WHEN JON Langford was at art school – University of Leeds, the college he refers to below – it was right around the time that TJ Clark showed up. Clark, the Marxist art historian and one-time only British member of the Situationist International, apparently did a lot to pull the university’s art college away from its staid and stale academic approach to art. Langford, in other interviews, has jokingly likened him to a Che Guevara figure for the art department. He was committed enough to the idea of art as something that actually fucking mattered that he was not just supportive but enthusiastic about Langford and the other Mekons dropping out of school to go on tour. (Though Langford soon returned to finish his degree.) So the story goes.
But we didn’t come here to talk about TJ Clark. We came here to talk to Jon Langford, a man whose ideas about art, music, socialism and society have made him one of the most interesting and sharpest voices in that vague realm referred to as “post-punk.”
The Mekons are legends in indie music, occupying a league of their own, expanding the horizons of punk to incorporate country, reggae, rock and roll, and most importantly a skewed vision of life liberated from the fetters of empire and exploitative drudgery. The story about Clark is just a way to reflect how deserving Langford and the Mekons’ contributions to art and music are of being taken seriously in our pantheon of radical art. Not because they have some sort of Marxist academic pedigree, but because they have always explored the way in which art actually plays a role in daily life, pushes against the divisions that are dropped on top of our existence, and should be seen by radicals as something more than a mere diversion when we aren’t “doing activism.”
It goes just as much for their new album, Deserted, released earlier this year, as it does for any of their other works. Or, for that matter, for Lanford’s own art. Both prod at this mystical “what if,” playing with so many signifiers of European literature and American folklore in a way that pulls out their own kernels of anti-colonial subversion. He’s better positioned to talk about both than I am. Letting him do so on the pages of Locust Review seemed an apt addition to the first issue.
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Art by Jon Langford
Alexander Billet: Freshman rock journalist question number one. Who are you? What do you do?
Jon Langford: I’m Jon Langford. I’m a musician originally from Wales. I say musician; I became a musician after I moved to Leeds. We formed the Mekons when we were at art college as a sort of almost inevitable reaction to what was going on culturally and politically at the time. Which was the punk rock movement.
You’re also an artist, aren’t you?
Yeah, I went to art school. That’s where we all met but it didn’t seem like art was very interesting at the time. But punk rock had a lot of energy around it. It seemed like something really new and exciting the way painting really didn’t at the time. You know, we were at art school. We were supposed to be making paintings because we were at art school. So that’s an easy first rule of rejection; revolt against the art teachers and make punk rock music.
There’s been a lot of acclaim for your art and your music over the past few decades. Greil Marcus said that the Mekons are the band that most successfully clung to punk ideology. Lester Bangs said you’re one of the only truly revolutionary rock and roll bands. What do those words mean to you now, if they ever meant anything to you?
I think when you start reading your own press, you’re probably in a bit of trouble. It’s quite nice when you have an album like the current one coming out and people seem to like it. We’re not immune to that. But I think most of what we do, of how we work, is to satisfy our own needs. For us, the ways that other people work that they might require to be successful sometimes don’t really apply to us. We have small ideas when it starts out: a way to just survive and work in the conversation, be a part of this conversation of culture and music and politics. That’s the success for us. Not having critical acclaim or selling loads of records or making lots of money. For us it’s always been quite harsh to do what we try to do. To cut into the commercial mainstream is very hard and it’s very hard outside that. So the goal has generally been survival. And if you make some good art, that’s good as well.
So do you think that the idea of a “revolutionary rock and roll band” or “punk rock ideology” or any of these buzz terms hold any meaning?
Well, there’s all sorts of romantic notions about that sort of thing. How do you be revolutionary when you’re just propping up the status quo you’re supposed to be resisting? Obviously we’re part of all that. We’re part of the system, though we’ve always been on the very fringes of it. So I think we’ve always been very careful with the idea of “message music.” Sometimes I feel like the best thing you can do is be part of a conversation and collaborate with people who are doing interesting things, politically, musically, artistically. You know, to try to form more of a community and a conversation within that community. Rather than the U2 model where you become the biggest band in the world and spout off about issues while actually being part of the problem.
Wounded Tools (After Goya) from Born Again Labor Museum
In the documentary about the band’s history, Revenge of the Mekons, there is that part where Steve [Goulding, the band’s drummer] talks about how the refusal to compromise the group’s vision and musical sense is more of an artistic act than a political one. But it’s kind of both, isn’t it?
It’s hard to separate them really. We came out of a “fine art” background. And we’re not “big P” political. I’ve done a lot of things for specific causes and the band has done some things like raising money but we’re not politicians in that sense. Or figures to be admired or anything. But, as a journey for the band, there’s a lot of internal things. The way we run the band and the way we approach the structures and obstacles that come our way. Like the capitalist music business, just to be able to keep doing what we’re doing.
So, you know, I feel like we have a bloody-mindedness. You look at it analytically; what should you do, what shouldn’t you do in certain situations? That information is always changing because certain situations we haven’t envisaged or imagined come up. And then you have to think on your feet. So to say we’re ideological politically is a bit of a stretch. Because I think that what’s going on for us and for everyone at the moment is more... it’s more... kind of new, you know? So over the years we’ve aligned ourselves with socialism and I come from a part of the world where there’s a strong working class socialist history – you know, my home town in Wales. But I’ve also learned a lot. Not just about socialism but about everything. So, to answer the question about is it artistic or is it political, is hard because I kind of see them as one big thing, one big mess of ideas.
To make art and say it’s not political, or to make art that’s apolitical, is kind of a ludicrous suggestion. And I have personal grudges for people from the political world who like the idea of making art but don’t really see those people as fellow travelers or important to the cause. This is something that’s come up over and over and over again. It’s very odd that people don’t see the whole picture. And they say things like “politics are really important, here’s this thing over here,” and then you’ve got entertainers on the outside who are all right if they’re useful and they raise money, but their ideas are peripheral to this issue or this cause. I find that really insulting. And I’ve had that over and over and over again with the organized left.
Same here. I’ve been in one organized socialist group or another for twenty years. And this rigid, unappreciative view of what art is and the role that art plays in our lives and the world comes up again and again.
It’s a missed opportunity. But there’s been wonderful instances also when things have come together. And that’s great. But that’s why to say it was a political endeavor, I think it’s a “small P.” We were really, really political about the way we approached the music business definitely. But we weren’t really political in saying we support the policies of the Socialist Workers Party.
Certainly not them now...
I have no idea what they’re up to now.
Google it some time if you want to go down a really terrible rabbit hole. Though I’m guessing you don’t.
No, not really.
So this idea about being part of a conversation is one that I find really interesting.
Yeah, because I think a lot of artists as well as songwriters feel like they’re in this position of power. So they’ll say things to people they think are of importance and they’ll absorb them. Rather than it being a two-way street. There has to be humility for such things with us. We never have been comfortable with the chest-beating propaganda stuff. There are exceptions though. It’s complicated. I think you have to think on your feet about it. In the end I suppose that’s kind of enemy of dogma.
You have to experiment.
Yeah, but also you have to be true to something.
I guess that brings me to the most recent contribution the Mekons have made to the conversation, which of course is Deserted. You’ve said that the California desert has been a big influence on this album.
We got into this idea to kind of make art where you are. That’s been really interesting for us. We don’t really make anything until we all get together. So we try to get ourselves together in places that are then conducive. Rather than, like, Chicago, where people would then have different levels of ability to concentrate because of things they’d have going in their life.
We did an album called Natural in 2007, and we went to a spot in the Lake District in the UK. We had traveled through it and found it interesting and tried to see if we could get back there. And there was all this stuff going on, and we studied the history of it and we found these stone circles, it’s where Wordsworth was from. And I got really interested in all these people in the 19th century like Rimbaud and Verlaine leaving the modern world and trying to get out of it.
You try to do that now and you end up... There’s a song on there called “Cockermouth” that’s about it. That’s where Wordsworth was born and you go there today and you’re actually in the middle of an RAF training exercise. One of the highest tech things you can imagine is coming over the hills and you end up rehearsing for Armageddon.
There’s this modernist and post-modernist sense that the avant-garde only comes from really tightly packed cities, and this kind of hothouse atmosphere. And on these two albums, and a lot of other work from the Mekons, there’s the opposite. It’s a sense that when you go out into the open you notice the contradictions even more than you would otherwise.
Yeah, and I think that’s it. Working together, collaborating, being all together in one place, thinking about it all. Conversations inevitably come out of that, about where you are. You know, “what’s down in the village? Let’s go have a walk around there.” You know, or “maybe we can go see Wordsworth’s grave, let’s go and do that.” And then you have a Spinal Tap moment reciting Wordsworth over Wordsworth’s grave.
The process is kind of haphazard I would say. But because it happened this time in the desert, we were just all very into the idea of the desert, and how it works on a symbolic, metaphoric levels. And then also the place itself is so strange. It’s pretty overpowering, what’s going on there. You think of hippy bands saying “we’re going to go to the country and get our heads together.” That’s not really how it works with me. It’s more “let’s go rub our brains on gravel and see how it works out for me.”
It was fascinating. It’s almost like the process of taking bits of this and bits of that and making a collage. And that’s the way it ends up. It’s different people’s hands doing different tasks, and different voices. For me that’s what’s good about the Mekons. It’s not like one guy going into the desert and saying “oh, the desert, it’s so empty. Isn’t that clever that I thought that?” You know, it’s just all these different voices and all these different ideas coming from different people.
So this new album, when you listen to it, it has a lot of levels. And I think it’s very political. For me, anyway. We’re filtering things, and ideas are coming about in a sort of unconscious, non-deliberate kind of way. It sounds a bit wishy-washy, but that’s just how it works. We’ll go and work furiously on this stuff and toss ideas around and make stuff like kids in a playground. And then when you go away, when you get back to it and you have to get to the nitty gritty of mixing it or chopping bits out because you’ve got too much, or some bits aren’t even songs, they’re just fragments – then you actually see the themes. It’s weird. When you’re making something it takes a while. You don’t go “we need to have a song about this.” It doesn’t really work like that.
On the topic of the themes in some of these songs, I saw the interview you did with Mark Andrews from the Quietus. And you two talk about how there’s a lot of this theme of “white people in the desert” on this album. But I suppose there’s a bit more to it than that, isn’t there? Like it’s not just colonialism. The song “Harar 1883” is about Arthur Rimbaud in Ethiopia, and he was trying to do out there...
It wasn’t poetic.
AB: It wasn’t poetic, that’s for sure. But it also wasn’t exactly like he was a colonialist.
No, not at all. He was pretty much the only European there. I think that song is kind of about possibilities. Just walking off. And if you can walk off, can you really get away? Same as some of the themes on the Natural album. Can you really get away from all that? And then, what is a desert? There are many levels of desert at the moment? Maybe culturally and politically there’s a desert that’s
spreading. We know what it is.
Sure, and what do we do with that?
Right, how do you survive it?
Some of those themes about the American west have always played a role in your visual art too, haven’t they?
Yeah, I’ve always loved all those images of cowboys and stuff like that. It’s so loaded and multi-layered for me.
What are some of those layers? Because in the US, people of my generation have been raised with the idea that the cowboy is the ultimate patriot.
I’ve always thought of the cowboy as a free spirit. We used a painting on the second album cover of the guy standing on the mountain [Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog], and it’s that kind of romantic ideal. Because you are alone. The notion of the strong, tough, cowboy has always been very appealing to us.
And then this notion of a sort of weird civilian uniform was very appealing to us also when we first came to the States. Here you’ve got this really cool kind of clothing that has all these romantic overtones to it. I wear cowboy shirts all the time. They’re practical. And then you’ve got the rhinestone kind of look with dudes trying to dress like peacocks. I love all of that. And I was sad when that all went away. I was sad when country music went all urban cowboy and Garth Brooks, and people started dressing like idiots from the suburbs rather than cowboys. It’s not a good look.
Triangle Shirtwaist Fire by Laura Fair-Schulz (2019)
So I make a lot of paintings about that. I like the details. It’s like a folk art. It’s storytelling, it’s a functional art form. There’s a parallel with punk rock, it was simply people telling stories that were universal in some way and talked about real life and, again, were part of the conversation. And then even the shirts and the imagery were somehow... like Indian beadwork or working-class African Americans in New Orleans will spend the whole year beading a piece that tells stories. These rhinestone shirts are almost kind of the same thing. These were “tough guys” communicating something through this. So you have that artistic level about it.
And then you have the role of, like, Bush as a cowboy. Unfortunately Trump doesn’t conjure up any of that imagery whatsoever. You know, during the Bush years and the Iraq war the image of the cowboy was interesting for me; the stupid or blindfolded cowboy stumbling off into the dessert. No vision, no plan, just guns. But now, I think I’ve done some Trump related paintings because obviously that kind of stuff comes through in the work that I’m doing, but as far as a point of reference, I’m not going to start painting fat guys in golf shirts. It doesn’t work on any level for me visually. It’s just shit. It’s just foul, tacky. Just sort of shows how things get worse over time.
This is a bit of a digression, but on that note, on the note of things getting worse, but do you see any possibility for socialism?
I think it’s a generational thing, and I think they kind of know it. Young people aren’t scared of socialism, and they’ve been given a new world where the old left’s dogmatic ideas about it don’t really fit with what’s going on in the real world. They’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole. And the kids aren’t like that. They’re hugely practical and idealistic, they understand there are problems, and they see clearly what the problems are in terms of capitalism and greed. I’ve got a twenty-two year old son, and I’ve met a lot of his pals, and I find it really encouraging.
But I also have some very dark thoughts. You look at the way that technology is being used to make people obsolete, like Amazon. Who’s going to be spending money in this consumer society when nobody has any money because there aren’t any jobs and everything’s done by robots? And the rich are so rich and the poor are so poor? It’s like they’re preparing the ground for the Russian Revolution. They’ve got no idea. Capitalism, how it developed for many, many years was by giving people just enough, chucking people bones so that they weren’t starving. And now it’s just – we’re in the middle of a boom and people think “hang on, if we’re in the middle of a boom why are so many of us working two jobs?” We’ve had our healthcare taken away, our unions have been destroyed.
Meanwhile, with all the jobs gone, what do you do with all those people? What do you normally do at that stage in history when you have an excess of people? You have a great big war and kill everyone. In my darkest visions, that’s what they’re working toward. And capitalism, the tech industry, they’re all complicit in it as far as I can tell.
The Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both complicit. So something’s coming down the road, and I think it’s seismic. I just don’t know which way it’s going to fall. No one does. Some people are going around saying “we’ve got to beat Trump, so don’t vote for the socialist.” So, we vote for Joe Biden? He’s just the same as Trump except maybe a bit cooler on a few issues. What did he do when he was with Obama for eight years? Bailed out the banks and fucked everyone else. Why are you trying to sell me on these people who have been complicit? They know the jig’s up but they’re making loads of money. I think that’s Trump’s idea; make all the money he can and get the hell out.
He hasn’t got anything invested in the future. Except maybe his waxwork son-in-law. There’s a horrifying-looking human being... I get chills just looking at him. It’s like he’s an android. How can somebody look like that? It’s so weird. This is like a bad science fiction movie. When that guy [Jared Kushner] comes out, it’s like “there’s something wrong! Don’t you see it?”
It’s interesting that you say we’re in a bad science fiction movie. One of the things we’re trying to unpack with Locust is how everything seems so innately absurd, so intensely through the looking glass, and how can you parody that? How do you satirize it?
Well, that’s the thing. People try it and it’s not enough. You try to make jokes about Trump and they’re just...
Right. He is his own joke.
Steve Bell at the Guardian tried to draw him as a toilet, and his hair is the head, and whenever he opens his mouth shit comes out. But the thing is, it’s not funny. There’s nothing comical about it. And every time a comic makes fun of him, it’s obviously what he wants. Just gets his brand out there more and gets him more power.
So put a button on all of this for me if you could. You’ve said a lot. We’re in this moment where young people are more sympathetic to socialism but also that they want to reinvent it...
Well, they have reinvented it. It’s a living organism.
Right. And you were also talking about how many parts of the left have been dismissive of the role of art in struggle. Do you see young people finally resolving that tension?
Yeah. I see art like that all the time. It’s critical of capitalism but also, it’s playful. It can be anti-racist or about the environment, or bring together all sorts of concerns that people have.
Do you see any other artists from that new generation who might identify as socialists and who let that inform their art, or are we not that far along into this new moment yet?
That’s a complicated question. Virgil Abloh, do you know him? Black artist from Rockford, Illinois, worked with Kanye West, which is how I first heard of him. He had an exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago which raises loads of questions. I think what he’s trying to do is raise questions of how the corporate world fits in with streetwear. My son is involved with this thing that Nike set up. A massive corporation of course, but they’ve got all these young designers to try and make stuff. I can’t remember the actual premise was, but my son’s basically designing stuff that’s very eco and critical of capitalism.
Even with having Nike money underneath it?
Well, there wasn’t any money that they gave them. For my son and the other artists, it was just a chance to be mentored by Virgil Abloh. So, for Nike it was marketing, but my son and some of the others kind of subverted it. I haven’t seen the final exhibition but there’s some really interesting things going on in it. Like, basketball shirts with all the logos chopped up and sewn back together the wrong way. It looks really punk rock and weird.
A lot of it I’m still trying to get my head around it. You’ve asked for an example and I’m still trying to get my head around. It’s like this new model of the music business where people don’t put out records, they just give it away. It hasn’t settled yet, but things are changing so fast. There’s all these weird new things, but the jury’s out on whether it’s just the emperor’s new clothes. But, can I see all these kids using them and really fucking changing things? So, I think maybe it’s just the act of not fucking settling.
Sure, it’s always been that when something new and fresh and radical comes along, the question is always whether capitalism is able to swoop in.
It happened with punk rock. They just fucking sell it back to people. And they did that in the space of about five years. One minute it’s a threat and then the next they say “well, there’s money to be made.” And then before you know it you’ve got a bunch of people running around thinking punk rock is just spitting.
There’s a lot of questions at the moment. And that’s all right. I think young people will react, they’ll see what’s going on, without the trappings of control, and how all of our previous experiences make us behave in a certain way. They haven’t got a lot of that baggage in the first place. I wish I could think like a twenty-year-old now. They might sort it out. That’s my hope. I’m encouraged by some of the news now, not in terms of individuals but in terms of collectivities. And the critical thinking that’s coming out now of how the promise of the new technology has been totally taken over and using it to repress us.
Final question: as someone whose art and music have collided different time periods – from history and mythology but also a lot of radical hope – do you think an artist has more of a responsibility to the past or to the future?
I’m only about the future. I like history, but... When we first started the Mekons we thought it was Year Zero and punk rock was just this new thing. There was no history and we thought we were just making things from scratch. That lasted about a year, but then we suddenly realized that that sort of radical protest, wanting to destroy everything and start again, happens cyclically throughout history. And in very interesting ways.
We were really part of a weird, dissident folk tradition. You can trace that back. So yeah, I’m interested in history, and the past. But keep your eyes on the future. That’s the difference between a living history and a museum. Museums are great, museums are useful, but there’s a problem with letting things gather dust in cupboards. Because the ideas in them aren’t dead. Ideas are alive.
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