Tales of Derring Do

“I heard you singing/You sound depraved . . .” (‘Hello Cruel World’)

JON LANGFORD crouches behind the mixing desk like a cartoon sniper, speed-operating faders with demonic glee.

“I have to do this,” he dead-pans seriously. Then a manic grin splashes his face, “. . . “’cos I make vast amounts of money from it!”

Well, perhaps not. But Mekons are back for another album I Love Mekons. From Marxist punks with a mission to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, avenging angels of the unemployed and the dispossessed, through to an incarnation as the Dubliners’ twisted bastard love-children, into a straggling aggregation of World Music shot through with the deep undertow of myth, from Leeds to Nashville – and now . . . I Love Mekons. They’re a band with a history to respect, and much to investigate.

“There are Irish bands better than the Pogues playing in pubs down in London.” Jon Langford is totally unaffected by the irradiation of Mekonic celebrity. He’s as matey and casual as a drinking buddy of long standing (and some staggering). Playfully argumentative. “Irish music has been taken over by middle-class people. Scholarly people who say ‘ooh, look at the fantastic semi-quaver form of this song, marvellous. This is really wonderful clever music.’” He mimics arty-fartyness with viciously accurate fey gestures. “But English Country Dance Music has always been so primitive and so robust. It revels in its own ineptitude. No-one’s been able to colonise it in that way. It still exists. You can still hear it, it’s still being played . . . But it’s a crude, coarse, pounding thumping noise. People inherit the style of English Country Dance Music as much by the mistakes that are passed on. They learn the mistakes from their parents, so they play the mistakes. That’s the way it mutates. And that was always the idea of the Mekons . . .”

The Mekons are Techno-Primitives. Always have been. That’s where the continuity lies. It’s inebriating music that’s as much fun as a frisky stoat. It’s also slyly subversive. Sometimes the lyrics are packed like lumpy grocery shoved unsystematically into the misshapen bags of their song structures. Sometimes it’s as rich as musical mud-wrestling. But when it’s good, it’s so good it hurts.

Jon Langford slouches back in a battered swivel chair, pausing only to switch anecdotal direction. He pulls on a can of Stella Artois, and goes into a story about Dick Taylor. There’s a play-back of choogling low-octane boogie oozing up from the studio below as he explains how the grizzled original guitarist with the Pretty Things wound up sporadically guesting with the Mekons. He tells a good tale. After an evening of it my brain-matter is sloshing about in my skull like slop in a rusty bucket.

DANCING WITH DOGMA

“Outer Space is a pretty nice place/Dan Dare – oh yeah!” (‘Dan Dare’)

In the late lamented Underground comic-book Oink (no. 40, 31st October, 1978) there’s a photo picture-strip story starring The Mekonstones, called ‘2001 Million Years B.C.: A Space Filler’. It’s filmed entirely in the rain, and is not entirely unrelated to Stanley Kubrick’s SF movie of a not dissimilar title. “Blimey! It’s a mystery object sent here by an alien race, to teach me wisdom and truth and speed up the process of evolution,” says a Mekonstone by way of ‘handy plot explanation’ as he encounters the giant housebrick placed in the frame by cunning collage. This occurs after the attack of the plastic dinosaur, but before Mekonstone Jon Langford gets crushed by the ‘alien monolith’. The moral; if you must marry young, try to get a Council Flat first. Sound advice for us all.

“S.F.? I used to read it,” he admits by way of explanation, as I thrust the issue of Oink at him accusingly. “I can’t remember what I actually read of that S.F. stuff now. But we had a song called ‘Dan Dare’ which was quite funny. It was a sort of spoof Punk Rock song. Political Punk Rock. We did an interview for Kaleidoscope on Radio 4. Original Mekon Kevin (Lycett) took it. It was about connections between comic books . . . or was it just about comic books? The whole thing basically. And it was “here is a band called the Mekons,” and they played a little bit of ‘Dan Dare’ on Radio 4 at about ten in the morning. Then they asked Kevin why. He said it was ‘because Dan Dare is the archetypal Paternalist Capitalist Imperialist’ and stuff like that. Which probably wasn’t the reason, but it stands up. You have to submit Dan Dare to some pretty rigorous analysis. He’s probably not a very nice bloke.”

I Love Mekons has so far had a mixed reception. To Select it’s “like the Fall with no sloppiness and no Mark E. Smith i.e., with all the fun taken out.” To some – like the lines in their song ‘The Gin Palace’, perhaps “they’ve cashed in the chips on their shoulders”? And sure, early Mekons had a more calculated and protracted savagery, but they’ve never restricted their inputs to single dimensions. The lyric sheet to their Honky Tonkin name-checks everyone from Gram Parsons to Ulrike Meinhof, E.P. Thompson to Wittgenstein, Engels to John Huston. To that we can add comic-books and Country Dance.

“We started off as a band who weren’t going to play gigs headlining, and weren’t going to make any records. We just used to borrow the gear that was in Gang of Four’s rehearsal room. It was a bit embarrassing, because we got a record out before they did! Ah-hem, and they were a bit pissed off for a while. Then they got their record out, and they were alright. It was a funny time, ’cos we just had an all-consuming passion to wanna be in it, and doing it – but there was absolutely no ambition whatsoever to do any more than be just sort of . . . making a statement. It was quite hardline politically. We made up a really harsh manifesto of what you should do if you were in a band; then we proceeded to – sort of, break every rule. That’s what we’ve been doing ever since . . .!”

But no, not quite. The Mekons have always been a Left, Green Anarchist issues band. They did the Mindless Slaughter compilation album, a benefit by ‘Artists For Animals’ to raise funds for Hunt Saboteurs. Later they could be found on Dig This: A Tribute To The Great Strike LP for the heroic last stand of the NUM, ’Til Things Are Brighter for the Terence Higgins AIDS Trust, ‘Fight The Cuts’ for They Shall Not Pass in 1984, and more. Now it’s Born To Choose. You get Mekons alongside REM with Natalie Merchant, Sugar, Tom Waits, NRBQ, and other worthies – all proceeds to various Woman’s Rights groups including the Woman’s Anti-Rape Exchange, and the valuable National Abortion Rights Action League.

“I thought we were being really boring in interviews,” he smiles amiably. “We used to just talk about pretty high-powered boring Marxist dogmas and things like that, which is what we were interested in at the time. Things that we’re not quite so interested in now. You know what I mean? This doesn’t mean we’re any less political, but I just think you live and learn. When I look back now to some of the things we were thinking about then, we were trying to physically rebuild the music we were making, and the whole industry too. We thought we could actually do that. And now we’re sort of, like, nursing the wounds. Well – no, we’re not now, but we were for a while. And then, you just have to re-think. You can’t sort of confront a massive corporate industry like the Music Business, and Capitalism in general by just singing songs that disclaim it all, saying how much you don’t like it. It doesn’t work like that.”

Can making an issue out of who distributes your records (an Indie or a major) still be the measure of your political commitment? Mekons remain Indie, for what it’s worth. The current album is on Quarterstick.

WEIRD SCENES INSIDE THE VINYL-MINE

“Now you’ve got anorexia nervosa/We’ll have to sleep a little closer” (‘The Quality Of Mercy Is Not ?????’)

We are just down the road from Kirkstall. Some debate its merits. They say Kirkstall is to Leeds what Sarajevo is to the former Yugoslavia. Others says Leeds can be a Haight-Ashbury (or at least Astbury?) for the 1990s. And somewhere in Leeds Mekons’ vocabulary of influences expanded through the post-Punk Eighties; into Folk and English Country Dance. “I like Folk Music. But we’re not a Folk Band.” And Country? Isn’t that seen as a reactionary right-wing music? “Erm – yes, I think it is. It’s seen as that,” he admits. “A lot of it isn’t. Probably a lot of people involved in it are like that. But that’s like saying all the White American Working Class is right-wing, which isn’t necessarily true. Merle Haggard is probably absolutely frightening politically, but I just think his songs are absolutely beautiful. He’s a really excellent songwriter.”

I love Mekons because within their enjoyable ragbag of styles there’s a weird dignity and truth that goes beyond mere songs, chord changes, or slogans. I Love Mekons puts it all through the blender so that all their history and evolution is there condensed into each of its segments. Sally Timms adds a cohesive purity to four of its tracks (including an excoriating ‘Millionaire’), while Langford and Tom Greenhalgh define the rougher edges of ‘I Don’t Know’ and ‘Special’. Susie Honeyman’s violin, Sarah Corina and John Langley all add to a rich stew of sharp rock ’n’ roll mythology.

“I don’t know where we are stylistically,” says Jon Langford frankly. “We just . . . listen to certain things and absorb them. You can’t, sort of, be purer than pure. I don’t like the heavy avant garde where they try to force your head with music. I mean, I suppose Hip-Hop is an interesting development, but I don’t really want to play Hip-Hop with the Mekons particularly. The music I like best is music that is real mish-mash. You know, there’s lots of different types of Roots Music that you’re inevitably going to be processing anyway. It’s like, if you only listen to the Top Forty all the time, you’re going to churn out stuff influenced by that.”

He gets up and looks out the window, over the birdshit-spattered roofs of Kirkstall. “Or you can investigate the whole history of music . . .”