The Big Lookback: The Mekons

The Curse of the Mekons, from The Village Voice, 1991

Robert Christgau

Carola believes we first saw the Mekons in their native Leeds in 1978, where we definitely saw a Clash concert that will always stand as one of my all-time great shows but did not include, as I recall that remarkable evening, the University of Leeds-spawned Gang of Four or the Leeds-spawned Mekons either. Yet before too long—by 1990, to be precise—I'd handed out 12 Consumer Guide A's and three B's as the Mekons catapulted into the hottest band there was in my little circle, with Greil Marcus their most enthusiastic fan by my measure. They deserved it on musical and songwriting pizzazz alone, too. But without question their ideology was decisive, as for album after EP after what-have you they wrote the best political-as-in-leftist lyrics of anyone in rock: funny, sharp, sardonic, informed. Hence this month's Big Lookback, which began in The Village Voice and then was revised for my 1998 Harvard collection Grown Up All Wrong. Counting tonight's San Francisco stop, there seem to be three shows over the next four nights—in order, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle—remaining on their current tour (which I wrote about here). If you're one of these younguns who are new to this band, grab tickets now.

Late in 1989, the Mekons released their first major-label effort since The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen, thrown against the postpunk wall by a bright-eyed UK Virgin in 1979. Funk-influenced intellectual leftists like their Leeds compadres the Gang of 4, the Mekons seemed worth a go back then. But that debut LP never even came out in America, and the ambiguously entitled followup was on the left-identified UK indie Red Rhino. Subsequent labels have included the Leeds indie CNT, their own Sin imprint, the US indies Twin/Tone and ROIR, and Sonic Youth's temporary resting place, Blast First. Blast First is partners with the best-selling Anglodisco indie Mute, just now beginning US distribution with Elektra, but the ambiguously entitled Rock 'n' Roll, a/k/a The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll, was on A&M via the Twin/Tone deal engineered by a&r hotshot Steve Ralbovsky, formerly of EMI and CBS, now a senior VP at Elektra. The Mekons were one of the properties that attracted Ralbovsky to Twin/Tone, and though the eccentricity of the group's recording history only begins with their footloose corporate connections, Rock 'n' Roll crunched hard enough to pass as a major-label effort—hard enough to inspire fantasies of sales in the middle five figures.

But the project misfired even before release, which was held up while the A&M legal department fretted over the unauthorized Elvis pic cunningly concealed on the cover, and to the predictable dismay of both sides, US consumption topped out at around twenty-three thousand. Talk to founding Mekons Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford and you'll hear the sad old stories of fans who just couldn't find the thing in the shops; Blast First president Paul Smith, who became the only manager the band's ever had shortly after the record came out, complains about paltry tour support, about nonexistent ads in Forced Exposure and Your Flesh and Musician and Spin. There are counterarguments, however. A&M couldn't stand Smith, whom nobody claims is easy to get on the phone, and promotionally, what touring the band did do was ill-designed—it allowed no time for advance work, and instead of first selling themselves to label honchos in LA, the Mekons finished up there and immediately returned to Europe for more dates. By the time they came back that spring, Rock 'n' Roll was dead meat, and when they told Ralbovsky they wanted to cut another album right away, he suggested they have some fun with an EP instead. Honoring this request to the letter, they dubbed the fourth EP of their oddly configured career F.U.N. '90: buncha covers, ghost vocal from early fan Lester Bangs, Anglodisco-style pulse that came as a shock after Rock 'n' Roll's Clashlike aggression. A&M was baffled, and pissed.

So were the Mekons. In fact, they felt on the verge of breakdown or breakup, and when they flew over to play Tramps last November, they asked out of their contract. I won't bore you with the crossfire except to note that A&M insists the Mekons demanded sales in the hundreds of thousands and the Mekons deny it, and that A&M refused to let them go. Abandoning the clever scheme of withholding The Curse of the Mekons, which they'd cut on advances from Twin/Tone and Blast First, the Mekons eventually sent master tapes to A&M only to have them rejected as "technically and commercially unsatisfactory"—commercially for the obvious reasons, technically because the tape arrived too late to release before alternative radio went home for vacation (not for sound quality, as the indignant Mekons believed). The album then reverted to the Amerindie limbo of Twin/Tone, which to no one's surprise failed to find another major-label distributor. If the group can get their catalogue back in return, The Curse of the Mekons may yet surface as their Twin/Tone swan song. Otherwise, their tenth album will only be "available" here as a Blast First import.

This is lamentable—even tragic. Since 1985's Fear and Whiskey, the Mekons have put out as much good music as anybody in rock and roll. Informed opinion differs—Lester Bangs beams up The Quality of Mercy, Greil Marcus still pumps 1982's Mekons Story worktapes, and 1986's The Edge of the World is much loved—but for most of their cult (and also Langford, though not Greenhalgh) the peaks are Fear and Whiskey and Rock 'n' Roll. The former marks the moment when a commune that harbored upwards of sixties enemies of the state in the eight years following Johnny Rotten's con began to resemble a proper band, with former Rumour drummer Steve Goulding the linchpin, and also when their long since unfunkified anarchy turned hillbilly. Even Rock 'n' Roll is drenched in fiddle, and though Langford says that record was merely an attempt to reproduce their raucous live energy in the studio, it functions as an exuberantly embittered celebration/critique of rock 'n' roll as capitalism's big beat. Commercial oblivion spoils the aesthetic effect. And of course, that's not all it spoils. Oblivion is no f.u.n. for artists, especially artists working popular forms with putatively political intent, and it's hell on their protein intake. Materially, the Mekons have fuckall to show for their critically acclaimed studio output—Hüsker Dü made more money. At least people should be able to buy their records.

Far better realized than either of the Twin/Tone albums that got them to A&M, The Curse of the Mekons> is more sour than bitter and worth the hunt nevertheless. "This is our truth that no man shall stop," Greenhalgh warns soddenly near the top, and both "Sorcerer," about brainwashing, and "Funeral," about the death of false socialism, have plenty of truth to them. But unstoppable they obviously aren't—the country stylings of Ms. Sally Timms, who delivers the drugs-in-history lecture "Brutal" and a painfully crystalline reading of John Anderson's "Wild and Blue," are more convincing in the end. Though the Mekons threaten "magic, fear and superstition," they never approach the goth-metal overdrive of their Leeds compadres the Sisters of Mercy. By the final cut, they're reduced to exhuming Jesus from Loch Ness to thank him for their beers, their careers, and the ditty at hand. Like all their records save Rock 'n' Roll, this one fleshes out their anarchist principles by abjuring power—it's messy, slightly inchoate, as unreconstructed and befuddled as their politics.

After all, how clear-eyed are they supposed to be in the year 12 A.T., having disseminated their message cheek-by-jowl with Madame Medusa for over a decade? At some level they must suspect that reifying their incoherence into a proper career—making records that rock when they're supposed to rock and grin when they're supposed to grin, putting the same riffs and jokes across night after night—would be an obscenity. Who wants to make a living preaching to the converted when the converted are such a miserable minority? Who stands a chance in bloody hell of teaching disillusioned R.E.M. fans what real disillusionment is? Of the very few bands who've stuck it out longer than Johnny Rotten—longer than Hüsker Dü, even—these guys and gals are the most undefeated and the most lost.

Both Langford and Greenhalgh land the occasional cheapo production assignment, and Langford had enough capitalist in him to put down an advance from his 3 Johns side project on a house in Leeds, where one of his roomers likes to embarrass him by calling him "landlord" in front of his friends. Greenhalgh gets dole money and the occasional art or worker's education gig. Langford scripts installments of an anarcho-surrealist rock history cartoon. The computer-trained Timms holds down real jobs, currently "in an administrative capacity at a telephone dating service." And Goulding, the closest thing to a professional ever to put down roots in the band, scraped by on session work until he moved to Chicago to get married and, Timms reports, take up copywriting.

The vagueness of their take on the dilemma that is their material/professional/creative life is striking in such theoretical sophisticates, though not in such hard-drinking bohemians. Greenhalgh says he only wants "a little money to make things easier" and attributes the band's longevity to its propensity for "the short-term view." Bitterly, Langford imagines arts council funding in an England where Shakespeare is looking like a charity case. Timms, Langford's sometime companion and a definitive contributor on vocal chops alone by now, also mentions this utopian fix, but retains a grip on the everyday: "People want some sort of security. You get to about thirty-two or so and it's not the same sleeping on people's floors." Although they grant that they could make a living at it if they were willing to tour like troupers, they're not that masochistic. "We'd survive," says Langford, the only principal who still resides in Leeds, "but I don't know what we'd survive as." Even Greenhalgh, who warms most readily to such a prospect, would want to do it their way: not opening for the Pogues or whomever, but setting up a "Club Mekon" for more or less extended stays in more or less friendly locales.

Relieved of the psychic weight of A&M, which came down to vibes as much as biz, they're very together at the moment, touring Europe for a month with the Blue Aeroplanes' drummer and the peripatetic Tony Maimone. Timms ventures that even if she were to go so far as to have a baby the Mekons wouldn't really get in her way. But as far as she's concerned, "Jon and Tom are the Mekons," and Greenhalgh acknowledges that he's "been considering as carefully as possible whether to carry on doing it." Even Langford, who says he's positive they'll "just go on doing it," admits that he "can see a time when we might still pack it in." All naturally look to the hard-won numbers of the equally unconventional Sonic Youth as a way out. But Sonic Youth live on the road, and unlike the Mekons have a truly distinctive sound to sell. Greenhalgh likes Curse because it's "enigmatic, a bit more open and broader" and even Timms, who loves the Mekons' records—"They all bring in different strains, there's so much to get out of one album"—allows that they're "rough sounding," not something you put on just "to listen to." They're not obscure, but they raise the question of just how commodifiable attacks on commodity can be—even when they're acerbic, multileveled, tuneful, and you can clog to them.

So hope for the best. Hope that on prestige and roadwork and newfound luck the Mekons escape Amerindie limbo and reach the middle five figures—the sixty thousand US sales Twin/Tone's Paul Stark says will keep a band going and A&M's Julie Panebianco reckons is a good start. Forget that the majors' habit of cherry-picking middle-level acts is what's pushed indie capitalism into limbo—let younger bohos suffer for a while. And though Panebianco says she's never met a band willing to stop at sixty thousand, or even "a really happy number" like a hundred thousand, pray that after fourteen years the Mekons could be the exception—and figure that given the miserable minority they're cursed with in the year 12 A.T., they'd better be.

Note: True to Langford's belief that they'd "just go on doing it," the Mekons have recorded some 15 albums between 1991's Curse of the Mekons (which finally saw a Stateside release in 2001—I contributed liner notes) and today. That's along with Langford's work with the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, Skull Orchard, the Men of Gwent, the Bright Shiners, and whatever he thinks of next.