Reviews
Artist: Mark Chadwick
Album: All The Pieces
Label: Stay By
Tracks: 12
Website:http://www.markchadwickofficial.co.uk
I first heard the Levellers when the provided band duties on Rev Hammer's debut album "Industrial Sound And Magic", an album literally recorded in a cowshed on virtually no budget, back in 1991. That album had a real buzz about it, if not commercially, certainly in attitude. That buzz turned into a real spine tingle when I heard "Levelling The Land" later that same year.
Whilst those hazy days of youth are never going to be recreated, that heady sense of discovering something new diminished by being fortunate enough to continue doing that for nineteen years since, there still remains a tingle that reacts on the back of the neck as surely as a hazel rod does for a dowser when they hit water. Let me say right now, Mark Chadwick's solo debut, "All The Pieces" gets those neck hairs moving.
"All The Pieces" seem to involve pulling threads from the past and melding them into a future, something that is separate, yet parallel to his Leveller activity. It's allowed him to view this as a true debut album and to be truly free from his connection with the band.
Naturally there are similarities, over twenty years with the same band are bound to influence sound and style to some degree, but this is an album that is distinct and one that wouldn't feel right as a Levellers album.
The opening track "Elephant Fayre" is probably the track that most draws on the heritage referring back to a festival that was a key factor in establishing the 'crustie' scene of the late eighties, early nineties. It's one of the great lost festivals, but difficult to look back on without realising the role it and festival's like it played in establishing what was a real folk tradition with a hard rocking edge.
The song that most surprises me on the album is the title track. It's far more poppy, radio friendly than I would have expected. There's a real sense of hope in the lyric, a feeling that that which has been broken can be put back together and built into a better future.
The Levellers always seemed more at home with the counter-culture(a term I know they'll hate), environmentalists, sabs, free thinkers. Happy giving time to fanzines rather than the mainsteam music papers and it did them no harm, arguably exposing weakness in the mainstream media of the time.
Chadwick seems to have distilled this free thinking attitude into "All The Pieces" giving rise to an album that is rich in ideas both musically and lyrically. Politics and ideas are a dominant theme across the album. One that suggests that these are his thoughts on how it could be, rather than asking what you want and regurgitating it.
Its the album of a songwriter and one that seems to have found salvation by finding a new channel for his energy. There's a reason it sets they hairs on the back of the neck tingling, it's because its liberated and liberating. History judges albums, not reviewers, but I'm more than happy to throw a mark down for this one. Chadwick should find the recognition he deserves.
Neil King