Mekons - Punk-folk in the trenches

Valencia. A few metres from the cafeteria/bookshop La Batisfera, the Mekons are recording their twenty-third album. They'll be staying in the city for a few weeks; the band's American friend, who lives right next to the venue, has organised the trip for the nine sixty-somethings so well that he's managed to fit in a concert, an exhibition and, in passing, this interview in Italian, all without leaving the barrio.

The story goes that the nine members of the Mekons, living as they do between the United States and the United Kingdom, tackle the writing of each new album by meeting up somewhere with, at most, a single computer to jot down sketches of songs. That happened when we went to the “Lake District” in the “north of England” and all sat around a table in the “living room”, recording every idea, recall Jon Langford and Tom Greenhalgh, jogging each other's memories. A bit like The Band did at the house known as Big Pink, I suggest, the songs are a collective effort, they confirm, everyone contributes some piece. Judging from the latest photos posted on their Instagram page, the material for the new album was born in a setting very similar to that living room in England, only this time further south, in Spain, in Valencia, in the unusual seaside barrio maritimo of Cabanyal, where a friend of theirs from Chicago has lived since before the pandemic (when they were originally supposed to come, in April 2020). At Elefante studio they laid down the new twelve tracks, which will be mixed by Dave Trumfio, producer and by now a member of the band. “Exqusit” (2020), the previous record, born out of masks and lockdown, had instead been created by sending each other parts by email without ever meeting, then piecing them back together, giving rise to a collection of eleven acid, warped tracks, as if Tom Waits had switched to dub on the side of Mano Negra's “Casa Baylon”. “Deserted” (2018), recorded in the Mojave Desert, was instead the chance to fully enjoy the landscape and surrounding environment. The idea is not to prepare anything beforehand, we get together, all in the same place, one that isn't where we live, and things work much better. When I'm in Chicago, New York, London it's different, because it's much harder to detach yourself and devote yourself to music - that's real life, Langford concludes. The technique seems to work: if the Mekons' most "famous" songs belong to the past, for instance on "Fear And Whiskey" (1985) and "So Good It Hurts" (1988), these latest records mentioned have nothing to be ashamed of by comparison.

The band was born amid the punk rock streets of the late Seventies, around Leeds, where Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford were studying Fine Art. Jon, although now naturalised in Chicago, is a Welshman from Newport, and just before landing in Valencia he passed through his hometown to celebrate Joe Strummer's seventieth birthday with his family and other friends. They met back when the future frontman of the Clash, besides squalling away in his first band, The Vultures, was working as a gravedigger in the city cemetery to get by. Langford searches his phone for the photo, the famous one where Joe's brylcreem and quiff had not yet landed on his thick, unruly hair, then moves on to the colour ones he took a few weeks earlier with Strummer's grandson, and I ask them if they'd like another beer. We're inside the cafeteria/bookshop La Batisfera, having just finished hanging Langford's works on the walls for an exhibition - wooden panels with portraits of famous and forgotten figures from the early days of country music and beyond: Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, but also John Coltrane... The first two doble glasses of beer are gone and the questions are multiplying too fast in my head. I'd even prepared a list, but the course of things is set by Jon's chatter, which continues, years later Strummer himself asked me to open a few Clash shows, the strange ones from “Cut The Crap” (1985) when Mick Jones was no longer in the band, he seeks understanding from Tom, who nods sadly, I was playing with the Three Johns (there'd be enough material for a whole chapter on the side projects Langford was involved in) and we played before Joe. We talked a bit, but I think he was really going through a difficult time psychologically. Years later, in 1989, I was in a bar - “Mekons Rock'n Roll” (1989) had just come out - Joe Strummer was there, Jim Jarmusch too, and we were all pretty drunk. At one point Robert Christgau (for 37 years the music critic at “The Village Voice”) came out with it, recommending “Mekons Rock 'n' Roll” like a good doctor, specifying you should avoid the side effects of Joe Strummer's latest album. We were in a bar and I felt really embarrassed, because it certainly wasn't the high point of his career (“Earthquake Weather”, 1989), then we opened a show for him in Chicago...

The Mekons had dealings with the Clash right from the start: their explosive debut, which earned them a certain notoriety, was the song “Never Been In Riot” (1977). We were critical of the idea the Clash had expressed in “White Riot”, Jon recalls, they had backed the Indian uprising in London and were urging white people to take to the streets and beat up the police. In Leeds, where we lived, people thought the song was about white riots in another sense - fascist ones. For about ten days after the song came out, people were genuinely confused about the lyrics; you have to be careful writing certain things. We wrote “Never Been In A Riot” because we were art students, in a sense we rejected the macho role of men and violence, Langford recalls. We admired the Clash, we were only critical of them over that one song. There were loads of slogans, catchphrases going around in punk - think of the Sex Pistols' “Anarchy In The Uk”, which is a great song, brilliant, provocative, but clearly they didn't know the meaning of the word anarchy, they thought it meant smashing windows or beating up the police. Nothing to do with the idea of anarchy that, for instance, existed in Spain in the 1930s, Jon concludes, and hands the floor to Tom, “punk was a kind of cliche”, and the Mekons wallowed in it to justify the freedom to do more or less whatever they wanted - it wasn't necessarily tied to violence, aggression, all things foreign to our way of being. It's a genre that can go in countless directions, it doesn't have to be hardcore. In London it was an extension of other styles like glam or progressive. Punk rock in particular found success thanks to, or because of, the Sex Pistols, because they managed to draw in pretty much everyone, from office clerks to kids on the street, but in Sheffield, for example, it was full of synthesizers, in Manchester it was electronic, in Leeds it was all very political...

The early Mekons' travelling companions were bands from the English punk rock wave, Gang of Four and Buzzcocks, Langford mentions, so much so that their first album, “The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen” (1979), was recorded using Gang of Four's instruments and, due to a mistake, featured that band's pictures on the back cover. We came out of the Seventies and the punk rock era with no illusions left, Langford continues, and in the early Eighties what remained of the band was carried forward by Tom (Greenhalgh) . I'd spent three years having fun with the drum machine... Side A of “Fear and Whiskey” is played by the band Tom managed to put together, and side B is other stuff we worked on with the drum machine in a small rehearsal room or at home. Then other people started showing up, Sally (Timms) , Suzy (Honeyman) and then Dik Taylor of the Pretty Things, and it was strange having this band with no bass and drums - it all sorted itself out once Steve (Goulding) and Lu (Edmonds) joined too.

Between 1984 and 1985, it's Tom speaking now, we played a few shows as the Mekons and changed style - there was no interest whatsoever in repeating what we'd done six or seven years earlier, so we started playing other genres like country and reggae. Country music is very similar to punk, it's three chords and lyrics about hard situations in life, real situations. In 1985 there were a lot of people organising benefit shows for the miners, and together with other friends who worked with Gang of Four, we took part in a few, even though we'd been inactive for a while - basically the band re-formed to raise money for the miners. The British miners' strike of 1984-1985 was a union struggle (which turned violent, especially due to harsh repression by the English police) led by the National Union of Mineworkers (NUM), when Thatcher's government decided to close twenty coal pits in the United Kingdom, resulting in the sacking of around 20,000 miners.

We've always been critical of the political and economic system; when we started out it was the early days of punk rock, and it was normal to criticise the “political social system”. The first time we found ourselves in a band, none of us had had that kind of experience, so we started writing in the best punk rock style. Without taking ourselves too seriously, gallows humour, Jon states firmly, but I don't know what he means, so he explains: jokes, humorous comments on unpleasant or worrying subjects like death and illness, “dark humor in a bad situations”. We've got loads of songs where we basically say yes, life is shit, but we can have a laugh about it, he chuckles, and the second doble of beer is nearly finished, mine too... I go for a third round, Jon accepts readily, Tom hesitates for almost ten seconds and then gives in. As I come back from the bar loaded with beer, olives and peanuts, it's almost 1.30pm, and I ask him point blank whether, more than forty years after punk was born, it still makes sense to think about fighting the system by smashing windows and insulting police officers. Very often things change, Jon replies, because people manage to get inside the machinery of power. Like what happened with the death penalty in Illinois, where we didn't put up barricades in the street, but went around asking people whether they agreed, and for donations - a very slow, boring job, with very little adrenaline. Langford was an activist right up until the victory of the battle to abolish the death penalty in Illinois in 2011. Moving to Chicago, he says, was fantastic for my career as a musician, of course, but also as a painter and graphic artist. He has designed record covers, his works hang in galleries around the world and circulate in music museums across the United States (the small painting of Dr John, for instance, is the most requested one around New Orleans, he tells me). To give an idea, the cover of the album “Dylan, Cash, And The Nashville Cats: A New Music City” (2015) is a piece of his, commissioned by the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum.

About thirty of these reproductions now hang on the walls of La Batisfera, the cafeteria/bookshop where I work, a hundred metres or so from the band's recording studio and about the same distance from Malvarosa, the city beach, where the band hangs out between sessions. Before the interview, Jon hung about thirty of them around the venue, arranging them wherever he thought best. I only pointed out that the ones by the stage would be seen more, especially during the show they'd be playing a few days later - maybe Cash and Strummer deserved that spot. He agreed and moved them while humming “Highway Patrolman” from “Nebraska”, which was playing over the venue's speakers, then he turned his attention to the wonky faces a friend of ours had drawn on some post-its stuck to the wall behind the bar, and told me it felt like being in a different place altogether...

Friday night at La Batisfera is the big night, since over the next three days the various band members will be boarding planes back to their respective homes. The show they've decided to give the venue is free, no charge, because they don't want money for it. Just a couple of hours before it starts, Jon tells me there'll be seven of them and they'll be making do with what they've got: two guitars, a violin, a kazoo, a bass and a snare drum. All I can do is accept, and I plant two microphones in front of the stage to catch whatever I can, then head back to the room... but it turns out to be an unnecessary worry. After the first three minutes, the venue turns into an Irish pub, the Mekons playing somewhere between the Pogues and what's left of their own Seventies - Joy Division, sure, and the Clash. They dedicate The Band's “The Shape I'm In” to me just as I step away from the bar for a moment to wipe off the sweat, because I'm working, it's hot and there's a great racket going on: more than sixty people, mostly English and American, drinking beer and singing happily.

I saw exactly what Tom had told me three days earlier: we've stayed together so many years because we've never had success. That's why we've never had pressure from any label, and we've always done what interested us. The way the music business wants to run bands' lives is exactly what drives them to break up. Sure, they don't make a living off the Mekons, they assured me, but much better than that, I'd say - well into their sixties, they still live FOR the Mekons. They've been sitting on La Batisfera's terrace since six, between gin and tonics and beers, as special guests, and when the guy of Sicilian descent who plays bass, Dave Trumfio - who Jon had told me was their producer as well as bassist - asks for yet another beer at the end of the show, I hand it over so gladly I could hug him. He thanks me, and in the course of a bit of chat tells me he produced Wilco's first records, the two “Mermaid Avenue” and “Summerteeth” albums - yes, he produced them, and confirms that the whole new reissue with unreleased tracks and so on is his work too (later I'll find out that My Morning Jacket, Built to Spill and various others have also passed through his hands and ears). I don't know who to smile at anymore, and I watch a flushed Jon darting out of the venue to talk to everyone - that's what he prefers doing after shows, chatting with the people who watched the gig. He told me as much during the interview; then I asked him if he liked Wilco, and he told me his son plays with Jeff Tweedy's son...

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