on the expanded edition, turning up in several different guises across the outtakes and demos. That the band worked and reworked it so many times speaks to how much it mattered to them, and hearing those earlier versions alongside the finished article should be one of the real draws for long-time fans. In its final form, it is a song that looks back without regret, and it remains one of the finest things they ever recorded.
Sell Out opens the second side with a sneer. Despite the title, this is not a song about a band compromising itself; it is a scattergun state-of-the-nation address pinned squarely to 1991, taking aim at a wealthy few holding the reins, at a media and education system that keeps people docile, at governments turning a blind eye to apartheid, and at a money market happy to see rainforests felled if the numbers add up. The sell-out, in other words, is the establishment, and the people it betrays are everyone else. It is a lean and wiry track, less anthemic than some of its neighbours but with a real bite, and it serves as a reminder that the Levellers were never simply about good-time folk knees-ups; there was always a critical, angry edge to what they did. In the context of the album's sequencing, it resets the tone after the warmth of Far From Home and signals that the second half will be every bit as combative as the first.
Another Man's Cause is one of the album's most powerful statements, a stark anti-war song written in the shadow of the Falklands conflict that looks at the young men sent to fight and die in wars shaped by the powerful and paid for by the powerless. It is handled with real care; there is anger here, but also grief and compassion for the ordinary soldiers caught up in someone else's war, and that empathy is what gives the song its enduring weight. The arrangement matches the gravity of the subject, building steadily rather than exploding, and Chadwick delivers the lyric with a restraint that makes it all the more affecting. Given the state of the world in 2026, it is one of the songs on the album that feels most painfully relevant, and it is easy to imagine it landing with renewed force on the anniversary tour. It is also a fine example of the folk tradition the band drew upon, a lineage of protest songs stretching back centuries, updated for a new generation and delivered with genuine conviction.
The Road is a slower, reflective song about the band's own life on the move, the endless motorway miles, the small-town gatherings where old songs get passed around, and the buskers who have swapped settled lives for a pitch outside a bar somewhere in Europe and do not regret it for a second. It does so with warmth and honesty, celebrating the freedom of the open road while never quite pretending it comes without cost. It is one of the album's quieter pleasures, a song that rewards close listening rather than demanding attention, and it offers a moment of calm before the storm that closes the record. The acoustic textures are front and centre, and it is the sort of track where a wider, more spacious mix could genuinely enhance the listening experience, letting the individual instruments breathe. It also turns up on the expanded edition in both outtake and demo form, giving fans a rare chance to hear how it took shape.
Fifteen Years (Outtake)
The Riverflow is where the acoustic and electric sides of the band meet most comfortably, a driving, melodic song that grafts their folk roots onto a bigger, fuller rock sound. Beneath the momentum sits one of the album's most affecting lyrics, a portrait of an old friend from the estates, someone met in the early eighties with big plans to change the world, who has been knocked about by drink, drugs and hard luck and ground down by the need to earn a living, with the river standing in for a life that simply keeps flowing on regardless. It is bittersweet rather than bleak, full of affection for its subject, and that mix of warmth and sorrow is something the band do better than anyone. It has quietly become one of the most requested songs in the set, perhaps because it captures something essential about the band: the ability to be both expansive and intimate at the same time. Positioned as the penultimate track, it acts as a deep breath before the finale, one last look at the people left behind before the album closes on its most confrontational note.
Battle Of The Beanfield closes the album on its angriest, most urgent note, and it remains one of the most important protest songs of its era. It tells the story of the events of 1 June 1985, when police in Wiltshire stopped a convoy of travellers heading for the Stonehenge free festival and the confrontation descended into violence, leaving many injured and vehicles wrecked. The song takes the side of the travellers without apology, and it is delivered at a furious pace that captures the chaos and anger of the day. It is a fitting close to an album so concerned with the right to live differently, and it serves as a powerful reminder of the real-world stakes behind the band's music. More than three decades on, it still sounds like an act of bearing witness, and it still brings a crowd to boiling point. If there is a single song that encapsulates the spirit of Levelling The Land, it may well be this one.
For many buyers, the real prize of the expanded edition will be the bonus discs. The second CD gathers the B-sides of the era, most of which first reappeared on that 2007 edition, including Dance Before The Storm, Hard Fight, Last Days Of Winter, Plastic Jeezus and the band's riotous take on the Charlie Daniels Band standard The Devil Went Down To Georgia, alongside a batch of previously unreleased outtakes. Among them are early versions of Far From Home, a first pass at The Boatman titled Boatman Jig, as well as a dance mix of One Way that may raise a few eyebrows among the purists. Taken together, they offer a fascinating glimpse of a band still working out exactly who they were, and of songs still finding their final shape.
The third disc is the most intriguing of all: a full set of demos for the album, plus demos of The Devil Went Down To Georgia and Last Days Of Winter, drawn from that cassette rescued from Heather's cupboard. It is worth noting that Fifteen Years is absent from the demo disc, a small curiosity given its late arrival on the album itself. For casual listeners, three discs with multiple versions of the same songs may feel like a lot, and it is fair to say this is a package aimed primarily at the dedicated. But for anyone who has lived with these songs for decades, the chance to hear them in their raw, formative state is a genuine gift, and it gives this reissue a substance that many anniversary editions lack.
Taken as a whole, the 35th anniversary edition of Levelling The Land does exactly what a reissue of a beloved album should do. It respects the original, it offers a good reason to listen again, and it adds genuine value for those who want to dig deeper. The new mix is not about reinventing the album, but about letting it finally sound the way the band always intended, and on paper at least, that is a goal well worth pursuing. There will always be those who prefer the original, and that is their right; for many, the lighter, treble-heavy sound of the 1991 mix is part of the album's character and inseparable from their memories of it. But the songs remain the songs, and they are as strong, as angry, and as heartfelt as they ever were.
Britain has always had a proud tradition of bands who stand up for the outsider, and the Levellers remain one of its most important exponents. Levelling The Land is the album where they found their voice and found their audience, and thirty-five years on, it still sounds like a call to arms. With most of the anniversary tour sold out before its main run has even begun, and Essex punk duo The Meffs lined up in support, the album's spirit is alive and well, and that the band's message still resonates with a new generation. Play it loud, sing along, and remember that the only way of life worth living is your own.
A folk-rock landmark given the low end it always deserved, plus a treasure trove of lost demos — still angry, still joyous, still essential.
5/5
LEVELLING THE LAND (35TH ANNIVERSARY EDITION) — TRACKLIST
CD1: LEVELLING THE LAND — REMIX BY AL SCOTT (ALSO ON 1LP)
1. One Way
2. The Game
3. Fifteen Years
4. The Boatman
5. Liberty Song
6. Far From Home
7. Sell Out
8. Another Man’s Cause
9. The Road
10. The Riverflow
11. Battle Of The Beanfield
CD2: BONUS TRACKS
1. Dance Before The Storm (B-Side)
2. Hard Fight (B-Side)
3. The Devil Went Down To Georgia (B-Side)
4. Last Days Of Winter (B-Side)
5. Plastic Jeezus (B-Side)
6. Liberty Song (Outtake)
7. The Road (Outtake)
8. Far From Home, V1 (Outtake)
9. Boatman Jig, V1 (Outtake)
10. Plastic Jeezus (Outtake)
11. Fifteen Years (Outtake)
12. Another Man’s Cause (Outtake)
13. Far From Home (Outtake)
14. One Way (Dance Mix) (Outtake)
CD3: LEVELLING THE LAND DEMOS
1. One Way (Demo)
2. The Game (Demo)
3. The Boatman (Demo)
4. Liberty Song (Demo)
5. Far From Home (Demo)
6. Sell Out (Demo)
7. Another Man’s Cause (Demo)
8. The Road (Demo)
9. The Riverflow (Demo)
10. Battle Of The Beanfield (Demo)
11. The Devil Went Down To Georgia (Demo)
12. Last Days Of Winter (Demo)
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