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)
Sally Timms
“Two Shores” by Little Sparta with Sally Timms
Two Shores is from the EP Lost Boat Party available July 29th 2020.
Buy in advance from littlesparta.bandcamp.com
Performed by Little Sparta with Sally Timms.
(c) Grey Gallery Records/Little Sparta Productions 2020
LYRICS
I was lost between two shores
When I saw your hand reaching to me
And I was wandering between the walls
Continue readingLetters to The Hobbledehoy
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Hi Terri!
Thanks for visiting the website. You are so right – it’s time to move that cat’s asshole from the homepage. The link for “Trump’s Covid Timeline” will no longer be accompanied by an image of Trump.
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Hi there Robert!
So glad you are enjoying the content. As the masthead reads, “I use the best, I use the rest” (And ‘thank you’ Johnny Rotten). Yes – you can subscribe to THE HOBBLEDEHOY and receive daily notices of new posts in your email.
I’d love to visit Hana, Maui someday. Must be beautiful.
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Bravo on the small and lovely community you have … I’ve been enjoying using the music recommendations and review posts to soundtrack the evenings as I create a new portfolio and redo my CV, it’s been helpful in keeping my blood pressure down. I hope working on this site provides you with some of the happiness it has given me to read it, it certainly seems to be maintained with care. If it’s not too poky I’d also like to ask, how do you curate posts for the site?
Hey K. Cam!
Thanks and ‘cheers’ on keeping that blood pressure down. My BP also requires diligent watching. THE HOBBLEDEHOY curates content from multiple sources – fine newspapers such as The Guardian and The Scotsman; media companies such as BBC and NPR; and video platforms such as YouTube, of course. Because we feature British Folk music, we often curate music from the wonderful Folk Music UK website. We are careful to list our sources on each post.
Litte Sparta writes:
Hi Mike, We thought you might be interested in this: MEKONS singer Sally Timms joins alternative folk three-piece LITTLE SPARTA (featuring Mekons’ violinist Susie Honeyman) for new EP LOST BOAT PARTY out 29 July 2020 on Grey Gallery Records Listen to Lost Boat Party on SoundCloud
We LOVE Sally Timms and will check-out the new EP as soon as our breakfast dishes are washed and dried. We have featured Sally, Susie Honeyman, Jon Langford and Mekons music and news often. Cheers, and best of luck with Little Sparta!
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Hello Sirs
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Outside of music and alcohol I’ve also been intrigued by the other media peppered here. I have been going down the birding rabbit hole, which is a subject I did not expect to find here but who am I to complain about such an interesting smorgasbord?
I spent an evening exploring the concert videos which are a treasure, thank you for sharing them. I have also ran into a podcast (radio show? audio drama? does anyone really care what they’re called?) thanks to you called Annika Stranded. Isn’t it funny that the BBC is making shows about Norwegian detectives now? But I like it, I look forward to the sixth season appearing on this website at some point as the BBC deems my locality unworthy, for little fifteen minute bites the episodes has done their bit helping me cope with grief these last two months.”
Thank you, Bulla.
THE HOBBLEDEHOY hopes to post Season 6 of Annika Stranded soon. Nicola Walker is marvelous, isn’t she? Take care of those migraines and glad you are exploring birding as a new hobby.
The Mekons to release ‘Exquisite,’ surprise new album recorded in isolation
Group’s latest, a Bandcamp exclusive, “recorded in splendid physical isolation on mobile phones, broken cassette recorders, clay tablets and other ancient technologies”
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
Watch the Mekons new video “After the Rain”
This legendary group from Leeds, have written contemporary music history for the last 40 years as radical innovators of both first generation punk and insurgent roots music. Their new album was recorded in the desert environs of Joshua Tree, California and is drenched with widescreen, barbed-wire atmosphere and hard-earned (but ever amused) defiance. The return of one of the planet’s most essentil rock & roll bands.
When punk exploded in London, fast and brash and full of fury, up in Leeds the Mekons came blinking into the light at a much slower pace. Singles like “Where Were You” and “Never Been in a Riot” (both from1978) fractured punk’s outlaw myth with the ordinariness of real life. During the next decade, as country singers donned cowboy hats and slid into the stadiums, the Mekons celebrated the music’s rough, raw beginnings and tender hearts with the Fear and Whiskey album (1985) and went on to demolish rock narratives with Mekons Rock’n’Roll (1989).
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. And now the caravan continues with Deserted, their first full studio album in eight years.
And desert is an apt word. This time there’s an emphasis on texture and sounds, a sense of space that brings a new, widescreen feel to their music, opening up songs that surge like clarion calls, like the album’s opening track, “Lawrence of California.”
“We were recording at the studio of our bass player, Dave Trumfio,” Langford recalls. “It’s just outside Joshua Tree National Park. Seeing Tom [Greenhalgh, the group’s other original member] wandering in that landscape looked like a scene from Lawrence of California.’ And then, ‘Wait a minute, there’s a song in that.’”
The band arrived with no songs written, only a few ideas exchanged by email between Langford and Tom Greenhalgh, the group’s other original member.
“Things emerged. At one point we had a sheet with a few words written here and there. Everyone added bits and by the time it was finished, it only needed a few changes to be able to sing. Somewhere else there are two lyrics sung over each other.”
Even during the mixing, Dave pushed us into some new sonic territory all the way through,” Langford recalls.
The tweaking and effects take them about as far as they can go from 2016’s Existentialism, which saw all eight members crowded around a single microphone in a tiny theatre in Red Hook, New York, recording live in front of an audience. Deserted offers a different kind of freedom. Of space and stars and wide-open land. Of possibilities and past. But mainly of the future. It’s fresh territory. But that’s always been what attracts the Mekons. They show that four decades doesn’t translate to becoming a heritage act.
Instead, they keep experimenting, from the jagged, spaced throb that powers “Into The Sun,” revolving around the drums of Steve Goulding and Trumfio’s bass to the barely controlled anarchy that’s “Mirage,” or a countrified homage to “Andromeda.” Everything is possible, everything is permitted. 41 years after that first single they’re still moving. Still defiant, still laughing, still joyful. Never underestimate some happy anarchy, and never write off the Mekons. Deserted, perhaps, but they’re back to tip the world on its axis. Again.
– GlitterbeatTV