The Mekons, a band that I have long loved, first emerged from the 1977 British punk scene, and progressed from socialist art students with no musical skills to the prolific, raucous progeny of Hank Williams. They have been releasing music which has combined politics with post-punk, folk and country music for the last 40 years as radical innovators of both first generation punk and insurgent roots music. For years continuing while staying true to the punk ethos. Political provocateurs. Social agitators. Punk's reigning contrarians willing outcasts, exuberant luddites the Mekons have been called all this and more. The late Lester Bangs called them “the most revolutionary in the history of rock’n’roll” the Mekons were notorious, as critic Greil Marcus notes, for being “the band that took punk ideology most seriously.
There story began at the University of Leeds, where a politicized student body was further ignited by the Sex Pistols’ “Anarchy in the UK” tour of ’77. Out of that flashpoint came one great band ,Gang of Four and a group of incompetent malcontents who picked up Gang of Four’s instruments when the group wasn’t looking.
They were from the outset highly principled stating ”That anybody could do it; that we didn’t
want to be stars; that there was no set group as such, anybody could
get up and join in and instruments would be swapped around; that there’d
be no distance between the audience and the band; that we were nobody
special”
They called themselves the
Mekons after a sci-fi movie villain from the popular 1950’s
comic The Eagle . releasing singles on a variety of labels and
their first album, The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, was recorded using a friends bands instruments. Due to an error by the
record company art department the cover featured pictures of, fellow
Leeds band, Gang of Four by mistake.
The group’s first iteration was a purposefully sloppy mix of mangled
power chords and ideological messages, some of them aimed at the punk
revolution itself; the Mekons answered the Clash’s “White Riot” with the
reality bites of “Never Been in a Riot.” They played benefits for
striking miners and fought hard against the short sharp shock of
Margaret Thatcher’s domestic policies.After The Mekons Story compilation
in 1982 the band called it a day, with Langford forming The Three Johns, and that
seemed to be that.
However they soon returned and began pumping out album after album again on a multitude of labels and even at one time making it onto a major though the resulting album was a commercial flop and though it was loved by the fans they were soon dropped like the proverbial hot potato and cut adrift again.
The band’s discovery of folk music and honky-tonk in the early ’80s recharged them for the long run; The band's longtime members - Jon Langford, Tom Greenhalgh, Dick Taylor( a greying elder who’d been in the very first Rolling Stones lineup) and Kevin Lycett - had added a superb fiddle player Susie Honeyman, an accordionist Rico Bell, multi-instrumentalist Lu Edmonds formely of the Damned. and a professional drummer, Steve Goulding (from Graham Parker's band, the Rumour), whose beat steadied the band somewhat, and then Sally Timms arrived, her voice wicked with the weight of class warfare and long nights drinking at the local.
The albums of this era — from “Fear and Whiskey” (1985) to “I [heart] Mekons” (1993) — are majestic works of roots-rock entropy, angry and exhausted, daring and funny. Their track
“Robin Hood”, interspersed choruses from Percy Bysshe Shelley with attacks on Winston Churchill as villain “shooting down/the South Wales striking miners”, and they occupied roughly the same musical space as the Oysterband. When they recorded ''Fear and Whisky,'' the Mekons had been transformed by exposure to American music, especially honky-tonk country and Cajun music; both are connected to British and Celtic traditions from the home front.
With abundant good humor and dark irony they released The Mekons Rock ’n’ Roll” in 1989 it was recieved very favourably . 'Rock-and-roll'' turns up all over the album. The sprightly ''Club Mekon'' links rock to sex, but not in the standard way; for the Mekons, each is ''a commodity, to be bought and sold.'' In ''Learning to Live on Your Own,'' a ballad, Ms. Timms sings that she'll ''throw a rock-and-roll song on the fire''; in ''Amnesia,'' a jumble of images from the 1960's, band members bellow, ''any old army high on drugs/ fight that rock-and-roll war.''Not that rock-and-roll is the only target for the band's skepticism. ''Empire of the Senseless''
Over the years and after the band had learnt to play their instruments their musical style transformed and The Mekons were now famous for playing country and folk music as well as brief forays into rock and even dub reggae. With around twenty albums to their name plus untold amount of singles and EP’s as well as appearances on dozens of compilations
For more than
four decades they’ve been a constant contradiction, an ongoing art
project of observation, anger and compassion, all neatly summed up in
the movie Revenge of the Mekons, which has ironically brought an
upsurge
in their popularity around the US as new audiences discovers their
shambling splendour. That the band is still with us nearly four decades
after its founding, the only one of British punk’s class of 1977 still
standing , is
remarkable in itself. More endearing is that the Mekons’ shaggy,
jaded-but-jovial communal ethos still holds strong, embracing alt-folk,
country-punk, pub-rock, leftist rage, boozy humor, a rotating cast of
men and women, and a dedication to taking nothing seriously but the
music and the moment. However they soon returned and began pumping out album after album again on a multitude of labels and even at one time making it onto a major though the resulting album was a commercial flop and though it was loved by the fans they were soon dropped like the proverbial hot potato and cut adrift again.
The band’s discovery of folk music and honky-tonk in the early ’80s recharged them for the long run; The band's longtime members - Jon Langford, Tom Greenhalgh, Dick Taylor( a greying elder who’d been in the very first Rolling Stones lineup) and Kevin Lycett - had added a superb fiddle player Susie Honeyman, an accordionist Rico Bell, multi-instrumentalist Lu Edmonds formely of the Damned. and a professional drummer, Steve Goulding (from Graham Parker's band, the Rumour), whose beat steadied the band somewhat, and then Sally Timms arrived, her voice wicked with the weight of class warfare and long nights drinking at the local.
The albums of this era — from “Fear and Whiskey” (1985) to “I [heart] Mekons” (1993) — are majestic works of roots-rock entropy, angry and exhausted, daring and funny. Their track
“Robin Hood”, interspersed choruses from Percy Bysshe Shelley with attacks on Winston Churchill as villain “shooting down/the South Wales striking miners”, and they occupied roughly the same musical space as the Oysterband. When they recorded ''Fear and Whisky,'' the Mekons had been transformed by exposure to American music, especially honky-tonk country and Cajun music; both are connected to British and Celtic traditions from the home front.
With abundant good humor and dark irony they released The Mekons Rock ’n’ Roll” in 1989 it was recieved very favourably . 'Rock-and-roll'' turns up all over the album. The sprightly ''Club Mekon'' links rock to sex, but not in the standard way; for the Mekons, each is ''a commodity, to be bought and sold.'' In ''Learning to Live on Your Own,'' a ballad, Ms. Timms sings that she'll ''throw a rock-and-roll song on the fire''; in ''Amnesia,'' a jumble of images from the 1960's, band members bellow, ''any old army high on drugs/ fight that rock-and-roll war.''Not that rock-and-roll is the only target for the band's skepticism. ''Empire of the Senseless''
Over the years and after the band had learnt to play their instruments their musical style transformed and The Mekons were now famous for playing country and folk music as well as brief forays into rock and even dub reggae. With around twenty albums to their name plus untold amount of singles and EP’s as well as appearances on dozens of compilations
Critically and cultishly adored The Mekons deserve to be much more well known as they continue to make innovative original music while staying true to the punk ethos. After a bit of a hiatus these beloved survivors are back with Deserted, their first full studio album in eight years. Their new album was recorded in the desert environs of Joshua Tree, California after,the group’s bassist The Baron (aka Dave Trumfio) set up a studio in the Yucca Valley, where the Mekons became inspired by the surroundings, leading to the writing and recording of Deserted. “There are deserts everywhere. We took time to ponder the vastness and the weirdness of the desert. Going to the country to get your head together is a ripe old rock cliché. We went to the desert to have our brains scoured… We went from one desert to another. A more hopeful place where we arm ourselves with spikes and endure" main man Jon Langford has said and their new album is every bit as bold, raw and imaginative as the work that’s established them as one of the most revolutionary groups in punk-rock history.
They have managed to craft something very much in keeping with their surroundings.and is drenched with widescreen, barbed-wire atmosphere and hard-earned (but ever amused) defiance. Deserted is still rooted in their dual comfort zones of raucous post-punk and rollicking alt-country, folk balladry, sea shanties and whatever else strikes their creative fancy.
The formidable opening track “Lawrence Of California”, is inspired by the guitarist Tom Greenhalgh wandering in Joshua Tree National Park, it arrives on a swell of feedback that erupts into a shout-along gang vocal that remind us they’ve lost none of the firebrand punk spirit on which they were originally founded.
The next song “Harar, 1883” imagines the patron saint of punk poetry, Arthur Rimbaud’s time spent in the area of Harar, where he, “…was not troubled in the least / To give up writing poetry.”
The almost pastoral 'How Many Stars' ' sees Tom Greenhalgh’s deadpan vocals unravel a magical and occasionally mystical tale, which looks to the massive desert night sky pondering the universe and the hereafter while in the harshness of the environment. As beautiful and moving as this song is, there is still humor in a line like “For I am pickled, I am done.” Yes, it’s a folk song about death.
“In The Desert”, Sally Timms sings about a shattered statue half sunk, a “creature of Bush and Blair”, a reference to the Gulf War and sees her quoting from the closing three lines of Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias.”
The raucous 'Mirage’ follows and is anything but a dreamy number.It's raw and exciting.Calling out Mark E Smith’s name in a brightl lit alley, as guitars grind away like buzz saws amid cries of “Where you hiding?“ “This is as good as it’s going to get/Between the mirage and the sunset.”
The beautiful"Weimar Vending Machine ” makes a direct reference to “Alabama Song”by Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (also known as “Moon Of Alabama”), a song that The Doors covered turning into a delightful David Bowie tribute “That starts off about Iggy Pop in Berlin,” Langford explains. “There’s a story that he went to a vending machine and saw the word ‘sand’. He put his money in and a bag of sand came out.”
Then there is the gorgeous rambling “Andromeda”, with a jaunty reggae beat that is undercut by Langford’s echoey, distorted vocals and really lovely violin playing. It’s as left-field as The Mekons can get. The album ends with the atmospheric ‘After The Rain’. It has a dark and haunting sound, a cinematic, elegiac farewell that finds the Mekons on top of their game.
The Mekons are without a doubt still passionate, it's embedded into everything that they do. Upon the whole the album looks like a musical landscape, that is monumental but is subject to chaos.The LP sounds fresh and not out of time. Deserted is a joy and marks the welcome return of one of the planet's most essential rock and roll bands that after 40 years still have something to say. Deserted is the Mekons at their finest, and is a proud addition to their catalog. It's folk music by folks who are pissed and disillusioned, lost and longing to be found, but only on their terms. It’s a testimony to resilience, showcasing a band still as creatively vital as when they first formed, living up to their reputation ' as the only band that matters.' The Mekons still treading their very own idiosyncratic path and because of this the musical world is a much better place for bands and albums like this.Viva the Mekons.
CD Track List
- Lawrence Of California
- Harar 1883
- In The Sun/The Galaxy Explodes
- How Many Stars?
- In The Desert
- Mirage
- Weimar Vending Machine/Priest?
- Andromeda
- After The Rain
‘Deserted’ is released by Glitterbeat
