A Quiet Night with The Mekons?

By Jim Lundstrom

That’s how the kickoff to The Mekons’ 30th anniversary tour is being billed at the Pabst Theater in Milwaukee, which makes one wonder, are the raucous days of Mekon rock gone?

Now that they’ve achieved three decades of work outside of the mainstream, is the band that took the piss from the start with the release of “Never Been In a Riot” – a true punk response to The Clash’s “White Riot” – ready for rocking chairs and shawls around their shoulders?

Naw, says Jon Langford, the Welshman-in-Chicago who is one of two original mem­bers of the band (along with guitarist Tom Greenhalgh). Quiet is just the nature of the band’s latest CD, “Natural,” released last month by Touch and Go Records.

“I think this album, it’s kind of a listening record,” Langford said. “That’s how we want to represent it. We could do versions of the songs and just kind of bash them out and do the normal noisy, clattering, drunken Mekons thing, but it’s actually different. We don’t want to do the same thing really. It’s been our downfall, you know, refusal to do the same thing.”

Some might say one band’s downfall is another’s badge of honor.

The Mekons hadn’t even considered doing a 30th anniversary tour, but the new re­lease necessitated a tour, and it just happened to be three decades after the birth of the band at the University of Leeds, a place that has a knack for producing anarchic acts such as the Gang of Four (also formed at Leeds in ’77) and the all-vegetarian Chumbawumba (more about them later).

“A lot of things have changed,” Langford said about The Mekons. “This band we have at the moment is only me and Tom from the original band. But, having said that, the newcomer in this band is Sarah (Corina, bass), and she’s been in the band 16 years.

That’s pretty scary in itself.”

The rest of the crew includes former Damned guitarist Lu Edmonds (now playing the Turkish saz, among other stringed things), Rumour drummer Steve Goulding, violin­ist Susie Honeyman (who played with Vivian Stanshall until his death in 1995), angel­ic-voiced Sally Timms and Liverpuddlian accordionist Rico Bell.

“We haven’t played in the States for three years,” Langford said. “It’s kind of cool. Now there’s a lot of interest in the fact that there’s a new album and the band is kind of ev­erybody. Over the years it’s been hard to get everyone together, but we did this time.”

The tour hits both coasts and points in between, ending Oct. 13 in Lafayette, Ind.

“It’s not that long, but by our standards, it’s an epic,” Langford said.

“Natural,” he said, was approached like every Mekons’ recording.

“It’s always different. We always try to change how we work,” he said. “We’re all scat­tered across the planet, so when we get together we have an idea not so much of what we’re doing, but how we’re going to do it.”
“Natural” is also a good example of how hard it is to get everyone together for a proj­ect.

In early 2004, after the last U.S. tour in the wake of the band’s “Punk Rock” CD, Lang­ford said The Mekons had a few days off between appearances in England.

“We decided we’d rent a farmhouse in the Lake District (in rural northwestern Eng­land), a very beautiful part of the world, but very wild and dark, lots of stone circles, ancient,” he said. “We took Lu’s Pro Tools (a digital audio workstation) and a bunch of acoustic instruments and we just jammed. Jammed? We don’t jam. That’s a terrible word. We’re not a jam band. We kind of just made stuff up.”

Those original sessions were never intended to be a finished product. At the time, it was more about just hanging out together and making music into the night.

“It was very late at night when we did a lot of the recording,” Langford said. “There was valuable daylight to be walking around to pubs. We sat around and talked and drank and ate and went on long walks and sat in stone circles and had a really inter­esting time. We didn’t even know what we were going to do with it. We thought maybe demos.”

Meanwhile, Greenhalgh went to China for 18 months.

“And had two more kids in that period as well,” Langford said. “It’s been a bit difficult for him to do too much.”

And Lu Edmonds tinkered away on the recordings.

“Lu took it away and just tweaked it for about a year while Tom was in China,” Lang­ford said. “He’d send me CDs. I’d listen to them. He desperately wanted feedback, but it was all instrumental. It was hard to tell, you know? I’d say, ‘It sounds great, whatever you’re doing’.”

Last year the band got together in the Lake District again to lay lyrics over the instru­mental tracks.
“It’s interesting, the album’s called ‘Natural,’ the idea of going to a farmhouse in the countryside and just kind of making songs up sounds very natural, but the process was anything but,” Langford said.

“It’s a good way to spend time together, when you’re writing,” he said. “We didn’t have any lyrics, but when we came to write the lyrics, we talked about a lot of things. It’s quite weird being up in that part of the country, to actually be removed from the city. To some extent, the songs talk about that. How much can you actually be connected to nature or be removed from modern life? What is natural and what isn’t natural? To be out walking around in the remotest part of Britain and feel like you’re getting back to nature and then be buzzed by fighter planes training to blow up Iraqi farms, a tentacle of technology, warfare and death is 25 feet about your head. Pretty strange. It will all make sense when you hear it.”

Perfect sense, no doubt.

“It’s nice to kick off the tour in Milwaukee,” Langford said. “We just got asked to play the Pabst Theater. It’s a really beautiful theater.”

Before the 8 p.m. show at the Pabst, the Mekons will host a reception at Hotcakes Gallery (3379 N. Pierce St.) for “The Art of The Mekons,” an exhibition of various band member’s works that will run through Oct. 27. The reception begins at 5 p.m.

“It’s a collection of different Mekons doing their art and collaborative stuff,” Langford said. “That should be really interesting.”
* * *
Danbert Nobacon will open for The Mekons at the Pabst and several other venues on the heels of his new Bloodshot release “The Library Book of the World.”

Nobacon (real name Nigel Hunter) enlisted another of Langford’s other bands, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, to back him on the recording. Langford also served as pro­ducer.

“We’ve been mates for years,” Langford said of Nobacon, the founder and former lead vocalist of Chumbawumba. “We overlapped a lot. The Mekons and Chumbawumba were definitely friends for a long time, although we hated each other when we first met. They were very rude at first. The arrogance of the young. But now they’re old as well.

“When Danbert was in Chumbawumba, we used to go off drinking. We used to have little secret nights out where we’d go off and drink pints and pints of beer in weird pubs in rough corners of Leeds.

“The rest of Chumbawumba would say, ‘What’d you talk about?’ They’d ask me ques­tions about Danbert because he wouldn’t talk to them. He’d only talk to me, but we re­ally didn’t talk that much, beer and football and that sort of stuff.” They had, however, talked about making a record together.

“He left Chumbawumba and they turned into this more folky acoustic thing,” Lang­ford said. “He kind of reinvented himself as some kind of northern English Man in Black. He liked the sound of some of the records I’ve been making, especially ‘The Executioner’s Last Son’ with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts.”

The 15 songs on “The Library Book of the World” are a “partial soundtrack” to a his­tory and current affairs book Norbacon is writing, tentatively titled “Smart Lies, Secret Wars and Climate Revolt.”

“It was recorded very live, which is kind of cool and brave of him,” Langford said. “They’re not perfect vocals, but I really wanted to go with that. I just really wanted it to be in the raw. We could have worked on it and got it in time better, but there’s an urgency and energy to it of him singing the songs and us trying to keep up with him. It has a kind of old-fashioned feel to it, but we had some modern things as well.”