{"id":336143,"date":"2025-12-26T07:21:16","date_gmt":"2025-12-26T07:21:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/336143\/"},"modified":"2025-12-26T07:21:16","modified_gmt":"2025-12-26T07:21:16","slug":"hope-street-by-the-levellers-the-story-behind-the-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/336143\/","title":{"rendered":"Hope Street by the Levellers: The story behind the song"},"content":{"rendered":"

A free-spirited gang of underdogs who championed social causes and aligned themselves to the travelling community, Levellers<\/a> were a fast-rising force come the mid-90s. The band\u2019s heady brand of anarcho folk-punk hit its commercial peak with 1995\u2019s Zeitgeist, their fourth album, due in no small part to the inclusion of open-hearted street anthems like Hope Street.<\/p>\n

Released as a lead-off single that July, Hope Street is a song for the dispossessed and the forgotten, for all those struggling in the slipstream of economic progress. It\u2019s peopled by outcasts, addicts, vagrants and gamblers.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cI was living in Hove and travelling into Brighton every day to record Zeitgeist,\u201d says lyricist and bass player Jeremy Cunningham. \u201cAnd Hope Street was a kind of heightened version of what I saw walking down the street. It\u2019s actually based on Western Road, which runs the length of Brighton into Hove. But the song is called Hope Street because there\u2019s a Hope Street in almost every town or city<\/p>\n

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\u201cI\u2019m a mad Smiths<\/a> fan,\u201d he continues, \u201cand I really wanted to write some words that were a bit more observational, like Morrissey did. So it\u2019s me having a go at telling that story. At that point, the council was trying to lift homeless people off the streets and then ship them off to the edge of town. The idea being that it would take them about a day to walk back in again. But at least they were off the streets for that short time. Then they\u2019d lift them again when they finally made it in. So that\u2019s kind of a big part of the song: \u2018No old faces out today\/ Someone took them all away.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not all relentlessly grim. Mindful of his natural predilection for a downbeat lyric, Cunningham tempered the tale with a chorus that suggested all was not lost: \u2018Rain on me come pouring down, clean the dirt off this old town\/Tell the sun to come around, and show his face on Hope Street.\u2019 \u2018Hope\u2019 being the operative word.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t just want it to be about how miserable everything is,\u201d he explains, \u201cwhich is why I tried to bring the sunshine stuff into it, to make it more uplifting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Levellers – Hope Street (Official Music Video) – YouTube
\n\"Levellers<\/p>\n

Watch On <\/a><\/p>\n

Cunningham sat on the lyrics for a while before eventually taking them to his bandmates. Guitarist Simon Friend came back with a tune rooted in traditional shanty folk, but with a surging chorus. Singer Mark Chadwick and fiddle player Jonathan Sevink then did a spot of \u201cfinessing, making everything fit together really well. They do a lot of that\u201d.<\/p>\n

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Hope Street boasts a fiercely rocky intro that reappears throughout, leading to a grandstanding finale that finds Levellers operating at full steam.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the time, we were listening to a lot of Led Zeppelin<\/a>,\u201d Cunningham recalls. \u201cThey\u2019re Mark\u2019s favourite band, so he was more than keen to get that riff in there. And Charlie [Heather]\u2019s drums were recorded on the massive concrete staircase in the Metway, an old converted Victorian brewery which is our headquarters in Brighton. We put the kit out there, mic\u2019d it up, and it just sounded immense. That was all down to Al Scott, our producer, suggesting that. He\u2019s quite aggressive in his production, which I really like.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hope Street was written while Levellers had already begun recording Zeitgeist. The first demo, as heard on the newly expanded 30th anniversary version of the album, reveals its gestation. The original opening line was \u2018There\u2019s a young boy sniffing glue\u2026\u2019, later amended to \u2018There\u2019s a young boy in the queue\u2026\u2019 So why the alteration?<\/p>\n

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\u201cAfter hearing it a few times on playback, I just thought people would think it was a negative intro,\u201d reasons Cunningham. \u201cBut I wrote it because that\u2019s what I saw. There was a guy there sniffing glue. And it is a great line. If it had come up later on in the song, I think it would\u2019ve been all right. But not as the first line. A lot of people who\u2019ve heard the demo have asked if the record company told us to change it, but no, it had nothing to do with them. Although I\u2019m sure they did breathe a sigh of relief.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hope Street made it to No.12 in the UK. When Zeitgeist landed in early September, it debuted at No.2. A few TV ads later and it rose to the top spot. Another couple of Zeitgeist singles – Fantasy and Just The One, the latter with Joe Strummer<\/a> guesting on piano \u2013 also made the Top 20.<\/p>\n

Coming a year after their headline performance at Glastonbury<\/a>, in front of an estimated 300,000 people, Levellers\u2019 success seemed like a pleasing anomaly. Britpop, a movement with which they had only a passing affiliation, was then at its height. Below them in the upper reaches of the album chart sat Oasis<\/a>, Blur<\/a>, The Charlatans and Supergrass.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were on tour so much that the whole Britpop thing kind of passed us by,\u201d admits Cunningham. \u201cSo it didn\u2019t really play a massive part in our lives. We\u2019d be in France or somewhere else, would fly over to do Top Of The Pops and then fly straight back out again to Europe. When you\u2019re at the centre of a whirlwind, like we were, you don\u2019t really notice what\u2019s going on around you so much. Plus we were young, so we were just interested in having a good time, basically.\u201d<\/p>\n

Three decades on, however, Hope Street still feels painfully relevant as a piece of bitter social commentary. \u201cIt\u2019s not set in any particular time and place, but it\u2019s talking about stuff that happens all the time, everywhere,\u201d Cunningham offers. \u201cThere\u2019s always going to be people seeing that shit going on, so it\u2019s one of those songs that\u2019s never going to date. And even though it was made in the nineties, Hope Street was heavily influenced by folk and early-seventies stuff. So the music is kind of timeless as well. That\u2019s part of the reason for its longevity, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 30th anniversary remix edition of Zeitgeist is out now via Rhino.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Levellers: Zeitgeist (30th Anniversary) – Today’s Best Prices<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A free-spirited gang of underdogs who championed social causes and aligned themselves to the travelling community, Levellers were…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":336144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[96,128,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-336143","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-music","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=336143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/336143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/336144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=336143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=336143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=336143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}