This is his testimony. In 1991, Jon Langford and his mates from Leeds, the Mekons, had just missed their opportunity as rock-n-roll’s latest last best hope. After almost 15 years of lineup changes, a bunch of classic albums with lousy distribution, countless raucous alcohol-soaked tours and stylistic shifts from punk to country, dance and back, the Mekons were on the verge of saving rock music from big hair and empty heads when fights with A&M Records left their newest record without an outlet in the U.S., just as Nirvana opened up the radio to so-called “alternative rock.” They called that record “The Curse of the Mekons,” but their contract problems and bad luck didn’t piss them off as much as the fall of the Soviet Union and the media’s declaration of the “death of socialism.” “How can something really be dead when it hasn’t even happened,” long-time lefty Langford demands in the album’s highlight, “Funeral,” which concludes, “This funeral is for the wrong corpse!”
Last year marked the Mekons’ 25th anniversary, and Jon Langford has continued to be busier than ever. His Pine Valley Cosmonauts assembled an impressive line-up of underground country artists – including Neko Case and Steve Earle – released a well-received anti-death penalty benefit album, “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” early last year, and later in the year, he brought back many of the same artists to record, “The Bottle Let Me Down,” a tongue-in-cheek children’s album that parents could stomach. His alt.country band, the Waco Brothers, just wrapped up a tour on which Langford pulled double duty, playing in support of the Waco’s sixth disc, “New Deal,” as well as playing with tour openers the Sadies, with whom he just released a collaboration titled, “The Mayors of the Moon.” And, last fall, the Mekons marked their silver jubilee not with a compilation looking back on their career, but with an album of new material, “Out of Our Heads,” and a world club tour.
The Mekons Story
Langford spoke with The Socialist from his home in Chicago, on the eve of the Mekons’ tour. The Mekons, he says, were formed in punk’s first wave, with the idea that, “Your favorite band didn’t have to be people you never meet.” Indeed, the band got its start when schoolmates Langford, Tom Greenhaigh and Kevin Lycett borrowed their favorite band’s (and good friends), the Gang of Four’s, instruments to practice and record their new songs. The art school punk scene in Leeds, centered on the Mekons and Gang of Four, was more political, more intellectual and more danceable than London’s.
In the early days, Langford, Greenhaigh and Lycett released a string of 7″ singles, recorded on simple two track equipment, using borrowed instruments and whatever friends they could rope into the session to fill out the band. Their first single, “Never Been in a Riot,” was a piss-take on the Clash’s “White Riot.” Langford says he has always disliked the romantic outsider stance of punk and some of its thoughtless rhetoric. “When you say ‘smash the system,'” he asks, “what the fuck are you talking about? The national health system?” He found the same problem in parts of the organized left. “I was in the Socialist Workers Party for about half an hour,” quips Langford, who describes himself as a Welsh socialist and an “unaffiliated lefty.”
The Mekons’ early singles attracted the attention of Virgin Records, which released their first album in 1979. Its title, “The Quality of Mercy is Not Strnen,” a reference to that old axiom about a thousand monkeys, a thousand typewriters and a work of Shakespeare, was also a commentary on the band’s limited aptitude and everybody-pick-an-instrument-and-play style. Another album followed, but the band fizzled as England’s gig scene grew violent and they became financially dependent on a record label that didn’t know what to do with them. They broke up in 1982, and moved on to new projects. Langford even sold his drums to the goth band Sisters of Mercy, who painted them black.
However, “even when the band thought we split up,” says Langford, “we hadn’t.” The band members continued to hang out and work on art projects together. They even did a few live shows as the Mekons to benefit the striking miners. In 1985, the Mekons made a startling comeback as a country band. They added talented new members, such as Steve Goulding on drums, Susie Honeymoon on fiddle, and singer Sally Timms and released “Fear and Whiskey” on their own independent record label. The album was Hank Williams distilled through punk rock. “Country music struck quite a few chords at that point in our lives,” he says, as a string of broken relationships and too much hard drinking resulted in songs that were stark and personal, but also warm – not to mention musically accomplished.
Two more country albums followed, with better distribution in America, as did other sounds and influences. “Once we got past the first Year Zero days of punk,” he says, “we started to get into the idea of folk music, dance music, reggae.” Along with the new sounds came new members, who seemed to come and go at a rate that could populate several new bands a year, although Langford bristles at the idea that there have been that many personnel changes. “It’s kind of an open door policy, but there’s a core of people,” he says, although he likes the idea of adding younger members and having the band go on. “Here’s the Mekons,” he jokes, “with no one from the Mekons.”
The Curse of the Mekons
Their work in the 80’s made the Mekons critical darlings with a cult-like fan following, and brought them to A&M records. Their first album for A&M should have made them stars. “Destroy your safe and happy lives,” they demanded on the opening track of “The Mekons’ Rock and Roll.” The album was packed full of super-charged rock and rave-ups, but, ever the intellectuals, the band deconstructed their chosen art form throughout the album. One track offers a prostitution analogy for rock-n-roll; others use imperialism and consumerism. “The battles we fought were long and hard, just not to be consumed by rock and roll,” goes one refrain. Unfortunately, their second experience on a corporate record label proved to be more frustrating than the Virgin days. The album’s cover art, which incorporated a licensed image of Elvis Presley, tied the album up in lawsuits and delayed its release. When it finally hit record stores, it was poorly promoted.
More battles with A&M followed. The band wanted to release more albums. The label wanted fewer. Of course, the label also wanted more commercial material. A&M declined to release “Curse of the Mekons,” and it was available in America only as an import for a decade. The Mekons’ curse continued when they moved from A&M to Loud Records, a short-lived subsidiary of Warner Brothers, which tied them up in red tape for two years and never released a single note of music recorded by the band. When the Mekons were finally released from their contract, they immediately released the superb “I (Heart) Mekons” on the independent Touch and Go Records label and never looked back.
“I don’t work for major labels anymore,” Langford says today. Despite his own problems with the major labels over the years, he says he’s mostly uninvolved with the recent artists’ rebellion at the major labels. “There’s such a disparity between musicians,” he says, “that I don’t quite feel a part of that Don Henley struggle.” Still, he’s incredulous at the way the system is set up. “Somebody gives you some money,” he explains, “which you then owe them, to make something which they then own. I can understand why someone who sells three million records gets pissed off.”
Langford manages to eke out a living for himself through his art. “My wife will kill me if I do any more work for no money. For my next benefit album I have to do,” he jokes, “I promised her I’d embezzle all the money.” Working for indie labels, he says that he receives modest royalty checks about six months after a record is released, but that he would have to record about four or five records a year in order for that money to translate into a living wage. His biggest source of money recently was the use of two Waco Brothers songs in episodes of the HBO series “Sex and the City,” which, after repeats and DVD releases, translated in a “sizeable” royalty check.
Heaven and Back
These days, Langford, like the rest of the Mekons, no longer lives in Leeds. He moved to Chicago in 1992 to be with his then-girlfriend, Helen, who is now his wife. The couple has two children, 5-year-old Jimmy and newborn Tommy. He says that it’s because of his children that he finally became involved in U.S. political issues, most notably the campaign to end the death penalty. “I felt like it’s time I should step up,” he says, describing it as a “winnable fight.” On “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” Langford assembled over a dozen Chicago-area alternative country artists, along Nashville’s Steve Earle among others, to cover classic songs about murder and mayhem, with the proceeds benefiting the Illinois Coalition Against the Death Penalty. Langford speaks very warmly of the Chicago music scene, which he feels has even more of a sense of community than the old punk days in Leeds.
“I’m a socialist because I believe in a sense of community,” he says. “I think a community needs to look after people, rather than rip them off. It’s as simple as that.” His sense of community is underscored by his strong identification with the three places he has called home over the years. “I feel like Chicago’s the only place I could live in America,” he says. Ten years in, Chicago (and America) are as much a part of his identity as Leeds and Wales, whose working class identity and “people got to work, people got to eat” ethos he credits for his socialist politics.
Jon Langford will continue to be an activist in the U.S. on his own terms, and despite his own ambivalence about the organized left. “A lot of people on the left seem to fear musicians and artists, for some reason, as being free spirits, or kinda sneer at them for not being intellectually rigorous,” he says. “Music reflects social change,” he explains. “I don’t think it instigates social change, but you can be a morale builder.”
This article was originally published in the March-April 2003 issue of “The Socialist.”
