The Mekons

Flashback 1997: The Mekons hit the road and the road hits back

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Left to Right: Tom, Jon, Rico, Sarah, Sally

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On television, LeAnn Rimes has been replaced by Pat Boone, dressed like an aging Tom of Finland.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.

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Record Review: “Lost in Tajikistan” by Mekon’s Lu Edmonds

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Mekons’ Sally Tims with Lu Edmonds. Edmonds describes his new recording as “just a tiny slice of the mountain music of Tajikistan

A glimpse of Tajikistan’s roots musical traditions and the new music Tajik musicians are developing .

By Andrew Cronshaw

Tajikistan bordering on Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Afghanistan and China, is a mountainous country with a population of about ten million, the great majority of whom are Tajik. It became independent in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. This album is what British musician Lu Edmonds describes as “just a tiny slice of the mountain music of Tajikistan, whose rich traditions have soaked up the traffic of the Silk Roads and beyond for thousands of years.”

Lu Edmonds, a member of Public Image Ltd and at various times of 3 Mustaphas 3, The Mekons, Billy Bragg’s Blokes, Les Triaboliques and many more bands stretching back to and through punk times, didn’t so much get lost in Tajikistan as sucked in. At first, in 2004, it was as an interpreter for a biodiversity project. (He speaks Russian which, while Tajiks generally speak Tajik, is used as an inter-ethnic means of communication). But he got more involved, meeting and helping musicians create performances (which have now grown to include the annual Roof Of The World festival in the high Pamirs), get their instruments repaired with the help of London luthier Andrew Scrimshaw, and also surreptitiously digitising a mass of recordings of musical material from the old Soviet archives in the country’s capital of Dushanbe.

The recordings on this album aren’t from archives, though. They’re from 2008 when, with the help of Taneli Bruun of Helsinki’s Global Music Centre, Edmonds and key Dushanbe musician Iqbal Zavkibekov, put together a 16-track recording setup in Dushanbe’s Gurminj Museum of Musical Instruments, founded by Zavkibekov’s musician and film-star father Gurminj. We’re not talking Abbey Road here. It was -20°C outside, and although the museum was heated, much of the warmth came from the musicians who packed in to grasp an opportunity to record. It’s only now that those recordings have been cherry-picked and mixed (in London by Leo Abrahams) to make the album.

 

The first five tracks are by the group Mizrob, featuring Iqbal Zavkibekov on setor (Tajik long-necked steel-strung lute) and guitar, singer Davlat Nasri, who also plays harmonium and dotar (another long-necked lute), and percussionist Zarif Pulodov. In melodic form and sound it could broadly be described as having a middle-eastern feel, with a modal melody over drone and rippling darabukka or tabla-type percussion, but while a root drone is implied there are also harmonising lines. The first two tracks are instrumental; in the third enter Nasri’s vocals, perhaps comparable to some of the melismatic declamatory singing of the Indian sub-continent, while “Hurshedam,” with its winding harmonium melody line under Nasri’s singing, is in a flamenco-like mode. (I’m making these observations as description, not analysis).

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Top 10 Songs by The Mekons

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The Mekons

By Simon Robinson

The Mekons are a British punk rock band that formed in Leeds in the late 1970s. Over the course of their more than four-decade-long career, they have become known for their eclectic and experimental sound, as well as their politically charged and socially conscious lyrics. With a discography spanning over 20 albums, it can be hard to choose just a few standout tracks, but here are our picks for the top 10 best The Mekons songs of all time.

Our list includes classics like “Where Were You?”, a scathing critique of political apathy and complacency, and “Memphis, Egypt”, a unique fusion of punk, country, and African rhythms. We also included more introspective tracks like “Waltz”, a slow, mournful ballad about the difficulties of life, and “The Curse”, a haunting meditation on the loss of innocence and the passage of time.

Other highlights on the list include “Empire Of The Senseless”, a surrealistic and poetic critique of modern society, and “Hard To Be Human Again”, a powerful and emotionally raw track about the struggle to maintain one’s humanity in the face of adversity. These songs and more showcase the range and depth of The Mekons’ music, and why they remain one of the most influential and innovative punk rock bands of all time.

1. “Memphis, Egypt”

“Memphis, Egypt” is a song by the British punk rock band, The Mekons. It was released as a single in 1983 and later appeared on their album “The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll”. The song is a unique fusion of punk, country, and African rhythms, showcasing the band’s eclectic musical style.

The lyrics of “Memphis, Egypt” are a playful and surrealistic mix of references to ancient Egyptian history and contemporary American culture. The song opens with the lines “I met her in Memphis, but she was from outer space. / She said, ‘I’ve come to warn you of the human race.’” The song then proceeds to weave together images of Egyptian pyramids, Elvis Presley, and the American South.

Musically, “Memphis, Egypt” features a driving beat, catchy guitar riffs, and a catchy chorus that will get stuck in your head for days. The song’s use of African rhythms is particularly notable, with the percussion and bassline adding a distinctive groove to the track.

Overall, “Memphis, Egypt” is a standout song in The Mekons’ catalog, showcasing their ability to blend different genres and styles into a unique and catchy sound. It’s a fun and quirky track that will leave you tapping your toes and singing along to its infectious chorus.

2. Ghosts Of American Astronauts

“Ghosts Of American Astronauts” is a song by The Mekons, an English post-punk band that formed in the late 1970s. The song was released in 1988 on their album “So Good It Hurts” and stands out for its poetic and political lyrics, as well as its haunting melody.

The song reflects on the aftermath of the Space Race, with its focus on the astronauts who were hailed as heroes but whose experiences left them feeling disillusioned and disconnected from society upon their return. The lyrics convey a sense of isolation and sadness, with lines such as “We came back alone, our hands full of moon dust, but our minds as empty as a lunar crater.”
Musically, the song is stripped down and atmospheric, with a mournful guitar melody and sparse percussion that create a sense of unease and uncertainty. The vocals are delivered with a sense of detachment that echoes the feelings of the astronauts described in the lyrics.

Overall, “Ghosts Of American Astronauts” is a poignant and thought-provoking song that captures the emotional toll of the Space Race and the disillusionment felt by those who participated in it. The Mekons’ ability to convey complex emotions through their music is evident in this haunting and evocative track, which remains a standout in their discography.

3. Thee Olde Trip To Jerusalem

“Thee Olde Trip To Jerusalem” is a song by The Mekons, a British punk rock band formed in the late 1970s. It was released in 1985 on their album “Fear and Whiskey” and is one of their most popular and enduring tracks.

The song takes its name from a historic pub in Nottingham, England, which claims to be the oldest inn in the UK. The lyrics describe a night out at the pub, with its colorful cast of characters and raucous atmosphere. The song captures the sense of community and camaraderie that can be found in a good pub, as well as the sense of escape and release that comes with a night of drinking and revelry.

Musically, “Thee Olde Trip To Jerusalem” features a driving rhythm section, twangy guitar riffs, and a sing-along chorus that is sure to get crowds moving. The song’s catchy melody and energetic performance make it a staple of The Mekons’ live shows and a fan favorite.

Overall, “Thee Olde Trip To Jerusalem” is a fun and rowdy track that captures the spirit of a night out at the pub. Its memorable chorus and infectious energy have made it a classic of the punk rock canon and a standout in The Mekons’ discography.

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