We know them as the underbelly of miscreant, maverick culture. That wail. That definitive jiggledy-jiggledy-jiggledy-dee violin. Cider. Doc-Martin boots. Travelers. Those dreads. An army-sized fan base notorious for dogs tied to pieces of string. A whole new identity of crusty-chic worn with cider-swilling pride by those originating predominantly from East Anglia. Oliver Cromwell. Politics and music. Turds in the post to the NME.

Contrary to the powers that be, the Levellers live on, defying insult and mockery penned by every power-tripping muso-journalist on the pop-planet. They make a bit of a song and a dance. They make a bit of a god-damned racket. The Levellers rule Britannia.

That's the Britannia Underground massive, that is. All that, and with a very secure place in the heart of British pop-culture. Quite randomly, their anti-establishment sound has struck a chord with disaffected youth and earned them one big, fat, commercial success.

We all know, and hum to, whether we like it or not, that uplifting, anarcho-folk anthem One Way. We all know who was responsible for that endemic of matted, massive, and odorous dreads that spread faster than an STD round the pubescent population of 1980s Fen-Land Britain.

Ladies and Gents, lend a warm hand for that turd-sending anarchist, real live traveler, and hero of Norwich, Jeremy, lead singer of the Levellers.

Despite my obvious excitement at meeting this nice-young-man of the anti-Establishment, I'm really late, having gorged myself on much-needed chips which seemed to take five hours longer to purchase than expected. Dizzily apologetic to an apparently rather miffed tour manager, I'm sternly promised a mere five minutes with the folk-meister who soon appears, padding shoeless across a shiny, polished-wood floor.

It's an odd first impression. This infamous band, notorious for anarchy and revolution in the UK, quietly sat round what appears to be nothing short of a banquet-type feast, opulently spread out in the inner regions of the Sheffield City Ballrooms. However, despite appearances - commercial crusties living on the fat of the underground, the Levellers are not.

Jeremy: Can I have a chip?

He's softly spoken and completely unassuming, creating rapport with a familiarity most celebrities lack. And as the five minutes I've been promised subtly expand into ten, then fifteen, I'm struck by how easy it is to chat to this singing Leveller, as his whole demeanor is pretty much exactly what he is: that of a genuinely nice bloke. With lots of dreads.

The Levellers are an anomaly in 20th Century fin-de-siecle pop culture. They defied contemporary, conservative, music convention with a punky, post-Pogues, deeply untrendy sound. They spat in the face of bad bress with an up-yours attitude that drove the apparently peace-loving Jeremy to send one NME reporter a turd in the post.

Vanguard: What happened there, then? Turds through the post to the NME, and all that?

Jeremy: [laughs] That was me a few years ago. [More seriously] No, but, it hurt, you know? We'd be playing to 3000 people, all of them having a fucking brilliant time and there'd be nothing in the review about our music. Nothing about the atmosphere, the people leaping up and down to our sound, to what we were saying, at all. This one particular bloke, I've chatted to since, and he's apologized for all the shit they put in the NME about us. He kind of admitted it was all the power-trip of being a music journalist at the time.

Vanguard: It's weird, isn't it? - the power the music press have over kids' preconceptions over what makes cool music. I remember just getting into music at the time and turning to the NME like it was some kind of bible and according to the bible, the Levellers were totally uncool. I have to admit.

Jeremy: [Pauses]. Yeah.

Despite derision amongst mainstream 'cool', the Levellers grew. And grew. And grew. Until now they're pretty much here to stay. And damned-straight they should. You've got to give respect to the Levellers.

Not for just growing, though. Oasis grew. Phil Collins, unfortunately, grew, as did Bryan-fucking-Adams. The wonderful thing about the Levellers' growth - their commercial and popular growth - is its wickedly subversive nature. It's exceptional improbability. Its against-the-odds defiance against the commonly trendy. The way how in the nineties - divine time of the Levellers' incubus - they battled for print with the soon-to-be homogenous Madchester scene. And lost.

But are still bloody well here. O yes. It's a fat big-up to the Levellers today for the way they're, bizarrely enough, both commercially successful, and still pretty much crusty. The way they manage to retain album-sales in their thousands, and a real integrity vociferously rare in today's cynically driven pop-culture. The Levellers. Wow.

Vanguard: So. Music Press. Any opinions?

Jeremy: Well, we've never had much of a relationship with the mainstream music papers, but partly that's because they're so conservative and they are the authority figures of the music world. We've never really fitted into that, we've always been on the outside of all those musical scenes. And in fact, the band formed partly as a reaction against all that sort of thing where people just wanted to be rock stars on a Friday night down the pub to all their mates. Everything happens because one reviewer's there who thinks they're great and thinks that they can make them.

Vanguard: How did it all start then?

Jeremy: It was partly me meeting Mark who I saw down the pub and moaning about the whole thing, as local bands do tend to be a bit that way inclined, that got the band together. It was just because we had - we felt we had - things to say. It was just about having a laugh without worrying whether we were commercially successful, having a laugh and saying what we ought to say.

Vanguard: So, you see yourselves as pretty politically active in your music. There's the whole revolutionary thing, isn't there?

Jeremy: Oh yeah, absolutely. Though musically we're not so overtly political as we used to be. That's only because we take it for granted that people know where we're coming from.

Vanguard: Kind of preaching to the converted.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. We don't want to keep banging away at the same sort of things. Of course, these days we're a lot more financially successful so we've been able to start things up to do those political things instead of just actually just talking about them.

Vanguard: Really, what sort of things?

Jeremy: Well, like the Justice group who we fund, who keep an eye on all the Criminal Justice Act and there's the Conscious Cinema who do alternative news reports.

Vanguard: Ah. Like Schnews [underground 'the news they don't sell us' publication].

Jeremy:Yeah, well Schnews are affiliated to Justice. And then in our studio we do free sessions for local bands and every weekend it's broadcast on the local radio.

If that all sounds a little philanthropic for your taste, preoccupy yourselves with a retrospection on what, exactly, happened to the politics in pop.

We all know how music transformed itself in the 20th Century. The Beatles declared themselves bigger than Jesus, hippies spread a lurve-vibe that temporarily turned off thousands from the system, and punks, erm, made a hell of a lot of noise. Religion crawled off the face of the planet, morality became deeply unfashionable, and God became a DJ.

Exactly what happened in the eighties, however, will be the subject of books, dissertations, and hot debate, for many years to come. Apart from an awful lot of synth-pop which, in today's as-long-as-its-sampled-to-a-funky-beat ethos, lives on, fuck knows what happened there. Slow and sure, as the rights of workers all over the globe were sinisterly, systematically eroded, similarly so was the grim fate of politics in pop.

The excessive eighties left one fat mother of a come-down. The nineties saw no cash, no rights, no heroes. Nihilism, heroin-chic, grunge, and glamorous excess, became buzzwords for youth identity. Madchester. Brit-Pop. New-Wave-Of-New-Wave became real, live, trends. Trends became marketable products pioneered not by artists, but by press. Subversion lost its punch. And became a new cosmetic. Which paves the way mighty easily for Steps, really. Steps, with their cute, nicely manufactured, Barbie-blonde dreads. Steps, the Spice Girls and that brethren of bland - Boyzone.

While God became a DJ, the pulpit became decks, and clubs the new House Of God, contrastingly, the right to party became illegal. Unless validated by commercial motivation, the free-party became grossly driven underground. Obscure. Untrendy. Unglamorous. The lot of hippies, drop-outs.

And what's our favourite slogan today, folks? Kill all hippies. Yeah, baby. Not a problem for commercial looters, Gatecrasher, Ministry Of Sound, and Cream: free-party in the mud to some random DJ? You've got to be kidding. Why bother, with a nice little commercial monopoly like ours? Why bother truly subvert, when capitalising on the dance scene is simply so, well, lucrative, really?

As the for the supply and demand theory. Whoever demanded the right to rather be at Gatecrasher and pay five pounds for a bottle of water, have their clothes derided by door-staff, deserves a punch in the face, thank you very much.

The mainstream placidly accepted this demand off of our new, sonically-improved pulpits. But not the Levellers. O no.

Vanguard: So, do you think music can save the world? [Long Pause]

Jeremy: No. Well, to be honest with you I'm too cynical [laughs] to believe that. [More serious] I do think that music can save people but can't really save the world - only people can save the world. That's why in one of our most famous songs, One Way, there's a line that goes 'this guitar won't change the world'.

But … you can change individuals.

It's no good people just singing along and jumping up and down to the Levellers - you've got to actually do something. Go out there and do it - do it for yourself. We love people coming along and having a great time to us, but the only thing, at the end of the day, that's going to achieve is: a. them having a fucking great time; and b. us making loads of money - now that doesn't actually change anything. Apart from that the money goes back into our studio, and the money helps us try to achieve those political aims. What we're really saying to people is that you've got to do it yourselves.

Vanguard: Do you think you might have started off being a lot more idealistic with what you're doing with your music? And then …

Jeremy: No. Because we've always had to be realistic. When we started off we were all living in squats or whatever, with no money. That forces you to be realistic, you know. And we've always been termed anarchists.

Vanguard: An odd term, isn't it?

Jeremy: Yeah. And we've sort of gone along with it because we don't support any political parties and we generally think politics is quite boring as a thing to be talking about. It's good fun doing action, but policy politics can be a bit dull.

Vanguard: So you're into direct action?

Jeremy: Yeah, definitely. We've done it loads. But I remember ages ago doing this interview where I was saying that I was simply too much of a cynic to be a good anarchist. To be an anarchist you've got to have faith in human nature [laughs, cynically]. Which I don't have. But, at the same time, we as a band have lived in an anarchist community and it did work. It wasn't in this country, it was in Holland just outside Amsterdam and we lived there for a good year or something before it got bull dozed. So, yeah, we're lucky in that we've seen it working. It can work, but … living that made me realize hat the population in general just isn't ready for that. You only have to look at Bosnia and places like that to see that when the law genuinely does collapse then people just start raping and pillaging. And there was that much raping and pillaging there that it couldn't have just been the malicious minority, or the army, but normal people, too. So … [suddenly realizes how dark he's sounding] I don't want to sound too pessimistic, or anything! We are actually a really idealsitic band.

Vanguard: Sometimes, if you're an idealist you have to protect yourself, too.

Jeremy: Yeah. I mean I am a cynic but I'm fully aware that I am a cynic. I'm not cynical like cynical means taking people's money and laughing at them. Which is horrible. We're cynical in a more ironic way, where we know the pitfalls of idealism. We can't change the world but we can change people's opinions. We know we have done that.

But at the same time we've always said that people should think for themselves. We're not telling them anything other than that. Don't always believe necessarily what you hear. Find out for yourself whether it's true. Which goes back to the 'It's not good enough to just sing along for the songs'. But then, if you do just want to jump up and down and have a good time …

Vanguard: Fair enough.

Jeremy: Yeah, exactly. That's what we're doing!

I leave the interview pretty much a Levellers convert. To coin the Face, the kind of cultural DIY pioneered a decade ago by artists like the Levellers, last year 'shone with a sense of purpose'. Rock on the Levellers.

Happy Birthday Revolution.