by Zak Mucha
December 18, 1997
In the Whirlaway Tavern, near the corner of Kedzie and Fullerton, the conversation between Sally Timms and Jon Langford keeps getting sidetracked by the American Music Awards on television. LeAnn Rimes is holding the last notes of a syrupy song with a sleepy-eyed grin.
“A 14-year-old girl,” Timms notes.
“Oh, God,” Langford groans.
Maria the bartender comes over to refill the gin and tonics. “You working hard?” she asks Langford, who says he isn’t. “What happened to my tape?”
Langford’s been bragging about his friend and band mate, accordion player Rico Bell, who titled a song after the bar. “Rico’s coming,” he tells her. “He’s coming next week.”
The girl on the TV screen takes a bow, and the bartender asks Sally Timms, “You like this kind of music?”
“Nah.” Timms hesitates. “Well, it’s all right.”
Timms and Langford’s band, the Mekons, has been making music for two decades, but the awards program has almost nothing to do with their careers. As a rock group they’ve won enough accolades to perform in art museums, but never enough money to keep from driving themselves from show to show in a rented van.
Right now they’re discussing Timms’s recent relocation to Chicago. Currently half the band lives here, the other half in London.
“I wouldn’t mind living in New York,” Timms says.
“You can’t afford it,” says Langford.
Timms ignores him. “Yeah, New York or Los Angeles.”
Langford begins to laugh.
“What’s so funny?”
“I can’t see you in LA,” he says. “You’d need implants.”
“I have them,” she replies with a quiet indignity. “They’re just in the wrong spot.”
On television, LeAnn Rimes has been replaced by Pat Boone, dressed like an aging Tom of Finland.
“Who the hell is that?” someone across the bar asks.
During this past year–the Mekons’ 20th–the band made a short tour of Boston and New York. They arrived in New York for the opening of their art exhibit, “Mekons United,” at a SoHo gallery. When they returned to Chicago, they resumed recording their next album, tentatively titled Me. Then they kicked off the Museum of Contemporary Art’s performance season with Pussy, King of the Pirates, a theater piece based on their 1996 album with writer Kathy Acker (both the play and the record were derived from Acker’s novel of the same name).
Before that show, Langford told me Pussy reminded him of British holiday revues. “It’s like a pantomime, you know, a musical play. It’s a seasonal thing after Christmas, traditional that every town has a big pantomime.” He said the best of these shows feature a lot of shouting, audience participation, corny jokes, and cross-dressing. “We’re going to do it like a proper pantomime. I’m not quite sure how that’s done, but we’ve got the cross-dressing down.”
Diving into a project without much planning has been business as usual for the Mekons. “If we know how it will end up,” says Langford, “why bother doing it?”
The Mekons formed in May 1977, six months after the Sex Pistols, the Clash, and the Damned played at Leeds Polytechnic. Langford, Tom Greenhalgh, and the group’s other founding members were art students at Leeds University. Do-it-yourself record labels were popping up throughout England, and bands were being formed dozens at a time. One punk zine published three basic guitar chords and instructed readers to start their own groups.
The first Mekons singles–“Where Were You?” / “I’ll Have to Dance Then on My Own” and “Never Been in a Riot” / “32 Weeks, Heart and Soul”–were released on the Fast label in 1978. In May of the following year critic Mary Harron asserted that rock was the only form of music that can be done better by people who can’t play their instruments: “This idea underlay punk,” she wrote, “but the Mekons were the first to base a group on that principle alone.” When Langford says he was the band’s best musician, he’s not bragging. “‘Cause I was a horrible drummer.”
The success of the Sex Pistols convinced major record labels that there was money to be made in punk music. Virgin Records signed the Mekons, but the sales of their first album, 1979’s The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen (the cover depicts a chimp at a typewriter), didn’t meet Virgin’s expectations. “It got a bit nasty,” Langford says. “There was no promotion. Punk bands were disappearing under the major labels.”
“It was just these horrible gigs,” recalls Greenhalgh. “We were playing for packs of skinheads. People were getting stomped. It got ugly. After a time we didn’t want to play live anymore. Not like that.” Greenhalgh got his nose broken at a benefit show for Rock Against Racism. “I don’t know, someone came backstage and punched me in the face.”
While the Mekons were formed under the banner of punk, pinning them to one category has been nearly impossible since. Over the years they’ve played rock, pop, reggae, and country and western, making them problematic for major labels and PR departments, which favor neatly packaged commodities. In more than one account the band has been described as a socialist collective. But while politics has always been an influence, they don’t take things too seriously. They see themselves as an ensemble that’s free enough to go in several directions at once: they’ll have four singers, two guitars, an accordion, drums, violin, lute, tape loops, bass, and keyboards. They’ve always prided themselves on doing what they want–be it performing a lesbian pirate show, writing a collaborative novel, or touring only when they feel like it.
On a Wednesday morning in September, Timms is heading south in a rental van with drummer Steve Goulding.
“Are we picking up Rico?” Goulding asks.
“No, he’s just going to shag his way out to Boston. Probably get there before us.”
Rico Bell (aka Eric Bellis) is the official playboy of the Mekons. Timms and Goulding are the designated drivers.