Mark Chadwick front man of the Levellers Live and acoustic at Mr. Kyps in Poole Thursday 5th April 2012
Mark Chadwick is one of the UK’s most successful songwriters. With his band, The Levellers, he has co-written 20 chart singles and 4 top 40 albums. Usually seen gallivanting across the globe with The Levellers on a seemingly never ending 20 year tour, he will take time out for this special one-off solo show. This will be a set of Levellers songs handpicked by the man himself, classics alongside some less well known tracks, material from his solo album ‘All The Pieces’ and you may even hear a couple of new songs from upcoming album ‘Static On The Airwaves’.
The year was 1982. Mark Chadwick had just turned 16. With unemployment topping the 3 million mark Margaret Thatcher’s radical version of monetarism was having a marked effect on the hitherto guileless population of the United Kingdom. For Mark, who was born in a British Army hospital in Munster, Germany in 1966 and who had spent his childhood following his soldier father from one barracks to the next, Britain’s madly disparate tribes represented new worlds of possibility. At the Elephant Fayre Mark, just sixteen, watched as these drunk, drugged teenagers danced and clashed. Where others saw only division, schism and in fighting Mark saw an array of new ways to live, all of which were dramatically, blissfully at odds with the regimented life he had known up until then. “Army life is a very contained life. Suddenly there’s all this music, all this subculture I knew nothing about. Bam, it blew my fucking head off.”
Music was the common denominator. The way Mark remembers it “Every week there were four or five singles you just had to fucking own.” So with no jobs to speak of and no real qualifications to tout, but a half decent dole and plenty of empty property to squat there was really only one thing to do. Do what Joe Strummer and Sniffin’ Glue had told him to do. Learn a few chords and form a rock n roll band. By the end of the Century the band, with top ten albums and a series of sell out tours behind them were a household name and a festival favourite. Mark loved the success but often felt oddly distant from it, as if he were a spectator watching his own life go by. Despite this, and through all this, Mark believes that as surely as music has pulled him apart from some of the people he loved, it is ultimately music that holds him together as a person. “I am amazingly optimistic. I still hate politicians and worry about the environment but I store great faith in people. I still believe in the power of music to transform lives because it has transformed mine and continues to transform mine. I am even getting better at relationships, having actually been able to hold one down for some time.”
Video
Check Out the Levellers new single “Truth Is” here:
Tickets are £11 in advance get yours here:
http://www.ticketweb.co.uk/user/?region=gb_south&query=detail&event=493240
