The Movement’s latest release, MOVE!, opens with Fidel Castro in full rally mode, espousing socialism and the revolution. A guitar riffs into overdrive, the walking bass line teams up with steadfast drums, and an amplified six-string is struck with windmill force, recalling earlier mod music mammoths of the late ’60s.

Musically, The Movement’s style and modus operandi are a hybrid of mod and Motown. Guitarist, lyricist and vocalist Lukas Scherfig was drawn to the mod revival group The Jam and its superior choice of instruments before even hearing the music (both Scherfig and bassist Lars Schídler play Rickenbacker guitars, as did The Jam). “I knew that I would like the band when I first saw pictures of them,” says Scherfig. “But there’s also the lyrics, their working-class way of telling stories about daily life.”

The British invasion of the ’60s borrowed heavily from black-American music of the time, incorporating the rhythm and blues and soul sound into the bass lines and reworking the lyrics just enough to relate the plights of the English downtrodden. Being raised in the very-white environs of Denmark, Scherfig found it difficult to hear Motown music. “But once I did,” he says, “I wanted it more and more.”

Members of The Movement cruise in their van singing along to The Temptations, Otis Redding and The Supremes. They speak of The Jam and The Who with as much reverence as they speak of Lars Grenaa and Rune Eltard-ßrensen, rebel activists who dumped red paint on state minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen and are currently serving long jail sentences.

Scherfig comes from an artistic background; both his mother and father were painters. His revolutionary tendencies may be in the genes, as Hans Scherfig, a revered writer, painter and socialist who was part of the underground resistance during World War II, was his grandfather.

What’s the point of preaching socialism now? Scherfig thinks it’s as relevant as ever in these dark days of xenophobia and immigrant deportation. “Five years ago you wouldn’t hear the things that are being said now in the press, on television, in the supermarkets,” he says. Scherfig sees a solution in applying the socialist ideal in its purest form.

“I’m not saying things were good,” he says of the days of communist oppression. “I just see socialism as a future, something for many people, where the goal of capitalism is one person owning everything, like the game of Monopoly.”