IT IS a wonderful to write music and words about radical history and have the opportunity to  bring them to life in exactly the right place.
 
Today is Levellers’ Day in Burford. Myself and my early music punk band Barnstormer 1649 will get up early to drive up to Oxfordshire from Brighton and lead the midday procession through the town, a march commemorating the three Levellers executed for rebelling against Cromwell’s orders on May 17 1649, protesting about lack of pay and being sent to Ireland to fight as part of Cromwell’s ghastly suppression of the people there.  

The night before their execution they and others from their regiment were imprisoned in Burford Church, and one of them, Anthony Sedley, carved his name on the font, where it remains to this day, with a plaque on the outside of the building.  A service of remembrance will take place before the march.
 
Then after three hours of discussion and debate at nearby Warwick Hall, we will be playing nearly all of Restoration Tragedy, the album I wrote inspired by the historic events of the period – the execution of Charles I in January 1649, the declaration of the Commonwealth of England and the subsequent rebellions of  the Levellers, Diggers and Ranters against Cromwell’s autocratic rule, which was no commonwealth at all but simply a continuation of the old order with a new master.  
 
The album combines two lifelong interests of mine – early music and radical history. I’ve always loved the former, have taught myself to play many ancient instruments and always believed those simple sounds could be harnessed to the energy of punk in the same kind of way that The Pogues combined Irish music and punk.

Growing up and living in Southwick, the port town of Shoreham Harbour in West Sussex, I’ve always known about our little place in England’s radical history.  

In 1651 the executed king’s son Charles Stuart, to be known as Charles II, attempted to regain his throne, travelling to Scotland and raising an army against the Commonwealth. After his defeat at the Battle of Worcester, Charles II travelled south in disguise, chased by the New Model Army, and ended up at Shoreham Port, sneaking off to France in a coal boat called Surprise.

The circuitous route he took, including the time hiding in an oak tree and an apocryphal stay in a cottage on Southwick Green, has now been turned into a walking and cycling route called The Monarch’s Way – and it ends at the tip of the East Arm of Shoreham Harbour, one of my favourite fishing spots for the last 50 years.   
 
In 2018 I decided to write a whole album about this vital period in English history and the part my home port played in Charles II’s escape using many of the instruments which would have been around during the period.  

I approached the project  from exactly the opposite perspective to that of the local Cavaliers who celebrate Charles’s skulking off with a music festival called The Great Escape, a (now closed) music venue called the Escape Club and a Royal Escape Yacht Race.

I called the album Restoration Tragedy because it was a lost opportunity to end the nonsense once and for all. In 1660, after the Restoration, the Act of Oblivion was passed, and everyone was supposed to forget about those 11 years when “the world turned upside down.”

But down the centuries many have remembered the “good old cause” and the Commonwealth has been an inspiration to many subsequent radical movements, and in recent years interest in the period has if anything increased.

Hence Levellers’ Day, hence my album, and hence, when the modern Charles finally ascends to the throne, a forthcoming T shirt “Barnstormer 1649 – One Charles Was Enough!”
 
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