MARK CHADWICK
All The Pieces

Ο MarkC hadwick, κιθαρίστας και τραγουδιστής των Levellers, κυκλοφορεί το πρώτο του προσωπικό άλμπουμ “All TheP ieces”.

Θεωρείται ένας από τους πιο επιτυχημένους Βρετανούς συνθέτες της γενιάς του, με 20 chart singles και 6 top 40 albums στο ενεργητικό του ως μέλος των Levellers. Ωστόσο, το “All The Pieces” δεν έχει ιδιαίτερη σχέση με τον ήχο των Levellers. Σίγουρα η φωνή είναι η ίδια αλλά όλες οι ομοιότητες σταματάνε εκεί.

Το “All TheP ieces” είναι ένα έντονα προσωπικό άλμπουμ με folk pop ακουστικά τραγούδια που δουλευόντουσαν επί δύο δεκαετίες. Την παραγωγή επιμελήθηκε ο πολυβραβευμένος Sean Lakeman ενώ συμμετέχουν μερικά από τα μεγαλύτερα ονόματα της folk βρετανικής σκηνής.(Sean και Seth Lakeman, Dan Donnelly (Watercress, Sonovagun), Martin Pannett (McDermott’s 2 Hours), Toby May (Clearlake), Daniel Goddard (aka DBG) Ben Nicholls (Dennis Hopper’s Choppers) Kathryn Roberts (Equation)).

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MARK CHADWICK

2010 BIOGRPAHY

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. The Falklands war was only months away. Victory in the South Atlantic would afford Thatcher’s Conservatives a second term and with them would come the yuppie, the microwave, consumer cocaine, the home-owning revolution (that worked out well) and the blood and strife of the miners strike.

The sense of transition, of leaving something very definite behind and moving into uncharted waters was obvious not just in the new aggressiveness of political discourse but also in the youth cults that The Sex Pistols and punk rock had left in their mutinous wake.

Unreconstructed hippies mixed it up with neo-Nazi skins, scooter-boy’s clashed with peacock punks and ageing teds. Early blitz kids, moody Joy Division fans in long dark overcoats, mods and Fila-decked football casuals all fought unwittingly for the title of Thatcher’s kids. And everyone kept changing sides. The punk became a skin, the skin a mod and the mod a new romantic as daily the ground shifted and with it the clothes, the attitude, the music and the loyalties. “Look at photographs of the early Eighties,” says Mark. “The scene was changing so fast, in terms of music and the way people dressed you can date them not just by the year, but by the month.”

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.

“It was a glam-rock band. Lots of sequinned jackets and bandanas and big earrings and make-up. General dressing up, which is always lot of fun.”

Now settled in Brighton (which on and off would remain his home), Mark supplemented government handouts by busking outside the notorious Kensington and Eagle pubs. It was in the latter that he met Jeremy Cunningham who shared his interest in left wing politics and music. Together they would form the Levellers, which they named after a radically democratic faction of Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army. When Brighton, booze, busking, and cheap dope and speed became too repetitive he and the band did what a whole lot of other people were doing. They upped sticks and left the country, travelling Europe in a heavily customised ambulance that came to double as their home.

“With no jobs and council houses being sold off making your own mobile home made a lot of sense back then. And every time I was back in the UK I would look at the mess the country was in and I’d want to smash the whole place to pieces. It was the whole punk rock, destroy to create thing. And that ethos seemed to come of age half a decade after the supposed death of punk.”

In the mid-eighties Mark and the band found themselves in the Amsterdam, hanging around the infamous Havens Oost squats. It became their home. Now remembered as a haven for artists and free thinkers from all over the world it was also, as Mark recalls, a fuck up and freak out from Europe and beyond.

“It was in some ways a brilliant place, that was founded on real idealism, but it was also a place where things could turn bad on the spin of a coin. Anyone could be murdered, people were murdered, anybody could die of a drugs overdose, and many did. And people just disappear. There are still bodies buried there, I’m sure of that. And the drugs, Jesus the drugs . . .”

There was dope and speed and even a little cocaine. And given the sexually and morally transgressive tone of the place there was plenty of acid and a thousand varieties of magic mushrooms. But there was also a whole lot of smack and crack and all the concomitant backbiting and misery.

Nonetheless it was here that Mark and Levellers, who by that time were pretty much the Havens in-house band, learned to print flyers and T-shirts, and organise gigs, festivals and raves.

“We’d left England to escape Thatcherism. The strange thing was that in this anarchist commune we kinda learned how to stand on our own two feet. I hate to admit it, but in some way her lessons about self-sufficiency had sunken in, albeit inadvertently. In the Havens it was sink or swim and we swam.”

In house-band or not when Marks friend Lido was stabbed 11 times in the chest by a crack head the band decided it was time to think about going home.

When they returned to Brighton it was with a new self-confidence. The music business, which before the Havens had seemed to necessitate mysterious, alchemical skills only a few were privy to, now seemed much like any other business. Having made a minor success of things in the chaos of the Havens Oost, they took their first record company advance and, rather than doing what most bands do and spunking it on coke and strippers, they bought an abandoned factory and turned it into a recording studio. You could call it boot-strap Thatcherism or Mark and the band putting into practice their DIY, Punk aesthetic, either way The Metway, as the recording studio became known swiftly transformed itself into a refuge for local misfits and artists.

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. He was also finding it increasingly hard to hold down any sort of relationship.

“Songwriters tend to be romantics, so it’s hard when you realise that your one great love, music, is holding back your ability to properly love and commit to another person. Musicians always try hard to make those on off, long distance relationships work, but they so rarely do, because no matter how understanding your lover is of you, they’ll never really understand the life you have. And I don’t fucking blame them.”

“You go on a long tour. And for the latter part of it all you can think of is the girl waiting for you back home. Then when you get home, you spend ten minutes in her company and you run down to the pub and get pissed. It takes a minimum of two weeks to decompress from a tour. And sometimes you ain’t got two weeks because you’re off out again.”

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.”

“Music has given me everything I have, informed everything from my politics to my love affairs and that is really what All The Pieces is about.”

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