The World's Police - Leon Rosselson

Leon Rosselson is one of England's most respected songwriters who played a real part in the post-war revival of folk music in the UK. Best known for his politically-edged tune, "The World Turned Upside Down," that tells the story of the historic Digger Commune movement of 1649 in England. Dedicated to the ideal of a classless society, the Diggers settled on privatized land and held it in “the common good,” believing that all should share freely in the gifts of the earth.about the 17th century.
https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2019/09/gerrard-winstanley-19101609-10091676.html
Rosselson continues to reflect the state of modern Britain through his songs that are full of power, passion, anger and hard questions yet catchy and sometime laugh out loud funny. The Guardian called his tunes "fierce, funny, cynical, outraged, blasphemous, challenging and anarchic," Folk Roots described Rosselson as "a sharp observer, a wonderful wordsmith, a composer of originality and depth, but most of all, a superb integrator of words and music." Launching his career in the early '60s, as a member of folk revivalist group the Galliards, Rosselson attracted international attention when several of his songs were featured on the satirical television show, That Was the Week That Was. A major break in Rosselson's bid for success came when Billy Bragg's version of "The World Turned Upside Down" reached the British Top Ten in 1985. Two years later, Rosselson had a minor hit with his independantly-released single, "Ballad of a Spycatcher," recorded with accompaniment by Bragg and the Oyster Band.
He has performed in every conceivable venue around the country, from pub rooms in Wigan and Warrington to the Albert Hall and Festival Hall in London, and has toured the United States, Canada, Holland, Belgium, Switzerland and Australia. He has written songs for community theatre and children’s street theatre, songs for a stage production of They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and a scripted shows about the nuclear threat called ‘No Cause for Alarm’. He has released twelve CDs of his songs and published two songbooks, Bringing the News from Nowhere and Turning Silence into Song. He has also had seventeen children’s books published; the first one, Rosa’s Singing Grandfather, published by Puffin, was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal in 1991. A stage show based on his children’s story The Greatest Drummer in the World was premiered at the Drill Hall in London in 2002 and subsequently went on a nationwide tour of theatres and schools.
From his 1979 LP If I knew who the enemy was, The World's Police has a wide interpretation, being on surface level about the forces of law and order, but in fact developing to show the use of authority as not merely oppressive but apocalyptic. By extension, the same authoritarian forces lead from boots to non-lethal weapons, to machine guns, bombs and ultimately nuclear holocaust.

The song seems to have reached its coda when the verses drop out, and in one of the most unexpected developments of any Leon song, the post-apocalypse world is almost celebrated as one of perfect calm and peace. But Leon spins it around again; he's looking from the perspective of the authorities where peace is synonymous with order, and the theme of the song is launched anew. As with a lot of his songs, it has a timeless quality that still resonates with the times we live today.
The World's Police" features Leon alongside Roy Bailey https://teifidancer-teifidancer.blogspot.com/2018/11/roy-bailey-radical-socialist-folk.html backed by Firoz Shapur on brass and piano, guest guitarist (and LP producer) Martin Carthy unhappily sitting out the session.

"There were arguments, I seem to remember, when we recorded this cheerful little number for If I Knew Who the Enemy Was. Martin Carthy thought that I'd over-arranged it. But there's no arguing over Fiz Shapur's fine octave leap on the French horn shortly before the end of the world."  -  LR (sleevenotes to Guess What They're Selling at the Happiness Counter, 1992)

“Musically, and in content and form, this is about as remote from the folk idiom as it’s possible to be. I’m not sure how I arrived at a melody which required a chord sequence of Edim/Fm/Cm/C sharp minor/G sharp/E. Not, for sure, from strumming the guitar. Could I then have made my first acquaintance with the Brecht-Eisler songs? This wasn’t, in my mind, a song just about the militarisation of society and the suppression of popular uprisings. It was intended to be broader than that – to depict a society based on an ideology of control, order, obedience, repression, domination of nature, deterrence, leading ultimately to the death of the planet.”  -  LR (sleevenotes to The World Turned Upside Down (CD box set), p27-28)

Source:- https://lrsc.weebly.com/  

Why leon Rosselson, is not a “household name” has long baffled me, not only has Leon been writing and singing for more than half a century, but he has remained faithful to a certain concept of political, social and economic justice. For those who share that faith, he will always be a household name

Visit his website at www.leonrosselson.co.uk

And here is a link to a recent  article written by him on the current Labour Party debacle :-

Beyond a Joke - Leon Rosselson


https://medium.com/@rosselson/beyond-a-joke-9296840293a2?source=social.fb 

http://www.leonrosselson.co.uk/