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I M IN a huge, old and very beautiful Brighton warehouse called The Metway, which embodies local heroes The Levellers and what they re all about. Amazingly, the band actually own this magnificent red-bricked edifice, and it was here that they recorded their latest longplayer Mouth to Mouth.
Simon Friend is the guitarist, co-writer and co-singer with the band, a smiling bespectacled man whose nature follows his name. We ve turned it into a mad crazy place for artists and musicians, he says as we begin a guided tour of The Metway.
The top floor is spacious, and open-plan; from the large windows you can see across the rooftops of Brighton to the blue rippling sea beyond. This here is the nerve centre really, explains Simon. It deals with management and accounts and the general everyday running of the band.
I ask Simon whether The Levellers have covered themselves financially since they bought The Metway three years ago.
Pretty much, he replies, in terms of what we paid for the building. You d spend a lot of money on office spaces in London, rehearsal rooms and studios and all that sort of stuff. But the cost of running a building like this isn t cheap, and we ve had to re-do the whole thing ourselves; the first three months was everybody aboard deck, charging round doing this, that and the other, stripping all the beams down, and the floors . . . There s a few people amongst our organisation that do everything really. Between us all we managed it.
It s hard to think of any other bands who ve got their shit together to such an extent.
It s a notoriously dangerous thing for bands to do, agrees Simon. But we re such a big diverse network of people now that you can get virtually anything done.
Here Simon has touched on the essence of The Levellers continuing success. Talking to the band, I notice them use the key word organisation several times; it s an accurate description of their collective way of working, which stretches way beyond the actual band members themselves (for example, The Metway employs about 20 people full-time)
We stroll downstairs to the studio. Here. Levellers members sit round planning rehearsals for their upcoming tour, which starts next week in Helsinki.
They re sorting out the drum loops and stuff, mentions Simon as we reach the bottom of The Metway, the oldest part of the building. It used to be the stables for an old brewery, but it s been transformed into a kitchen and bar. There s even a full-time chef working here; his cuisine doesn t go to waste during the months that The Levellers are on tour, because they rent their studio out to other bands while they re away.
The guitarist then introduces me to lead singer Mark Chadwick, who reminds me vaguely of a teddy bear. The buckles on Simon s biker boots rattle off down the corridor as he walks away. I turn to Mark and ask does he ever find himself saying, Christ almighty! I m walking round a building that I partially own! What a cool fucking job I have! ?
Yeah, yeah, he agrees. It gets better and better. We re in control of our own destiny if you like, we re not at the whim of a record company going, Right, you have to be here over in London to record your album, and over there in blah-di-blah to do your rehearsing, and then you ve to hire this place for that and that place for this. Now we can just do it all here. It s a lot easier.
So has that done anything for the creative process?
Oh, immensely, he concurs. Because instead of having to section it off into little areas like in three weeks time I m allowed to be creative and the rest of the time I ve got to do all this other shit you can do it all the time, you can mix it up. The ability to be creative is increased 100 per cent.
Like today, I just came in essentially to do this interview, but I was able to talk about making an intro tape for the next tour, and also work on some loops. Whereas normally I would ve had to meet you in a pub or something. So you get to cross all the boundaries. And you get to know a lot more of what the music industry s all about.
In some ways The Levellers latest album Mouth to Mouth represents a departure for them.
I think lyrically it s much less macro, suggests Mark. It s much more micro, more introverted and personal than previous things. Which is good, we wanted to do that, because we were getting ill with ranting off. We d already said pretty much everything we wanted to say without repeating ourselves. That was gonna be the case from the off, so any song writing that was done was done with that in mind. That was coming naturally anyway; I hadn t written any overtly political songs for a long time.
Does Mark see this as a natural progression in the evolution of his ideas?
I think so. Maybe it s just that I m getting too cynical to really, sort of . . . like see it, see things in black and white. Not that I ever really did, but when you first start writing songs it s quite easy I suppose to write us-and-them scenarios something I m not embarrassed about, in fact I think it s quite a good thing. The idealism stays there, it s just your approach becomes a little bit more sussed. I mean you can t be in this business for as long as we have without being completely aware of contradictions and compromise.
In his lyrics, Mark now tends to use metaphors rather than direct statements.
The issues that I might find interesting to write about are now much more complex, he explains, because the older you get, the more you understand how complicated things are. And I think that s much more interesting for writing purposes than the simple, two ways of seeing the world. Now it s much more interesting to look underneath the surface. Which is great, because for a while we were a bit stuck with the way we had to do it, because it was what was expected. After being around for so long, and having done various experiments in different directions in the past but not on a big scale, people are sort of not so bothered about what we do, so it allowed us to break our own mould.
Over the past few years The Levellers have received regular doses of flak in the press for selling out is this something that worries them particularly?
No, laughs Mark emphatically. I don t give a fuck what anybody says about it, because we know what we re about. We re not heroes for anybody, we never have been.

Art adorns nearly every scrap of wallspace in The Metway. All these drawings, prints and paintings come from the hand of one person, the incredibly prolific Jez Cunningham, who plays bass and is also responsible for The Levellers artwork (his painting of two faces interlocked in a kiss graces the cover of Mouth to Mouth).
As I walk down the corridor to his studio, amazed by the number of colourful 6 x 8ft canvasses leaning against the walls, a big furry Alsatian dog rushes out to greet me. He has the same rusty colouring, quizzical expression and voluminous hairstyle as his dreadlocked human companion.
His name s Did, smiles Jez, from diddecoy . I got him off some gypsies. I used to be a traveller, I used to live in a bus and one day I parked up on this travellers site. It was half what you d call New Age travellers, who I was moving around with, and the other half was old-style gypsies, tarmac layers. And I just got him he was a little puppy off one of them.
After making myself popular with this happy-looking dog by feeding him some biscuits, I ask Jez about his five years on the road.
I enjoyed it, but for me it wasn t so much an ideal that I aspired to, it was more of an accident, he laughs, because I had no money basically. I started off living in squats and stuff because what little money I had I didn t want to give to a landlord either. Then all my friends started living on buses and moving around, and so as soon as I got enough money I bought a small ancient old truck, and after that I got a bit more money and managed to get a bigger truck, and moved about in that for a few years.
But then the government started bringing in loads of laws against it, and it got more and more difficult.
These days I think you ve got to really make a statement if you re a traveller, and I never really did it for that. I did it because it was a free lifestyle, but now you re less free in that lifestyle than you are if you live in a normal flat. So you really have to be prepared to make your whole life into a political point. Some of the young kids are up for that, they re up for a bit of confrontation. But me, I ve had enough of it.
Having a studio in the spacious Metway gives Jez the chance to express his artistic nature which veers towards the large and loose while being uninhibited by a cramped environment. His canvasses all depict human forms, and little else.
I ve always been into painting about the way that people interact with each other, he enthuses. Every painting I ve ever done is always based on various experiences and things I ve seen. I just try to do it from my head onto the canvas, without any drawing at all, and just let it all come out, and sometimes it s like two or three events in one picture, and I don t try to make any sense of it. Your memory always warps things as well, so I just try and paint what s in the head, and I don t try to make any sense out of it at all. Which is why it always comes out bizarre and mad.
Jez gets dragged off for a walk, while diffuse evening light filters through the windows of The Metway. As I leave the building, this epicentre of The Levellers and their clan, I take a better look at the print Jez has kindly given me. It s a monochrome version of the kiss on the cover of Mouth To Mouth, with dog hairs stuck in the ink a quirky reminder of a great afternoon. n