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Welsh-born Jon Langford, the original drummer for the punk band the Mekons, has released numerous recordings as a solo artist and with other bands, most notably the Waco Brothers, The Three Johns, and The Pine Valley Cosmonauts. Langford is also a respected visual artist and in 2015 was the artist in residence at the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum. Nashville Radio a book of Jon’s artwork was published by Verse Chorus Press in 2006 and was followed in 2011 by Skull Orchard Revisited, a book, and CD about his roots in South Wales.

“On the Mekons”
Since their first single in 1978, which included the inflamed “32 Weeks”—an accounting of the number of weeks of low-wage labor it took to pay for various household necessities, like a refrigerator—to “Fear and Beer: Hymn to Brexit” from just this summer, the Mekons—originally from Leeds, now centered in Chicago—have written, recorded, and performed a constantly changing repertoire of songs that both address specific political situations and define the nature of the political itself. Even when the subjects are specific—the sense of exile those opposed to Thatcherism felt when the ideology of capitalism and the denial of the social seemed to smother all other forms of discourse, to make arguments against Thatcherism incomprehensible—“Fear and Whiskey” was, in its words, entirely allegorical, and in its music, a refusal of any genre, type, or style, making the song not merely applicable to but a sort of hidden, even silent anthem for any place or time: a way of making sense of the senseless.

We propose to explore the ways in which the Mekons have, over forty years, with two founding members and a band that has held its current shape for decades, combined history, myth, everyday life, music, the news, and their own aging and mortality to reconstitute the political as an inescapable part of life and the basis for a lot of good songs.