Mark King thrilled to be back on the road again with Level 42 - Hastings date

But as he says, his appreciation has always been huge – not just when times are tough, as he is sure they will be this winter as the cost of living crisis bites, hot on the heels of all the horrors of the pandemic. Level 42 are on the road with a mini tour or tourette, as he calls it, (“so there will be plenty of shouting and swearing”, Mark jokes) which brings them to Hastings’s White Rock Theatre on Friday, November 4.

“I can't really say that everything has come into focus because of the pandemic because I have always thought I've been incredibly blessed to be able to go out there and do what we do for a living and I can honestly say that I can't think of anything more fulfilling than making a hall full of people very happy for a night.

"That’s just what we do and that's as good as it gets but one of the things that I think is becoming increasingly important to me is to make sure that people have the best time that they possibly can. It's really not as if there is a lot of money washing about anymore so if people have saved up their money when people are having a really really hard time, then I really want to give them a fantastic evening. And that’s something that I think is going to be a real challenge for the arts going out as we go through the winter. Everybody is going to have to make cuts where they can somehow but fortunately we've done very well with ticket sales and that's just beautiful to know. This is just a little run of shows that we're doing. It's not a full tour per say. Historically the band has been touring for the past 20 years. We do a full UK and European tour October/November and then the following year we do festivals but then Covid came and threw a spanner in the works as far as that was concerned.”

But they managed to do the October/November 2020 tour a year late in 2021 and now they're back on the road again hot on the heels of a successful trip to Japan in September: “I'm feeling confident about it all. Personally speaking we had a wonderful summer of festivals and now we're back on the road. And Japan was just fantastic. But the lockdowns were a horrible time really. I was really angry with the government because of all the sectors that were getting assistance the whole entertainment industry was sidelined. We got nothing at all and the industry is still reeling from the fact that we lost so many people. So many people had to give up and had to do something else instead. Everything stopped and yet everybody has family and everybody has to try to work and try to do something. I've been doing this for 42 years and then the last two years were incredibly tough. Since 1980 we have been on a cycle of write music, get it released, go on tour, come back, write more music and that's just the way it has gone, the yearly cycle. We weren't able to do that anymore. I started doing that at the age of 21 and I'm 63. It was horrible.

“I just had to decamp back to the Isle of Wight. We have a home in London but the Isle of Wight has always being my main home and that was a saving grace for me. I was able to go out and do little jobs and little projects at home. It was not what I would have chosen to do but it got me through and now looking back it's funny how soon you forget. It just seems like it was so long ago.”