Turn That Noise Down - The Levellers

So many well-known albums turn 30 this year and Steve Taylor-Bryant and Susan Omand travel back to 1991 to revisit some of the sounds of their youth that made parents shout "Turn that noise down!" This week, Steve is Levelling the Land...

Sometimes an album pops up on our yearly list of what’s thirty and I’ve never heard of it, some arrive and I know them note for note and wax lyrical until the cows come home, and some, like Levelling the Land by The Levellers, are so wrapped up in memory it’s difficult to review them as an album you want other people to consume. I can’t sit here and define what Levelling the Land means politically or lyrically, or whether I enjoy the instrumentation or perhaps a particular drum break pops for me, because Levelling the Land was involved in so much of my 1991. It was the year I went from 15 to 16, I left school, I started work, I had a girlfriend, I played in a band, I lost a friend, I gained a friendship that would last nearly three decades. It was a defining year for me and the person I would become, it was the start of all that was good and all that would become a lifetime of battling, and almost every step I took that year had The Levellers providing the soundtrack.

If you want an in-depth look at a seminal record then you maybe need to find a different site on this occasion as all I can do is try and pick a couple of tracks that are more prevalent in my memory than others and hope you get some enjoyment from them. Also, 30 years? Fuck…

One Way




15 Years




Battle of the Beanfield




Image - Amazon