Ned's Atomic Dustbin: God Fodder artwork
I’ve had a bit of back to the early 90s binge this past fortnight, thanks to the effect of last week’s Levellers gig. There has been some musical revisionism at work in recent years that paint the time immediately before the explosion of grunge and then Britpop as a creative wasteland.
That era may have been arid for metal fans but there was a fantastic grebo (think crusty skate punks, sort of) scene that has largely been forgotten except by the fans.
Levellers: middle-aged crusties
Levellers are a glorious anachronism. They exist in a golden bubble of time between about 1989 and 1994, a crusty pocket of resistance to a brand of Thatcherite British politics that until recent months was a distant bad memory.
The agit-prop folk-rockers evoke images of travellers, the poll tax riots, dogs on strings, free parties, dreadlocks, dungarees, dope and acid. Idealistic lyrics about sticking it to the man and “circled As on the underpass” appealed to lower-middle class white teenagers looking to rebel against our drab suburban existence.
Monkey Defies Gravity 