The question Hitsville has always wanted to ask Jon Langford is this: When the Mekons reinvented themselves in the mid-80s, with the ragged, entrancing Fear and Whiskey, where did that countrified, punky, sprawling sound come from? Fiddles and power chords, drawls and shouts–it seemed to have no provenance.
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And so they are: From their garage-punk beginnings to their unstable but still defiant status today, the Mekons have evolved in not-so-splendid isolation that’s kept the members’ hands clean and heads high but pockets empty and morale somewhat inconsistent. At the same time, they’ve produced a glorious sort of pan-Atlantic electric folk music that, over the course of that isolation, sounds like little else. What Basque is to languages, the Mekons are to rock ‘n’ roll.
Years of anguished inactivity followed. The British miners’ strike of 1985 got the band playing live again, to do benefits. And America entered on a couple of counts to inspire the group: first in terms of their strange but valuable take on country and western, second in the person of one Sophie Bourbon, a Chicago-area woman who, legend has it, heard her daughter playing a Mekons record and sent the band some money to start a record label. The label was Sin–a pungent parody of Memphis’s Sun–and the first record was Fear and Whiskey, which introduced the world to the brave new Mekons, complete with the redolent, aching voice of Sally Timms. In the wake of that renaissance–which also produced the immortal Mekons Honky Tonkin’ in 1987–the band entered a brief association with A & M that neither party liked or profited from. But it did produce The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll, in which the band left C & W behind for a series of fearful song-dreams recited against a full-throated rock roar, impressionistic but still decipherable meditations on the various collaborations involved in playing rock ‘n’ roll not just in a capitalistic society, but in a world of capitalism triumphant:
