What do you do when your crusty folk anarchism hasn't brought down the government but has earned you seven platinum albums and enough cash to buy your dog a diamond-studded string?
Do you ditch the political idealism and makeshift fiddle and sell out? Of course you don't. The first thing you do is go down the record shop and spend some of the dosh on Beatles records.
Because, dear me, the opening three tracks of this album (cunningly titled to suggest both police paranoia and the traveller's love of living in a field in a single phrase!) threaten at any moment to turn into 'I Am The Walrus' complete with a nasal-voiced Mark Chadwick doing his best John Lennon impersonation.
It isn't pretty. Thenceforth, the Levellers buy a couple of orchestras, go to drama school, listen to some prog rock and plonk themselves round the campfire and sing, as ever, about how the police really aren't very nice.
As unpalatable as that sounds, it really isn't so bad, despite 'Voices On The Wind' being a melodramatic, string-laden behemoth of Mike Oldfield-like pomposity and the whole thing having an air of self-importance.
For it's not all pretentious twaddle. And even the pretentious twaddle is sometimes pretty fab - witness the 'every instrument but the nose flute' epic '61 Minutes Of Pleading' with its grandiose choruses.
There are plenty of the familiar fiddle de dee, rousing singalong anthems and the arrangements are lush enough to grow trees on. Watch out for 'The Levellers Sing About How The Police Really Aren't Very Nice, In An Opera Stylee' coming soon.
