The Great Levellers of Society’s Ills : British Band Brings Its Lyrical Messages and Folk-Rock Blend of Music to Santa Ana

When Mark Chadwick looks at the challenges facing his native England and those of the United States, where his band the Levellers is touring now, he sees more similarities than differences despite the miles that divide them.

“You’ve got beggars on the streets of Boston, where we are now, and on the streets of Brighton, where I’m from,” said Chadwick, the band’s singer and lead guitarist, in a telephone interview.

The Levellers, who perform Sunday at the Rhythm Cafe in Santa Ana with folk-tinged rapper Me Phi Me, are the latest in a line of British sensations trying to find an audience in the United States. The band’s socially oriented lyrics are backed by a musical attack that mixes elements of British folk and driving rock rhythms.

Propelled by the manic fiddling of Jon Sevink, the band’s swirling Celtic-flavored sound has drawn comparisons to everyone from Fairport Convention to the Waterboys and the Pogues. While Chadwick understands that journalists like to use such comparisons, he doesn’t want the Levellers to be pigeonholed.

“I don’t mind (the comparisons), as long as people realize we’re not that; we are who we are,” Chadwick said. “We don’t really like to be labeled, as much as any band doesn’t like to be labeled.”

The evolution of the band’s sound was “pure accident,” Chadwick said. “The sound grew out of the mix of people and the songwriting approach. It just came together as a sort of meeting of like-minded people.”

Members of the band also are like-minded when it comes to the lyrical message, which tends to takeon the ills of an industrial society, such as the soul-robbing pull of materialism and the unequal distribution of wealth and justice.

The band takes its name from a radical English political party of the mid-1600s that challenged the political power of the aristocracy, declaring, “The poorest that lives hath as true a right to give a vote as well as the richest and greatest.”

Those egalitarian beliefs are practiced within the band. All five members, identified only by their first names in album liner notes and press materials, share songwriting credits; musical credits are omitted entirely from the liner notes.

Their song “Sell Out,” on the band’s American debut record “Levelling the Land,” provides an example of the band’s message, although perhaps more stridently than most songs on the album:

It’s 1991, it seems that freedom’s dead and gone

The power of the rich is held by few

Keep the young ones paralyzed, educated by your lies

Keep the old ones happy with the news “We like to be a sort of alternative news service sometimes,” Chadwick explained, although he added that writing about social issues can be hard. “It’s difficult to write about issues without being cliched, without being boring,” he said.

The main goal is to give the material “a bit of soul and a bit of meaning instead of regurgitating the same old message,” he said. “It’s not just rhetoric.”

In England, the message has caught on in a big way. After forming in 1988 and releasing two EPs on its own label in 1989, the band released its first full-length album in 1990, “A Weapon Called the Word.” Despite being courted by several major labels, the band chose independent China Records for its breakthrough “Levelling the Land” album (distributed by Elektra Records in the United States).

Melody Maker, the British music weekly, labeled the group the hit of the recent Glastonbury Festival in England, where it played a “raggedly glorious set” before a crowd of several hundred thousand. “They are exactly what Glastonbury is about, a pocket of naive determination in a . . . bad world,” Melody Maker enthused--high praise indeed, considering the fickle nature of a British music press that is often stingy with compliments.

“We have a large sort of following that believe in the band,” Chadwick said. Much of that belief has been fostered by the group’s high-energy concerts, which help make the group’s sometimes heavy message go down easier.

“It’s just very energetic,” Chadwick said of the live show. “We don’t just look at our shoes and do our songs. We feed each other. We feed the audience and they feed us.”

Although they are still building an audience in the United States (this monthlong tour is their second U.S. swing), avoiding the trappings that can come with their success back home is a “constant challenge” for the band members, all in their mid-20s, Chadwick said.

There are pressures to accept tour sponsorships and merchandise deals and to play larger and larger venues--”the things bands do to generate more money when they get big,” Chadwick said. Such things can only serve to isolate the band from their audience, he concludes.

“We’re not interested in doing that, because it’s not what we’re about, and we don’t want the extra money.”

The Levellers and Me Phi Me play Sunday at 8 p.m. at the Rhythm Cafe, 3503 S. Harbor Blvd. in Santa Ana. $6. (714) 556-2233.