Jon Langford interview |
GROSS: Jon Langford, welcome to FRESH AIR. How did you first come
across Bob Wills? And how did he strike you the first time you heard
his music?
JON LANGFORD, MUSICIAN; VISUAL ARTIST: It was not like the country
music I'd heard in England growing up. We didn't think much of country
music, really. We were punk rockers and we thought punk rock was
really
exciting and everything else, and everything that went before it was
pretty boring.
And Bob Wills was just this music that kind of lapped up -- the thing
that struck me most about it was how timeless it was. It didn't sound
old to me. It sounded, like, very much alive, and I kind of imagined,
falsely, that possibly that was what was still going on somewhere in
Texas.
GROSS: When you were living in England and still playing kind of
punk
rock and listening to Bob Wills, did you ever imagine yourself playing
that kind of country or country swing, you know, western swing music
yourself?
LANGFORD: No. Absolutely not. I started listening to people like
Jimmy Rodgers and Hank Williams around that time, and people had
pointed
out parallels between what we did and those people. And I felt that
there were parallels between punk rock and country music because of the
focus of the lyrics.
It was very -- I felt that people like Merle Haggard or Hank Williams
were writing for their peers, and what was actually being talked about
was very realistic. It wasn't kind of escapist stuff like the lyrics
of
most rock music.
The structures were very simple, and Bob Wills is a different kettle
of fish altogether, because there was obviously fantastic musicianship
there. But I think he just had a strange open-minded vision of what
music could be in the sense that he came from very traditional fiddle
music into swing and big band stuff. I think he was a bit of an
avant-gardist, in a way.
GROSS: Let me put in a couple of the differences between western
swing and punk music. I think punk music has this really hard driving
beat, whereas western swing has this more, like, lilting swing to it.
LANGFORD: Bob had the big beat though. I think he was the first guy
to use drums on the Grand Ol' Opry.
GROSS: Uh-huh.
LANGFORD: I mean, he was very concerned about it being thumping and
dancing. I think when somebody asked him in 1958 or something what he
thought about rock and roll he said, oh we've been doing that for 30
years.
GROSS: OK, and another thing, a lot of punk songs were almost kind
of
shouting songs. Not about songcraft as we think of it. Whereas, you
know, country music -- all of country music is so dependent on
songcraft
and professional songwriters and all that.
LANGFORD: Yeah, but they're still -- the people I like, there's
still
simplicity to the songs, and the simplicity of the sentiments that
they're expressing, which I felt, you know, related to what we were
trying to do with punk music. Punk music is a strange genre
because
a lot of people think of, you know, the mohicans and the leather
jackets
of the early '80s --punks wearing them. What I thought was very broad
and open-minded, stuff that was going in the late '70s in England where
kind of anything was possible.
GROSS: Now, what pop music did you grow up with in Wales?
LANGFORD: When I was a kid, the first thing that I really liked was
a
band called Slade. That kind of glam rock stuff, because I think I was
probably about 12 for 13 years old and I probably wanted to be a
football hooligan and didn't have the wherewithal to do anything about
it.
And Slade and bands like that seemed to be kind of like the sort of
football hooligan element that sort of brought that into pop music.
They
were like a skinhead band who went all glam and wore outrageous outfits
and big boots and very strange -- looking back on it.
Quite boisterous and noisy -- T. Rex as well, I kind of got into
Hawkwind and Black Sabbath and that heavy metal stuff, but only the
kind
of crudest, most brutal stuff that I liked.
LAUGHTER
And then punk rock happened, and then you had The Clash and The Sex
Pistols.
GROSS: What year was The Mekons formed, your band?
LANGFORD: We formed in 1977 pretty much after The Sex Pistols came
along -- I forget what the name of that tour was. Was that the White
Riot Tour or something like that? Or the Anarchy Tour. They came with
The Clash and The Damned and Johnny Thunders and the Heartbreakers, and
they played at Leeds Polytechnic. It was just --anyone can be in a
band. You don't have to be able to play instruments to be in a band.
GROSS: Did you feel that was the only way you could be in a band if
-- the only way you could be in a band was if anybody could be in a
band?
LANGFORD: Yeah, that's what -- it really galvanized people. You
didn't have to make music like music that was made before. You didn't
have to be like The Who, you didn't have to write rock operas, and have
orchestras playing with you, and have huge banks of keyboards, and you
could just pick up a guitar and play one chord and you could be in a
band and you could have something that you could say.
GROSS: Let me read something that the rock critic Greil Marcus said
about you in his book "Lipstick Traces," he said, "The Mekons were best
known as the band that took punk ideology most seriously. Those who
couldn't play tried to learn, and those who could tried to forget."
Did you fit into either of those two categories? LANGFORD: I
had
a drum kit. I was very interested in being in a band for quite a
longtime, but never kind of really got it together, so I actually had a
drum kit that I bought off someone. And I took it up to Leeds when I
went up there to go to art college.
So, I was in demand because I had a drum kit. I couldn't actually
play them very well, but I was definitely in demand because you had to
have a drum kit. So I was -- me and Tom were in the same studio in art
school and he just said one day, we're going to form a band. And I was
like, oh, really? Yeah, it's going to be good because no one is going
to be able to play. And I said, oh, can I be in it then? And he said,
yeah, you'd be good. You've got a drum kit. Yeah, we were going to ask
you to be in it.
GROSS: I want to play one of the early Mekons recordings to get a
sense of what the band was like early in its career. Why don't you
choose one of the early records and introduce it for us.
LANGFORD: This is off the album we did for Virgin Records called,
"The Quality of Mercy Is Not Strnen." And this song is called, "What
Are We Going To Do Tonight."
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- THE MEKONS PERFORMING "WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO
TONIGHT")
GROSS: There is some, actually, really good discordant playing in
that too. I like that.
LANGFORD: Oh, yeah. We perfected that very early on.
GROSS: Did you get technically accomplished as time went on?
LANGFORD: That's why I gave up playing the drums because I knew that
there was no way I was ever going to be technically accomplished at
that. But I can play guitar a little bit now. I think it's more about
knowing a few tricks rather than being an accomplished musician.
GROSS: My guest is Jon Langford, co-founder of The Mekons. We'll
talk
more after our break.
This is FRESH AIR.
BREAK
GROSS: My guest, Jon Langford, is co-founder of the punk band The
Mekons. And he draws the syndicated comic strip, "Great Pop Things."
His strips are collected in a new book.
Now, you said that the first slogan of The Mekons was "No
personalities emerge." Why did you want to not make it the kind of
band
that had a star fronting it?
LANGFORD: We had a huge manifesto.
GROSS: What else was in it?
LANGFORD: Oh, there were loads of things. We will never make a
record. We will never have our photograph taken. We will only be the
support band. We'll be the punk band that plays slow songs not fast
songs.
Mostly, all those things crumbled before the first gig, because the
guy refused to book us. We said, we're going to be like a punk band,
but we're going to play slow songs. He said, well, you can't play them
because you've got to play fast. And we were like, oh no. And then we
had to back and write some more song's because we didn't have enough.
If we played them fast they weren't long enough, so we only had about
15
minutes of music for the first gig.
But somebody came along at the first gig, it was a band called The
Rizillos (ph) from Edinburgh. And their manager was a guy called Bob
Last (ph) and he was setting up a little record label, and he just
said,
do you want to make a record? And we were like, well, we're not going
to make a record. Oh, it would be quite good to make a record,
wouldn't
it? Yes, we'd like to make a record.
And the NME wouldn't publish a feature of us unless we had a
photograph of the band, so we stood in some trees miles away. And some
guy took some photographs of us standing in these trees so you couldn't
see who anyone was, and they rejected that.
So they said, we won't write about you unless you have a photograph.
So, we built some dummies with coat hangers and paint tins, and sent
them that, and they wouldn't have that. So, in the end they sent some
photographer up from London, and we all stood dutifully by and had our
photographs taken. So, there are many many things --we always knew in
The Mekons what we didn't want to be. What we were was what was left.
GROSS: Well, let me get back to the manifesto. Were you one of the
writers of the manifesto? Did you want a manifesto?
LANGFORD: Yeah, I think we thought that was -- it was year zero. We
were cutting kind of the punk -- the decadence of rock and roll music,
at the root we were punk rockers and that was it. It was very
important
to us that everything was justified.
GROSS: Did you feel like a sellout when you violated all the
principles of the manifesto right away?
LANGFORD: No, not really. Because half of it was just the love of
wanting to do it. And it was quite exciting.
GROSS: What did you hate in pop music at the time?
LANGFORD: All that progressive rock stuff. I just couldn't stand
it.
Most of my friends really liked The Who. The Who did a kind of four
album rock opera, and everyone would run out and buy it. I just thought
that was the most depressing thing imaginable. I really didn't like
that.
I thought -- I thought, mostly, they were very pompous. And I
thought
most pop stars were hilarious. I mean, "Dark Side of the Moon" by Pink
Floyd. I mean, it still cracks me up now if I hear that. I just think
it's like ludicrous megalomania.
GROSS: Why?
LANGFORD: I don't know. Just somebody who thinks that their
opinions
are that important, it's strange.
GROSS: Would you sing a few bars of the first song that you wrote
for
The Mekons?
LANGFORD: The first song?
GROSS: Mm-hmm. You could do one of the early songs, then.
LANGFORD: We used to write everything collectively. We had a song
called "Never Been in a Riot." So, do you want me to sing it?
GROSS: Mm-hmm.
LANGFORD: Well, we didn't used to sing, we used to shout.
GROSS: Right.
LAUGHTER
LANGFORD:
Never been in a riot
Never been in a fight
How come for me
Everything turns out
all
right
Turns out right
Turns out right
That was the first verse. It was a kind of answer to The Clash's
"White Riot." I like the Clash, but I thought it was completely
irresponsible and insane to write a song called "White Right," "Want to
Riot."
I didn't understand what they were talking about with that, and
thought they were -- I thought they were encroaching on the same sort
of
pomposity that the progressive rockers had as well. The Clash were a
great band, but had a lot of unfortunate things about them as well.
So, we did that as the first single as a kind of answer to that. So,
we assumed they were just nice middle-class boys who had never been in
a
riot anyway. We knew we were. So, we just said we've never been in a
riot, never been in a fight.
GROSS: So, the band was, in a way, about not following all the big
commercial principles of rock and roll.
LANGFORD: Yeah, totally.
GROSS: Then you succeeded in not becoming a big commercially
successful band.
LANGFORD: We succeeded, Terry. We did succeed. That's right. Thank
you for saying that. A secret of our success is our lack of success.
GROSS: I think you had something like 11 different record companies.
LANGFORD: Yeah. We've always had kind of -- some of those record
companies were actually ourselves.
GROSS: Oh, oh, even you couldn't take it.
LANGFORD: No, we would fire ourselves quite regularly.
GROSS: Who would jump out first with most of your records? Did they
want out or did you want out?
LANGFORD: Usually we wanted out. Usually it was just, like,
situations that weren't going anywhere. We'd been with major labels,
we
were fired by Virgin which was kind of predictable. I don't know why
they even signed us in the first place. It was just that kind of
madness, the sort of feeding frenzy that goes on when something new
comes out.
All these A&R men who think they know the secret of everything that's
commercial, run around with their check books wide-open trying to sign
everything. And they signed The Mekons, that was obviously not a
commercial band in any way.
More so when we signed to A&M in 1989. We signed kind of more with
our eyes open, and we signed because we thought that there was some
theory by which a band like ourselves could exist on a major label.
And we could make records quite cheaply and sell a modest amount of
records, but still make the record company money.
But after the guy who set up that deal left, and a lot of accountants
come along and they -- what are these people doing on the label? Yeah,
that's a very good question. We don't belong on a major label. It's
never been a very happy experience. I've always felt I'm like an
employee when I'm on a major label.
But then again, some independent labels have been excruciatingly bad
to us as well. Not Touch and Go in Chicago. That's the longest we've
ever been on a record label is with Touch and Go, they've just been
great. We just say, can we have some money? And they say, OK. And we
go and do things with it.
GROSS: During the punk days, I think a fair number of people would
show up at concerts in some venues and think that it was really cool to
throw things at the band or to act very aggressively.
LANGFORD: To spit at the band, yeah.
GROSS: What were some of the things that happened at some of your
concerts that you didn't appreciate?
LANGFORD: People getting stabbed. Members of the band being beaten
senseless.
GROSS: When did that happen?
LANGFORD: At a Rock Against Racism gig in Newcastle.
GROSS: Oh, perfect, huh?
LANGFORD: In the dressing room. There's a band called The Angelic
Upstarts who were meant to be playing, and apparently they didn't turn
up. So, their fans decided to beat the living crap out of the rest of
us. It was kind of a scary time.
The Mekons made a conscious decision not to play live after about
1980. We just didn't want to play. We didn't play until, maybe, '83.
Something like that.
v
GROSS: Were you almost afraid of your own fans?
LANGFORD: I just thought it turned into a very hideous, violent
scene. Punk was meant to be this wide open thing where everything was
acceptable, and it became like if you didn't have a leather jacket and
the mohican and you didn't play fast and pretend to be really stupid,
which is what most punk bands seem to want to do -- or be really right
wing because there was a lot of really right wing punk bands at that
time.
I mean, we played to crowds with people "Seig Heiling," who would
then be -- we would shoot our mouths off at them and then they'd be
waiting for us outside after the gig. That happened a couple of times.
It was pretty scary.
GROSS: Did you ask yourself, how did this happened? How did it
happen that the music hardened into this caricature and that the fans
somehow interpreted the music has being so compatible with fascism?
LANGFORD: I think the industry got the lid on it, you know. It
became a commercial prospect for the music industry. When it was
interesting it was because no one knew where it was going or what was
happening. And it turned into a very unpleasant cul-de-sac quite
quickly.
We decided we didn't want anything to do with it. So, we didn't play
live until about '83. We put out records, but very bedroom oriented
records. We would stay at home singing to tape recorders.
GROSS: Did you miss performing?
LANGFORD: Yeah, I did. I'm not sure -- it was such an unpleasant
situation. I didn't really miss it. I wanted to play in the band. I
like the idea of playing live. I started put working on playing
the
guitar. I formed another band called The Three John's. When I first
came to the States, it was with The Three John's, and that was like a
little drum machine, rock guitar trio. And they were just my friends.
It seemed to change --by the mid-'80s it had changed a lot. Something
got tired and died out, but it got very ugly for a while.
GROSS: Let me ask you to choose a Mekons recording that you
particularly like.
LANGFORD: I'll choose one of the new album. This is my favorite at
the moment. It's a song called "Flip Flop," which is pretty
inexplicable.
GROSS: And how new is the new how both?
LANGFORD: The new album came out in June, I think. May or June.
GROSS: Let's hear it. And the album is called "Me."
LANGFORD: It's called "Me." All songs written by me.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- THE MEKONS PERFORMING "Flip Flop")
He's a little boy so lovely
To watch and he's got great respect
You boys don't know what pain is
Just flip flop mate
Enter the sentimental chamber
GROSS: That's "Flip Flop" from The Mekons latest CD called, "Me."
Mekons co-founder Jon Langford will be back in the second half of the
show.
I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR.
BREAK
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross.
Back with Jon Langford. He's a founding member of the British punk
band The Mekons, which is still together after more than 20 years. But
the band members live in different places. In fact, Langford lives in
Chicago and has a number of other projects besides his work with The
Mekons.
He plays in a couple of country-inspired bands. He's also a painter,
and has had several shows this year. And he draws the syndicated comic
"Great Pop Things" under the pen name Chuck Death.
You have many different incarnations now. There's The Mekons,
there's
the Bob Wills tribute record you put together.
You have a band called
The Waco Brothers. I want to play something from your Waco Brothers
album. Where do The Waco Brothers fit in?
LANGFORD: I moved to
Chicago about '92, and I had absolutely nothing to do there whatsoever.
So, I wanted to -- I always wanted to be in a band. The Mekons were
always so stretched geographically even when we were all living in
England. People lived in London, people lived in Leeds, people lived
elsewhere. Steve, the drummer, had already moved to Chicago.
I felt like it would be nice to be a be in a band where everyone
lived
in the same neighborhood so we could get together and actually play in
your hometown. Become a band -- Chicago's big enough that you can
become a band of some note just by playing around Chicago. And that
was
the intention of The Waco Brothers.
I wanted to play the songs of people like George Jones, Hank
Williams,
Merle Haggard. Simple, straight, you know, pumped up country -- honky
tonk country music. That was something I tried to do in Leeds and no
one would take me serious whatsoever.
GROSS: Why did you name it The Waco Brothers?
LANGFORD: I didn't actually. We had many names. We used to change
the name every week in case people recognized us and wouldn't come
again
because we were so awful when we started. But, I don't know, I think
it
was that weekend with the Waco thing going on, and I went away and
somebody had to do a poster.
And I think that was the first time we played a gig that was actually
any good. The Waco Brothers was kind of a sick name at the time, but I
think the meaning as dissolved a little bit now.
GROSS: Well, I thought we could play "Arizona Rose" from this. And
this is a song that you wrote and sing lead on. Tell us about the
song,
what inspired it.
LANGFORD: A friend of mine from Leeds moved to New York and got
married and had a kid. And they named it Arizona Rose. I said, that
sounds like the title of a song, and we had just started doing The Waco
Brothers thing, and Blood Shot Records wanted us to make a album.
I had no idea what we were going to do for an album, but I thought it
would be a really bad idea to do an album of country covers, so lets
try
and write a few songs. I wrote this song with a guy called Tom Wright
who was the bass player in the band at the time. He actually said, that
sounds like a song, because I said to my friend on the phone, oh, give
my love to Arizona. So, there you have it.
GROSS: OK, and here it is. Jon Langford with The Waco Brothers.
(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP -- THE WACO BROTHERS PERFORMING "ARIZONA ROSE")
Oh give my love to Arizona
To Arizona Rose
She's in New
York
And I can't phone her
She left no number
She just had to go
Now all of the star
light
And all of the memories
They're still out there
Out there on the plain
But oh my
heart
Is such a dry place
As tears of love
Where once there were things
GROSS: That's "Arizona Rose" from The Waco Brothers album. My guest
is Jon Langford who sang lead and co-wrote the song. I think it's fair
to say that you seem to have a love-hate relationship with country
music. You love a lot of music and hate a lot of the commercialism and
trappings surrounding it . LANGFORD: The industry is problematic
for me. I mean, a lot of the people who run the country music industry
in Nashville are kind of shoe salesman, I think. They made their money
in other industries and applied the same kind of logic to music, but I
don't necessarily think that's the best way of selling music.
GROSS: You did an art piece called "The Death of Country Music," a
series of tombstones. Would you describe, first what some of the
tombstones were like?
LANGFORD: They were like great big lumps of granite. So, they were
difficult to transport. And they had pictures of Hank Williams on them
because I thought, as a kind of symbol more than anything else. And
they said kind of mean things about the country music industry.
We planned to put them outside some of the offices of big companies
on
music row. Friends of mine in Nashville told me that they wouldn't
last
two minutes even though they were really big and really heavy. So, we
didn't do that, but we had a show at a gallery called The American Pop
Culture Gallery in Nashville. It was interesting because a lot of
people came down to the show from the business side of things, and they
kind of quietly said how they agreed that maybe there were was some
point to what I was doing.
GROSS: My guest is Jon Langford, co-founder of The Mekons. He has
several bands, and he is also a visual artist. And he has a new book
as
well, it's a kind of satirical, comic history of rock and roll from
Elvis to Oasis called, "Great Pop Things."
This is a very funny book, and one of the premises throughout the
book
is that a lot of rock stars think they're change the world, and of
course fail. And the ways that they seem to be trying to change it are
kind of absurd and trivial.
So, a list of examples, The Velvet Underground, they tried to change
the world with their nihilism and their sunglasses. John Lennon, he
tried to make world peace by taking all his clothes off. Tom Waits, he
tried to change the world by making that token weird album that normal
people have in their record collections. The Grateful Dead tried to
change the world by playing continuously since 1966. Brian Eno tried
to
change the world by turning it on its side and calling it something
else.
Do you think it's kind of pretentious when pop stars say that they
want to change the world?
LANGFORD: I think pop music has the capacity to be very meaningful
to
people. I think a lot of pop stars go far overboard. I think the
turning point for me and Carlton, who is the guy I collaborate with on
this, was probably Live Aid. And seeing the lengths that people went
to
at that time.
I think music is maybe a reflection of things that go on rather than
being a kind of catalyzing force. The book is basically just pin
pricks
and just lampoon of those people who believe otherwise, or don't see
themselves as part of the problem.
GROSS: And I'll remind our listeners, this is spoken by somebody who
once had a pop manifesto. So, you should know.
LANGFORD: Yep. I'm just jealous, basically. We do mean strips
about
Bono from U2 because he's got more money than we have. It's the only
way to get back at him.
GROSS: Now, you have a satiric take on a Grateful Dead lyric in
here.
Do you remember the lyric?
LANGFORD: There's a lot of words in that book.
GROSS: Yeah. I was hoping you had actually written a melody around
this and I could get you to sing it.
LANGFORD: Oh. yeah?
GROSS: Let me turn to the page and see if there's anything you could
do with this.
LANGFORD: See, I forget most of the stuff that's in here. I need a
guitar, really. I mean, what does a Grateful Dead song sound like?
Pretty boring to my imagination. It would be kind of like:
Antelope fire Indians
Sparkling on the tennis courts
Diamond
pattern dancing
On the hydrants and the shoe stores
I thought I heard a noodle sing
I sang like Greta Garbo
But
I guess it doesn't matter anyway
GROSS: Very good.
LANGFORD: I'm not very good with the Grateful Dead vocals. It is
definitely outside my realm of experience or understanding.
GROSS:
You've said, and I guess people you've played with in The Mekons have
said that the band exceeded by failing. I mean, you've had your
independence by not being indebted in one way or another to a record
company or commercial concerns and all that.
LANGFORD: We don't feel the need to treat it as a career.
GROSS: Right. Now, say one day you became, actually, very
successful
within music, as improbable as that may seem because -- and I say that
not because of a lack of talent but because of what you're doing isn't
seeking to be in the mainstream.
And you're working with a lot of different idioms and so on. But say
you really did strike that nerve and you really caught on in a very
commercial way. Is that something you would finally welcome?
LANGFORD: I don't know. Some friends mine in Chumba Wumba have been
playing for, like, 15 years and they just ended up having a big hit
last
year. And I don't know how that will affect them or what that will do
to them. It's put them in the public eye quite a lot, which is
something I wouldn't want to be in.
GROSS: You've seen a lot of -- I'm sure you've had a lot of friends
who've become stars -- big ones. How do you think it's changed them?
Do think that, inevitably, it changes people?
LANGFORD: Yeah, I think so. There's a persona there that you have
to
kind of take on, and often it makes people a little bit -- to the
extent
that Chumba Wumba have become big stars on one record there may not be
another record, it may just be a flash in the pan thing.
I think it's made them kind of a little scared, and very self-
deprecating, you know, just wanting to not be in that position to some
extent. But then driven on to do more and more crazy things like
pouring buckets of water over Labour politicians and appearing on
late-night chat shares with Bill Mahr and things like that.
I don't know if that was to happen to The Mekons, I don't know, but I
just can't really see it happening. I think you would have to ask me
when it did happen. I think it would change everything. And it might
not -- it might not be for the better.
GROSS: OK, well I wish the best with your music and your art. And I
want to thank you a lot for talking with us.
LANGFORD: Thank you very much.
GROSS: Jon Langford is a co-founder of The Mekons. His solo record
is called "Skull Orchard," his western swing CD is called "The Pine
Valley Cosmonauts Salute the Majesty of Bob Wills." And his syndicated
comic strip is collected in the new book, "Great Pop Things."