- [Narrator] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial, Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, Ellergroup.com, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and Karey and Chris Oddo.

- I'm Evan Smith.

He's a punk rock icon who's a founding member of the Mekons, soon to celebrate, can you believe it, 50 years as a band.

He's Jon Langford.

This is "Overheard."

(upbeat music) A platform and a voice is a powerful thing.

You've really turned the conversation around about what leadership should be about.

Are we blowing this?

Are we doing the thing we shouldn't be doing by giving in to the attention junkie?

As an industry, we have an obligation to hold ourselves to the same standards that we hold everybody else.

- Two.

- This is "Overheard."

(audience applauding) (audience applauding) Jon Langford, welcome.

- Hey, thanks.

Finally, finally here.

- Finally, finally, finally here.

And what a treat it is to get to see you.

I gave away the punchline in the introduction, 50 years coming up.

- Yeah, I'm not gonna be talking about that next year.

I'm taking the year off.

- Oh, is that right, you're just gonna skip the whole anniversary?

- 50 years of punk.

We've done 10 years of punk, 20 years of punk.

- Yeah.

I think the longevity of this band is one of the untold stories.

You know, so many bands come together, everybody's excited on the front side of it, and then they play for a while, and then human nature being what it is, bands break up.

Like it's the oldest story in the world.

Only you all, all this time later are still doing it.

- Sally from the Mekons always says the secret of the Mekons' success is the Mekons' lack of success.

- Is that right?

- Yeah.

We never really had the, you know, any kind of reason to give up our day jobs and make the band the sole source of, it happened a couple of times.

We were on major labels twice.

- Yep.

- And those were, you know, we made good stuff on those labels and what we did was all right.

But the way we felt like as a band was, we felt like corporate employees, and it wasn't why we got into it in the first place.

- Well, it's totally antithetical to punk rock.

- Yeah, punk was about- - Working for the man.

- Yeah, exactly, and we thought we could, you know, climb in the dragon's mouth and, you know, pee out the flames and all that, but it didn't work.

It didn't work like that at all.

- Yeah.

- Yeah, we just felt like kind of broken when we would be signed to major labels.

- But it's not true that it's been a side hustle for all of you.

Like you've done other things, but you have been focused on the band.

- Well, a lot of people are involved in other things.

- Other things.

- And other things, you know, I mean, I paint and I have other bands as well, like the Waco Brothers in Chicago.

- Right.

- But, we don't kind of make the Mekons the bread and butter.

- It's not the main focus.

- Yeah.

It's more like a kind of college alumni saga holiday kind of retirement home thing.

We all come together when we feel it.

- But the band is not broken up.

That's the point.

- The band sort of broke up after we were signed to Virgin Records, the original band, a couple of people just- - The original band.

- Left and disappeared.

And that was about 1981.

But me, Kevin and Tom were just still hanging around together, and Mark.

And it was like, "Why don't we do some music?"

- Yeah.

- "Everyone hates us, why would we do music?"

- Well, this brings up a point.

You know, one of the things that has been consistent is that the lineup has been inconsistent over the years, right?

Different people have come in and gone.

You mentioned Sally.

Sally is, of course, Sally Timms, one of the great unheralded musicians over the last 50 years.

- Yeah.

- Susie Honeyman, Tom Greenhalgh, Rico Bell.

Like some people have played sort of regularly with this band, but people have come in and come out over time.

- Well, it's that you can come and go, but you can never leave.

- Yeah, it's the "Hotel California" of bands.

- It really is, yeah, yeah.

There's no way to leave the Mekons.

- Yeah.

- People have gone away and said, "I can't do this anymore."

- Yeah.

- "This is too humiliating.

I'm never gonna play with you."

Then they always come back.

- At the beginning you were styled, either you styled yourselves or people styled you as punk rock.

Was that a fair characterization?

- No, I think there was a thing, what happened, we were in the north of England.

We were art students at the University of Leeds, the original band.

And there was a band called the Gang of Four.

They were a proper band.

- Yes, a band called the Gang of Four that none of us have heard of.

- Yeah, first day I got to Leeds, my freshes group leaders, the people who were meant to show you around the university, were these older students from the, and it was Mark and Andy who became the lead singers.

- From Gang of Four?

- No, from the Mekons.

- Oh, the Mekons.

- Yeah, yeah, Andy Corrigan and Mark White.

- Yes.

- So they basically just took me to the pub and then I told them I had a drum kit back in Wales and Andy Corrigan got very interested.

"You should, my mate Andy Gill is forming a band.

You should bring your drum kit up here 'cause it's all gonna go off."

And then the, you know, the Sex Pistols came, The Clash came.

- Yep.

- I got my drum kit brought off, but the thing they said, I said, "What's the Gang of Four gonna be like?"

And they were, no one really knew what punk rock sounded like.

We'd only read it, read about it in newspapers.

- Yeah.

- But it was just the idea that it was this raw kind of like political music.

We got that idea, but there were no punk rock records at the time.

- So nothing to base it on.

- Nothing to base it on, really.

So we kind of misread the smoke signals and decided it was just this license to do anything you want.

And then Tom was the person who actually invited me to join the Mekons formally.

And he said, "Do you want to be in a band where no one can play?"

(audience laughing) Which would sound ludicrous at any other point in history, but it made total sense to me that day.

And the Gang of Four, they described, they said they were gonna try and be a cross between Dr.

Feelgood and The Velvet Underground.

And I was like, "Wow, I know Dr.

Feelgood, but I've never heard of this Velvet Underground.

I better go and do my homework."

But not admit it.

But then I realized John Cale was from Wales, was in The Velvet Underground.

I though he was a Welsh folk singer and I found out all about him.

- Yeah.

- You know, we were all really young.

- The trivia question that could be formed around this story is you were a drummer first, in the band.

- That's why I was in demand.

- Right.

(audience laughing) - 'Cause the one thing about punk rock, the drummer basically had to be able to hold a beat and play really, really fast.

- Right.

- So, and I always used to speed up.

When we got back together for the, I think it was the 40th anniversary, put the original band back together.

Everyone from the original band, including Ros, who went on to be in Delta 5.

And she looked at me and said, "You used to always speed up, but now you slow down."

(audience laughing) I was going, "Yeah, I slow down 'cause it's exhausting."

- Times change, exactly.

People get older.

- But I never really played drums with anyone else.

I stopped playing the drums, 'cause I didn't like packing the drum kit up at the end of the night.

And I wanted to stand at the front of the stage with a guitar next to Tom.

- And so you changed it.

- Yeah.

- And you did.

What happened to punk rock?

- Punk rock, by about the time we were hanging out on a major label, it became a cul-de-sac.

It became rigid.

- Yeah.

- What we saw as, you know, open-ended.

North of England, like I said, we misread the smoke signals.

In Manchester, the Buzzcocks thought you could be a pop band.

- Right.

- In Sheffield, The Human League, Cabaret Voltaire, all friends of ours, they thought it was an excuse to do electronic music.

You know, and it was the same thing, jingly jangling up in Scotland.

And then in Leeds, it was this very political kind of scene.

And with a lot of the Gang of Four, we were into funk music.

You know, we were into "Saturday Night Live" when that came out.

We were into the Bee Gees, and apparently, you know, in America that was seen as disco versus rock and was kind of- - So punk rock was whatever you decided it was.

- It was just you made your own entertainment, your independent labels.

Mekons just did a festival in North Wales and Richard Boon came and set up New Hormones records.

And that was our model.

The Buzzcocks' "Spiral Scratch" single came out on their own label and we were just, "That's what we want to do.

We want to do that."

- Well, over time, what's been really interesting to observe of your career is how comfortably you've moved.

So you moved from what we thought of as punk rock at the time- - It's not comfortable.

- It sure looks comfortable.

I mean, you know why, because- - It's how uncomfortably we've moved, I think.

- But I would actually say that you pulled it off.

In other words, you moved into country, you moved into folk, you moved into Americana.

- That's 'cause we felt discomfort with all the other things we were doing.

- But the point is that it was credible.

The stuff that you did, you mentioned the Waco Brothers or the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, right?

The stuff you did with Kelly Hogan.

- That's when I moved to Chicago.

- But that stuff reads as first nature to you, or second nature to you, I should say, right?

- Well Mekons, when I say we got back together, we were just hanging out as a sort of social group.

We decided to play music.

The reason Tom, I was off with another band, The Three Johns, playing in Italy, and Tom called me and said, "I want to put the Mekons back together as a live band, because of the miners' strike."

And that was, we'd always been connected to, every year of the Mekons, we were connected to some kind of political cause.

You know, usually things that were rearguard actions that we end up terribly depressed at the end of it.

Congratulations on last week, everyone.

(audience applauding) I voted and everyone I voted for won.

- Is that right?

Isn't it?

- Yeah.

- It's kind of a weird feeling.

- It's a really weird feeling.

- Exactly, yeah.

Well, no need to be political anymore 'cause, you know, you've won the game now.

That's what it is.

- Well, with the Mekons, country, it was just, as you said, you said "What happened to punk rock?"

Punk rock turned into a cul-de-sac with rigid rules.

And it was basically speeded up heavy metal and you had to have a leather jacket with certain number of studs in it.

And the height of your bright green Mohican was very important.

But that wasn't anything to do with what we did.

When we started punk rock, people would come to the gigs.

No one knew what punk rockers was meant to look like.

So guys would turn up with long hair mustaches, a dog collar on, and you know- - With spikes.

- And flared trousers with words written on 'em.

You know, and it was just, it was very, very homemade and do it yourself.

I loved that aspect.

When the music business caught up with it, bang, I put the lid back on the pot, and then it was boring.

And then ska came, the two-tone ska thing happened, which to me was much more exciting.

We were very involved in the Rock Against Racism campaign, and we were at, you know, an all-white band shouting.

We did a lot of gigs with The Ruts and Misty in Roots and we played with Aswad and bands like that, reggae bands.

There was a lot of crossover, and in Leeds particularly, there was a big West Indian community, but, it was quite hard to get that over.

There was like a lot of street violence and a lot of the young white punk kids mishearing The Clash's "White Riot" thought it was a fascist movement.

And it drove division on the streets.

And then the ska thing happened in the Midlands, and with the two-tone, and suddenly you got bands that looked like the inner city.

You got bands with white people, Black people, and women as well.

That was another really interesting thing about punk was the Mekons.

There was always women in the Mekons and it was "Whoa," you know?

And it was like, "You've got a woman in your band."

It's like, "Yeah, why wouldn't we?"

You know, but it never dawned on us.

So that was the first time that was not a novelty.

- What an extraordinary time from then to now and all the stuff that you've seen and experienced.

I mean, you've mentioned some of the bands that you played in during that time.

You mentioned Waco Brothers.

I've said Pine Valley Cosmonaut.

You mentioned the Three Johns.

I went back to look up all the bands that you've played in over the last couple of decades and it's a really long list.

- Yeah, unfortunately, yeah.

- No, no, but I actually think, I mean, you obviously are doing different things with different people.

- I like to collaborate, and I think music, I mean, half my time I spend doing painting, which is a very solitary activity.

- Right.

- And I hate that.

I hate the fact that you go back to your studio and just work on your own.

It's like being a writer.

Imagine that's a way that a writer's world is like that.

Music is just this, it's incredible.

Even when we couldn't play, with bad people.

Now we have great people, like you mentioned Susie Honeyman.

We have Steve Goulding who played drums on "Watching the Detectives," you know one of the great sort of drummers that come out of that period.

He's in the Mekons, whether he likes it or not.

- Right.

(Jon laughing) Yeah.

- But you know, you just put people in a room, like, we just play together.

And music, you can just pick up a guitar if you can just play two chords.

You can make something together.

And I've always marveled at that ease and comfort with which you can create stuff, collaboratively.

- If the goal is not to be commercially successful, I mean, it'd be nice if you were.

- Well, the goal was never not to be commercially successful.

- Right, but the point is if you're just there for the music- - It was just fairly obvious to us that was a bit of a waste of time.

- The world told you this was not gonna be successful.

- I mean, most bands have a lead singer, you know, someone who's the main songwriter, and then you have a record company that takes over and then they tell you to, "Well, that song did rather well, so write another song like that one, but hone it down and do that and sack the bass player 'cause he's got a big nose," and you know.

And we could never really get into that.

- And that's actually a really important point.

The music business today is like a music business in name only, right?

Like this is not the record business of old.

This is not the way it used to be.

It's very DIY now.

- Eh, there's a different game going on.

- Say more about that.

- Eh, well, I'll probably get into a lot of trouble, but you know, there's not really any independent record labels anymore.

They're all owned by someone else.

There's the illusion of independent record labels, and there are some that are genuinely... I've just done a record with Spacecase Records here in Austin, Texas.

- Yep.

- And it's a seven-inch single that we recorded at a studio that my son helped build out in Bastrop, just recently, with Adam Smith, who's a producer and master and engineer.

- Right, but that's something that you can do now.

- It does exist, but it exists on a level.

- The technology allows you to do this yourself.

- Yeah.

I mean, you can.

You can put it up on Bandcamp, but where does all the money go when we get, you know, you can buy my record, you just have a subscription to a company, and you've got the new Mekons record in your phone whether you like it or not.

All you have to do is Google, you know, well, search Mekons "Horrorble."

The latest record.

- That was the last thing.

- I'm just plugging the latest records.

- Yeah, right, yeah.

- But yeah, and it's like, we're actually on a label, Fire Records in London, but you know, they fit what we need at the moment.

They're nowhere near a major label but- - I have to believe that more people encounter your music, current music and old music on streaming, than they do in the way the music used to- - Yeah, but there's no way to make a living out of that.

- Can't make any money off of Spotify or anything else, right?

- I mean, the way the Mekons make a living now is we draw our own T-shirts.

- Yeah?

- Our drummer left the T-shirts on the Eurostar when we were going off on a European tour and we knew we were gonna barely break even, and all the profit we were gonna make was gonna be off the T-shirts.

- On those T-shirts.

- Yeah.

So we went to some kind of like Michael's in Austria, bought hundreds of T-shirts, just sat in the van with fabric pens and acrylic paints making T-shirts.

- So it now comes down to merch.

Merch is the way you make money.

- Yeah, it seems like, it seems like.

But it was actually really fun 'cause I hate touring, 'cause I don't draw.

And then me and Rico, Rico's a painter as well.

And so we just, and Tom does stuff, and we just sat in the van and tried to make the most stupid-looking T-shirts.

And every night they would be sold, and we're like- - Everyone would buy them, of course, why not?

- Yeah, we called 'em luxury chickens, 'cause they were unique.

- Yeah.

(audience laughing) How many nights are you on the road in a year?

You're 69 years old, you'll be 70 next year.

I mean, you have, well... - Evan!

Evan!

- Fact check me.

Fact check me.

I mean, you know- - It's true, I just don't want to hear it.

- Once upon a time, 70 would have been old, but the fact is there are a lot of people- - No, it's still old.

- Eh, but there are a lot of people your age who are continuing to do this at this pace with this frequency.

- We're trying to change the pace, now.

- Yeah.

But how often are you on the road, and do you get tired of it?

- The last couple of years, I've, for reasons, I've been on the road a lot.

I've been traveling a lot.

- Yeah.

Couple hundred nights a year?

- Eh, probably not that much, you know, but most weekends.

It's like I'm a weekend warrior.

- Yeah.

You still enjoy it?

- Yeah, I really enjoy it.

I mean, it's just amazing opportunities come up.

I mean, the Mekons just hosted a festival in North Wales at Portmeirion where they filmed "The Prisoner" in the 1960s.

- Yeah.

- And they asked me to curate a festival.

- Amazing.

- And they said, "You can just charge whatever you want, and you can have 150 people in the old town hall with them plus-" - You picked the bands.

- And I would say, "Well, just do it with the Mekons."

And they were like, "What?

You'd get the Mekons to do it?"

I said, "Yeah, we'll get the Mekons to come on."

We had an amazing weekend, it was really brilliant, and yeah, we didn't make a load of money, but we broke even on the whole thing.

- So that stuff is fun.

- But we had poets and storytellers and Sally and Susie playing up in a wooded glade.

You know, it was... That's fun to do stuff that's not the same, getting in a van, driving.

I think the European tour when we lost the T-shirts kind of broke us this year, 'cause Europe ain't the same.

Europe, they used to have lavish spreads in the dressing room and really nice hotels walking distance from the gig.

And this year, it's like, "Hang on."

They've cut all the government subsidies for punk rock bands, so.

(audience laughing) - Outrageous.

- Outrageous.

- Right.

- But yeah, it was hard.

And it was like, and yeah, we did feel it.

We felt like, you know, you drive in Europe, same as the states, long drives, really long drives.

- Right.

And you're based in Chicago, and have been for decades now, right?

- It was Newport, Leeds, Chicago, and, sometimes when I talk about the Three Johns, I say the Waco Brothers.

And sometimes when I talk about Leeds, I say Chicago, because, you know, I know I'm from Newport, but- - It all kind of interchanges.

- It's strange, they have a very similar part.

They occupy a similar part of my brain.

- Speaking of Newport, this was not the family business.

You were not from a family of musicians.

- Ah, my dad played the trumpet when he was a kid.

- When he was a kid.

- When they used to make their own entertainment on a Sunday night.

- But he was a chartered accountant, is that right?

- My dad was a chartered accountant, yeah.

He had a bad infection in his knee and they operated on him when he was a kid and he, they fused his leg so he had a stiff leg.

Whenever I want to summon up my father, I kind of, I can walk in a certain way, and it makes me remember him.

It's, yeah.

- Yeah.

- But his dad sat him down and said, "You know, you could have all these jobs that you'd be able to do with a bad leg."

And accountant was the first one.

And my dad being very pragmatic went, "I'll try that."

- I'll do that one.

That's exactly right.

- I just thought, "Well A, come on, man.

Astronaut.

Anarchist."

- Go further down the list, actually, right?

- I chose anarchist.

- Right.

- Yeah.

(audience laughing) - How did you know or when did you know that you wanted to play music?

- Just one night, my mom was listening to, you know, I was sporty, and I played three games a weekend, rugby with the school team on Saturday morning, club soccer on Saturday afternoon and Sunday with a men's team.

And I was probably about 15, and it was, got to the point I was about 15 and suddenly realized "This is stupid."

And I didn't like it.

And then I heard T. Rex on the radio.

- That's what it was.

- My mom was listening to the sort of top 40 roundup in the kitchen and suddenly something happened to my body, it went kind of, I felt something tingle.

- Yeah.

- And I got really interested.

- And you knew.

- And I spent all my money on records after that.

Slade, T. Rex, and then Roxy Music came out.

Then Bowie had "Starman" and the Ziggy Stardust thing.

But it happened to a lot of people.

A lot of people who would later be punk rockers, 'cause this was kind of very direct music.

It wasn't like the pretentious elves and wizards music of the progressive rock thing.

You know, we just loved this kind of, I don't know.

It was like rock and roll happening again for us.

But then I got to be about 15 and 16 and it was all... - There it was.

- Boring prog rock bands, and you couldn't go and see any of your favorite bands.

So punk, I was ripe.

You know, when punk hit, I was absolutely... You know, I look at it now, it's like, "Well, what else was I gonna do?

Course I was gonna."

I was an art student, and I was gonna be in a band, you know?

- But over time, as we've talked about, your tastes have evolved.

I mean, you're interested in country, you're interested in... - A very strange thing happened when we were in the process of being dropped by Virgin Records when our records we put out on Virgin weren't doing very well.

They'd taken us to Richard Branson's sort of country manor to record our first album because that meant they didn't have to, it was just free that week, and they could charge us for going there.

So they were like kind of moving money from one pocket to another pocket, yeah.

And it was just, we'd already been going too long and we were still playing the same songs we'd written two or three years earlier.

We just felt bored and I felt particularly bored with it all and it was stupid.

And then our manager, still, they took up the option for a second album and we said, "Let's just do something completely insane."

So our manager found a studio in the yellow pages and he said, "There's a studio out in the hills by Halifax.

We should go out there."

Happens to be the studio owned by Bill Leader, who was the British Alan Lomax.

We had no idea who he was.

We turned up at his studio and there's all these like Bert Jansch master tapes and like Richard Thompson stuff.

And we're like wandering around like "What?"

And he'd recorded all that stuff.

And he was kind of one of the figureheads of, you know, recording sort of rural British folk music with just people in a pub.

And he'd done, it was just incredible and it blew our minds.

And he had an engineer who worked with him who was really into kind of reggae music.

And we were into reggae, but, the idea of using that technology and, you know, the dub thing, it all just kind of came together and we were suddenly making folk dub music.

And Virgin were like, "No, thank you."

And Rough Trade said, "If you ever, ever need, if it doesn't work out with Virgin and the Mekons ever need a home, come to us."

So we went to them and they went "No, thank you."

(audience laughing) (Jon laughing) So we got it put out and it was... - Yeah.

- You know.

But that was the model for how we've worked ever since was, when you do a record that sounds like one thing, do something that sounds different.

- So we have about two minutes left, Jon.

I want to talk about art.

I want to talk about your art.

Two minutes.

- I can muster that up.

- I bet you can.

So you went to the University of Leeds as an art student.

- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

- Art's been something that's been a constant for you, going all the way back.

- Yeah.

It was a very interesting place.

I didn't realize how interesting it was at the time.

There's a guy called T.J.

Clark arrived the same time as me, and he was the only British person that was part of the Situationist International in Paris in 1968.

So he was right at the crux of all the naughtiness.

- You've been painting for all these years.

And the last number of years, I actually feel like I know you as much as a painter, as as a musician.

- It's a day job, which is weird.

- Yeah.

And you know, we think of you as a folk artist, although it's not really folk art.

- No, I'm not an outsider, I'm an insider art.

- Yeah.

But you do a lot of paintings of musicians, right?

A lot of cultural stuff.

- Well, that's what I learned at college was you make art about what you know.

So when Tony Fitzpatrick is, my mentor in Chicago asked me to have an exhibition, I'd never thought of showing my artwork, and he asked me to do it, and I went away and I thought about what I wanted to make the art about.

And it was gonna be the previous 15 years of struggling through the music business.

And then when I came down to Austin in '96, we played in the backyard of Yard Dog on South Congress with Whiskeytown and the Old 97's.

- Right.

- Just got to play with Rhett Miller from the Old 97's this weekend in Louisiana.

Fantastic, and, yeah, Randy said, "Oh, well, I do folk art and you're not folk art."

And then suddenly he realized that a lot of the folk artists were gonna die off pretty soon.

So he started including art by musicians, and that became a kind of fixture of- - Your stuff has been for sale at Yard Dog, which is the Austin folk art gallery, for several decades now.

- Every year since '96, so yeah, we had the 30th last year, I think.

- Yeah.

Well, through our friend Randy at Yard Dog, you painted my children, and I have that painting in my house.

And I look at that every day and I think of you.

- You think of me?

- I think of you.

- Think of me kindly.

- I will think of you kindly.

All right.

Right now I have to think of you as over because we're out of time.

(audience laughing) (Jon laughing) - Well, I'm 69.

- That's the end, exactly.

- I'm pretty near over.

- Got to get you to 70.

Jon, it's been so fun to hear stories and to talk to you, and I wish you continued success.

You've been such a big part of my life and everybody's lives.

- Well, I can't believe you were at the first Mekons show at Maxwell's.

- 1986 at Maxwell's.

- That's amazing.

- I always think back on that show.

- There was only three people there and one of 'em was you.

- And I was there.

All right.

Jon Langford, give him a big hand.

Thank you very much.

- Thank you.

- Great.

(audience applauding) Visit our website at austinpbs.org/overheard to find invitations to interviews, Q&As with our audience and guests, and an archive of past episodes.

- The game has changed so much, but as Evan said, there's all these opportunities now.

You can use the new technology as a kind of egalitarian thing that can actually really help you, or you can bang your head against a wall trying to get, you know, make no money from Spotify and Apple and people like that.

But there's other ways to do it, you know?

But yeah, I'd just say try and organize your own gigs.

You know?

- [Narrator] Funding for "Overheard with Evan Smith" comes from HillCo Partners, a Texas government affairs consultancy, Claire and Carl Stuart, Christine and Philip Dial.

Eller Group, specializing in crisis management, litigation, and public affairs communication, Ellergroup.com, Diane Land and Steve Adler, and Karey and Chris Oddo.

(cheerful music)