Review: The Levellers with The Wonder Stuff ****

At Leeds O2 Academy

In the early 1990s we were easily entertained. For two years of sixth form, four of us spent lunchtimes sat in my friend’s secondhand Fiesta listening to one of three cassette tapes (in no particular order, The Commitments soundtrack, The Saw Doctors’ If This Is Rock and Roll, I Want My Old Job Back and The Levellers’ Levelling the Land) and smoking cigarettes. We were cheap dates, but they were happy days.

That was 20 years ago and as the montage of poll tax riots, Tony Blair’s rise and fall and the birth of coalition government which played before the Levellers arrived on stage showed, a lot has happened since, but every so often it’s good to wind back the clock.

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The crowd had already been warmed up by an hour-long set from the Wonder Stuff, whose singer Miles Hunt is one the most charismatic frontmen going, and with The Levellers playing their breakthrough album in its entirety, nostalgia levels reached critical mass. From the iconic One Way to the arresting Another Man’s Cause, there is not one duff track and this was a band on a high. As they played their final encore, the uplifting Beautiful Day, the man next to me lit a cigarette. Anti-social, well yes. Illegal. Definitely. But just for a moment it took me back to Notre Dame car park and that old Fiesta. Pretty near perfect.

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