By Brian Baker
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Mekons, the Leeds punk group who wound up becoming a guiding force for alternative country from the '80s right up to the present. To commemorate their three decades of making music, the Mekons will be doing pretty much what they did for their 25th anniversary, which is to hit the road in support of a new album.
The difference is that, five years ago, the Mekons were celebrating the release of OOOH!, a conscious return to their hard country sound. This time around, the Mekons are once again supporting a new album, the just-released Natural, which represents the first Mekons album since 2002 to feature newly written material. It was also never intended to be released.
"We didn't know we were making an album," says Mekons frontman Jon Langford via phone from his Chicago studio.
It's a testament to the Mekons' talent and creativity when they can get together without the slightest intention of making a record and wind up making one of the best (and admittedly oddest) albums of their career. It also explains a lot about the band staying together in one form or another for the past 30 years.
"We did some punk revival things and everybody else was playing their first two albums," says Langford. "To be honest, that didn't hold any interest for me whatsoever. Most of it was bands that have reformed but we never split up. We like to say we're the best punk band in the world because we're the only punk band left going. But we're the worst punk band in the world as well."
Natural began to evolve back in 2004 when the Mekons embarked on their first English tour in nearly a decade and a half. The band had routed dates to accommodate a memorial service for John Gill, an early integral supporter of the Mekons who had passed away in 2003, which left them with four days off in mid-tour.
"We decided to go somewhere, rent a space and maybe just sit around and try and write some songs," says Langford. "We took some acoustic instruments with us and were fiddling about and Lu Edmonds brought all his Pro-Tools set up on his computer and a lot of microphones. It was just very relaxed, sort of casual noodling about. We weren't really quite sure what we were doing."
The band took a short holiday in the north of England's Lake District, an area steeped in history. The atmosphere of the place inspired the Mekons and that inspiration came out through the music they spontaneously began making.
"We were in this remote area and there's all these stone circles," says Langford. "It was kind of odd for us to be in England again, and just to be there, a lot of things came up in conversation. We went to this stone circle and drank whiskey and sang. It was about us coming together as a bunch of people who are kind of scattered across the planet to be all in the same place and catch up and talk about stuff. A lot of the things we talked about turned into songs."
After the England trip, guitarist Tom Greenhalgh (the only other original Mekon apart from Langford) left for a year in China with his wife and kids which halted the band's work on the recording. Edmonds continued to tinker with the tracks on his own, sending Langford copies of his progress.
"Lu took it away and turned it into this kind of really interesting instrumental record," says Langford. "I had a lot of stuff on my plate and Tom was in the Far East, so a lot of this came from other people in the band to push this forward. The fact that we hadn't done much in awhile and there wasn't any real plan made us worry about this a bit and make something happen. We don't really have a leader saying, "Now we're gonna do this, so when everyone takes their eye off the ball at the same time, things can drift off. Fortunately, Lu was possessed with this album."
When Greenhalgh rejoined the band after his China excursion, the Mekons headed back to England, this time to a small town in Sussex, to hammer the music the band had recorded into actual songs.
"It was a strange place, because it's where Brian Jones died, just up the road, and A.A. Milne wrote Winnie the Pooh and the Christopher Robin books about this particular area," says Langford. "It just seemed like the English countryside was encroaching on everything we did. We stopped recording one night and went for a walk around the 100 Acre Wood and we peered over a fence at the swimming pool where Brian Jones drowned. A lot of that stuff cropped up in the lyrics."
Langford had come up with some scattered lines for a couple of the songs during the initial recording and laid down some rudimentary vocals. The band briefly flirted with the idea of releasing Natural as an instrumental record, and there was the fleeting suggestion that they take the songs to a proper studio and re-record them.
"To me it seemed obvious that if you make something that sounds so different, you don't go normalizing it, you know?" says Langford. "So we tried to make it true to what had happened in the first place. We talked about it, we had a lot of ideas, and five minutes before we went into the studio, we wrote some lyrics."
The beauty of the Mekons' process is that there isn't one, as the making of Natural was a series of unintentional and happy accidents along an uncalculated path. Take Sally Timms' vocal on "White Stone Door."
"She's actually singing a melody line that she thought Tom should sing, so she's kind of doing a Tom impersonation and singing in his key," says Langford. "We kept it because it sounds great."
There were other similar Natural episodes, particularly Langford's use of harmonica during the sessions, for which he has a reasonable explanation.
"I don't think I've ever really played harmonica in my life, but nearly every track has me playing harmonica on it," says Langford. "I don't really remember recording it, because most of the time we were going to the pub and wandering around various historical sites or shopping in little rural towns, then at night we'd cook a big meal and have loads of drinks and then start playing a bit of music. Some of it was recorded in the early hours of the morning. It was quite strange."
The dichotomy in the making of Natural wasn't lost on the band. Langford explains that even the name of the album points to the disparity between what the Mekons created and how they made it.
"We didn't really think about it until we realized we'd made something and then we started to think about the experiences we'd had being back in England and being in this really imposing landscape," he says. "We started thinking about 19th century philosophers wanting to go back to nature and get their heads together in the country, and it seemed ironic to us. Would it be possible to make something that was natural and authentic? The whole album was made with Pro-Tools and chopped up and sliced and diced so it was completely unnatural. To make a cell phone call in that area, you actually had to climb 80 feet up this sheer mountain because it was the only way to get a signal. To make a phone call, it was this really physical thing. We're connected and we come to this place where we're not connected. We just thought about how technology's really taken over."
Technology will be the order of the day when the Mekons come to town, as the Cleveland date at Pat's in the Flats will be one of the rare electric dates on their current tour, which is being performed acoustically for the most part, to mirror the Natural sound.
"The album's pretty much acoustic, and we'd been playing in England and trying to recreate it in some way acoustically but a few venues popped up on the tour where we didn't think that would be applicable," says Langford. "This is kind of a roadhouse gig ... apparently, it's a pretty wild little joint."
The Mekons, Danbert Nobacon, Coffinberry
8:30 p.m. Saturday, September 29
Pat's in the Flats
2233 W. 3rd St.
216.621.8044
Tickets: $10
