Punk

The Mekons’ Jon Langford and Sally Timms recount discovering Country Music in this 2016 interview

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This [below] Factory session series features Jon Langford & Sally Timms of the legendary band The Mekons performing live at CHIRP Studios. The songs they performed are Mekons classics, a Skull Orchard tune, and a rare song from their upcoming collaboration with singer/songwriter Robbie Fulks.
1. Geeshie (0:21​) 2. Land Ahoy! (3:23​) 3. Dickie Chalkie & Nobby (6:10​) 4. Sentimental Marching Song (9:12​)

Gang of Four changed the way punk sounded and what it could say. A new box set reveals the peak of their power.

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“We didn’t sound like anybody else,” says singer Jon King. A new box set finds the band’s earliest albums have kept their original thrills.

Millions out of work and businesses shuttered. A crushing sense of poverty and alienation in the populace, leading to openly fascist groups marching in the streets and Marxist radicalization fomenting in the universities. The government teetering on the verge of a national emergency, with more details of the ultraright plotting a coup d’etat emerging every day. Yes, 1970s Leeds felt as if it were on the brink of social collapse.

“We were on the verge of civil war,” Jon King remembers of the era from his home in Camden Town. “You had this great split between progressive forces trying to accommodate different people in a way that respected each other. But by doing that, privileged people were going to lose something or other, whether material or psychological.” [ . . . ]

Continue at WASHINGTON POST: Gang of Four changed the way punk sounded and what it could say. A new box set reveals the peak of their power.

The Mekons to release ‘Exquisite,’ surprise new album recorded in isolation

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Group’s latest, a Bandcamp exclusive, “recorded in splendid physical isolation on mobile phones, broken cassette recorders, clay tablets and other ancient technologies”

The Mekons’ latest

In Paris, in 1925, Yves Tanguy, Jacques Prévert, André Breton and Marcel Duchamp invented a game they called ‘cadavre exquis,’ derived from a phrase that came up when they first played: ‘le cadavre exquis boira le vin nouveau’ (‘the exquisite corpse will drink the new wine’).

Basically each collaborator adds to a composition in sequence, either by following a rule or by being allowed to see only the end of what the previous person contributed. In the current plague year 2020, after a planned rendezvous in Valencia was necessarily cancelled, mekons adopted this method as a means of collectively assembling lyrics and tunes and recording their new album.

Locked down in various locations, scattered from the West Coast of California to the East End of London, they sang and played into their mobile phones and emailed, uploaded and Whatsapped their wailings, beatings, scratchings and strummings around the globe through the billions of interconnected nodes of our networked panopticon.

ESCALERA video edited by JAMES LANGFORD