Currently listening to: 'A Sequence for the Ascension' - yes, even with the Church's new wider target, I've still managed to miss...
Given the percentage of blogs I write while listening to Level 42 (just not the last couple), I thought I might as well write one about them. Diving right in, I came to the music of Level 42 by a somewhat circuitous route, specifically via references in an episode of the television comedy 'The Mighty Boosh'. While the details are too tedious and convoluted to recount, the references were to jazz funk as a genre, to slap bass as an instrument, to Level 42 as a group and to Mark King as a performer.
I've always had a fascination with low-pitched instruments and when I found out that a specific musical genre had developed a specific way of playing a low-pitched instrument, my curiosity was aroused. When I found some Level 42 CDs in a local library, I felt almost obliged to check them out.
Examining the CDs revealed a band whose most prominent work was perhaps a little before my time, the big clue being the number of songs which referred to an imminent nuclear war. What left me a bit puzzled was, slap bass aside, Level 42 didn't seem particularly different from the mainstream pop/rock electric instrument groups of my primary school years. Where did the jazz funk come in? There was, however, a simple solution.
Library CDs aside, I'd had contact with Level 42 through a single track which had found its way onto a jazz funk compilation. This one track had been much more what I was expecting - instrumental only, with a recurring theme developed by different instruments in succession. The link between this Level 42 and the one from the library CDs was, predictably enough, commercial sell-out. Further research revealed that as the 1980s had progressed, the 'jazz' element in Level 42's music (the band quite early rebranding themselves as 'Britfunk') got less and less as the percentage of 'lighter' numbers per album increased. That said, even in Level 42's 'poppiest' moments, there's enough slap bass and solo sax to differentiate them from 'just another prog rock band'.
Nor does the story finish there. I thought I'd missed the proverbial boat in terms of seeing Level 42 play live, but the my discovery of band coincided quite closely with the band's rediscovery of themselves, with a new album and accompanying tour in the autumn of 2006. I went to the gig in Liverpool and saw for myself that the fairly sizeable Philharmonic Hall was pretty much full.
No, they didn't play any of the early stuff and there weren't any instrumental-only tracks. I probably wasn't the only one to be slightly disappointed at this, but I'd certainly go and see them again if opportunity arose. As a concluding thought, Level 42 were never that popular and the height of their modest achievements came in the mid-1980s. Before last autumn, they hadn't released an album since 1994. How many other bands can play to full houses for a tour so long after a small section of the public and even the band themselves seemed to have lost interest?
