SLS: What A Beautiful Day

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For this week’s Song Lyric Sunday Jim is inviting us to play a song that carries a message of empowerment, as he tells us in his post, Harness The Energy. For once, I’m sticking to the guidelines and just playing one song, and it offers a slightly different take on what empowerment might mean.

I went through all the possible anthems I could be playing for this theme, and thought that others may well choose those, so I went for one which is probably unknown to most. It’s a real belter, though, hiding a serious message underneath a jaunty tune. This is one of my favourite songs by the Levellers:

And here are the lyrics, from genius.com as usual.

For those who haven’t heard of them – probably most of you, I’m guessing – Levellers are an English folk rock and anarcho-punk band formed in Brighton in 1988, consisting of Mark Chadwick (vocals, guitar), Jeremy Cunningham (bass guitar), Charlie Heather (drums), Jon Sevink (violin), Simon Friend (guitar, mandolin, vocals) and Dan Donnelly (guitar, mandolin, vocals). Matt Savage (keyboards) joined in 2003. Taking their name from the Levellers political movement, the band released their first EP in 1989 and album in 1990, and then had some international success following the release of their second album, Levelling the Land. The band were among the most popular indie bands in Britain in the early 1990s, and played twice at the Glastonbury Festival, first in 1992 and then again in 1994, where they performed as the headline act on The Pyramid Stage to a record crowd of 300,000 people. They continue to record and tour, their most recent album being Together All The Way, which came out in 2023.

What A Beautiful Day was a track on the band’s fifth album, Mouth To Mouth, which was released in August 1997 and peaked at #5 in the UK Albums Chart. Like several of their albums it also made the charts in Belgium, The Netherlands and Sweden, but nowhere else, as far as I can tell. This was the first of three songs from the album released as singles, and it reached #13 in the UK. Again, Wikipedia doesn’t give much information on other chart placings, so I have to assume that was its only success as a single. Like all of their records the song is credited to the whole band, though it was usually singer Mark Chadwick who wrote them – they are a collective outfit.

If you listen to the lyrics, or follow the link to read them, you will see that the song describes a revolution being planned and carried out. It includes references to Guy Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot, a couple of film stars and Che Guevara. With the inclusion of ideas of wealth distribution their imagined revolution is one of socialist intent, which ties in with the band name: I have included a link above to where their name came from so that you can understand the background. As I said at the outset, this is a slightly different take on empowerment, as we can all feel empowered in our thoughts and dreams, although they may never come to fruition:

I’m the king of all time 
And nothing is impossible
In my all powerful mind

Their revolution and empowerment was only imaginary, in the end, but with a mindset like that they could become the US President – much of his verbal diarrhoea  seems only to exist in his own mind!

That’s me done for today, and I hope you have enjoyed this little toe in the water of English folk rock with a bite to it. My thanks as always to Jim for running the show so well, and I’ll see you again for some more Tuesday Tunes. Take care 😊

35 thoughts on “SLS: What A Beautiful Day”

  2. It’s no surprise that I had never heard of this band, though I did know about the original ‘levellers’, because of my lifelong interest in the English Civil War. I played the clip, enough said,

    Best wishes, Pete.

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  3. Yes, heard this one before but it is a jaunty little number with a nice kick throughout. Singalong chorus, serious message. Somehow I couldn’t see the Young Conservatives of the times singing along though!

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    • You can see from this why I like the band so much, can’t you. Exactly as you describe, but with some dark lyrics underneath. This album kept me company in the days when I had a long car commute to work – it’s great music to drive to!

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  11. Love the Levellers and especially this song – it definitely is two songs in one masking its subversive concepts behind an incredibly upbeat tune. I think it would have got to number 1 but Princess Diana tragically died and the radio stations stopped anything that sounded overtly happy ☹️ Great choice Clive 👌

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  13. I’m very familiar with the song, but wasn’t aware of the message until I just read the lyric. Just shows what can be conveyed if you have a banger of a chorus! I also didn’t realise how far back the band went, I thought they were more recent than the late ’80’s. They just feel like they sit in with Wonderstuff and Waterboys. Great track.

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    • Indeed – that chorus is incredibly catchy and you could be forgiven for missing the message! Their peak period was through the 90s, not dissimilar to either of those, though the Waterboys’ best album, Fisherman’s Blues, was late 80s, I think.

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