The Mekons should be better known. They are so much more interesting than Radiohead, or Oasis, for instance. They were briefly signed by A&M, and released one great album, 'The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll' in 1989, but the fit was poor, and they were soon back to indie purgatory. Their next, 'Curse Of The Mekons', which is even better, didn't even see a US release initially. I used to gauge a new record store by how many Kevin Ayers albums they had. Then I'd check for Roy Harper and Lee 'Scratch' Perry. A quick indication of the depth of their catalog.
Jul 21, 2012 - When I say The Mekons Rock 'n' Roll is my favorite album by the Mekons, I should probably also mention there may be some wild-hair element. Features Song Lyrics for The Mekons's Fear and Whiskey album. Includes Album Cover, Release Year, and User Reviews. Popular Song Lyrics. Billboard Hot 100. Upcoming Lyrics. The Mekons - Fear and Whiskey Album Lyrics; 1. Darkness and Doubt Lyrics: 2. Flitcraft Lyrics: 3. Last Dance Lyrics: 4. Lost Highway Lyrics: 5. Chivalry Lyrics: 6.
In the early '90's I added The Mekons to the list. Their cd's were pretty hard to find, but over the years I managed to collect a baker's dozen. This compilation covers from 1987-2002. Formed in 1977 by a group of Leeds University art students: John Langford, Kevin Lycett, Mark White, Andy Corrigan, and Tom Greenhalgh (Gang Of Four and Delta 5 came out of the same group of students). I just now found out that they took the name from the Mekon, an evil, super-intelligent Venusian featured in the British 1950-1960's comic Dan Dare.
The band's first single was 'Never been In A Riot', a satirical take on The Clash's 'White Riot'. They're debut album, 'The Quality Of Mercy Is Not Strnen', was recorded using the Gang Of Four's instruments, and due to an error by the Virgin Records art department, features pictures of that band, instead of The Mekons on the back cover. The Mekons in 2015 Through the years, the band's musical style has evolved, incorporating country, folk, rock, and occasional experiments in dub. These days, The Mekons are often described as a post-punk, cowpunk and/or alt country band. The Mekons Jon Langford Tom Greenhalgh Sally Timms Sara Corina Steve Goulding (The Rumour) Susie Honeyman Rico Bell Lu Edmonds (The Damned) J. Mitch Flacko Past members Ben Mandelson Dick Taylor (original Rolling Stone and Pretty Thing) John Langley Kevin Lycett Mary Jenner Robert Worby Enjoy! Even in my own head, I downplay the importance of The Mekons in my life.
They just never seemed like a band that demanded respect - which is a quality I like! But as a result, they're never going to get mentioned in the same breath as Costello, Replacements, Smiths, etc. It's like they have a secret history that a select few know about. Their early punk stuff leaves me cold - always has, always will, tremendously disappointed when I back-tracked and got those early compilations of the late 70s/early 80s punk years.
1985: Fear and Whiskey. That was the game changer. Shifting into that punkish/country mode and stumbling onto a whole new genre.
I'm not really sure if anyone else was doing the same thing at that time? Or if that record is ever recognized as the milestone it is? But when I first came to NYC shortly thereafter, that was one of the first album I bought at Sounds, thus the Mekons, NYC in the 80s, St. Marks Place, East Village.
It all rolls together for me, such a great time to be in this city. And then they branched out.
Stuff like 'Fletcher Christian,' 'I'm Not Here (1967),' 'The Curse'. They pushed boundaries with what they were trying to do. I thought 'Rock and Roll' was a let down at the time, sounded like they were trying too hard to make it. They've had flashes of greatness since.
'Last Night on Earth' has become a go-to track. My best memory of them is seeing them at Summer Stage in Central Park, July 1991, right as 'The Curse of the Mekons' was coming out. Rowdy show, ended with the band inviting audience members up on stage so there was this heaving mass of people dancing around, and as the song progressed, each band member gave up his instrument to an audience member, and the show dissolved into this weird senseless jam.
No one quite when to leave, and that's how the show ended. Dogbreath said. Works for me. For 3 reasons: just back from a week's stay in Rome (the one in Italy not the 8 or so in the US) and the only respite from the ubiquitous Italo-Europop was a young guy blasting out an instrumental version of Metallica's 'Master of Puppets' outside the Colosseum and Peter Frampton's acoustic version of 'Baby, I Love Your Way' on our taxi driver's radio on the ride to the airport. I first tuned in to the band because I was big fan of the Dan Dare strip in 'The Eagle' comic. And now my stepdaughter goes to the same Uni from where the band emanated. Plus, natch, I trust your judgement on these things.
(Stop sucking up and that's 4 reasons - Ed). So, many thanks for sticking it all together for us. Have a great weekend.
Anonymous said. 'Revenge of the Mekons,' a likeable documentary about the band, is on Netflix right now. (also, 'Lemmy') My one quibble with the doc is that it alludes to Jon Langford as the man of boundless energy and ideas, but doesn't delve too much into his side projects, beginning with the Three Johns and still going on today. Maybe that material doesn't belong in a movie about the Mekons, but Jon was keeping the songs alive when the band was in the wilderness between 'Quality of Mercy' and 'Fear and Whiskey'. One of the talking heads in the doc gets it right, tho - their most recent album, 'Ancient & Modern,' is one of their best.
When I visit relatives in PA, my car back there only has a CD player, so I've gotten in the habit of burning copies of compilation discs from my iTunes playlists. So I figured, why not the Mekons now that it's in front of me. Here's what I came up with: 1. Slightly South of the Border 2. King Arthur 3. Darkness and Doubt 4.
The Lost Dance (remix of Last Dance) 5. I'm Not Here (1967) 6. Fletcher Christian 7. Wild and Blue 9.
100% Song 10. Back to Back 11. Antigone Speaks About Herself 14. Last Night on Earth 15. Ordinary Night 16.
Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem 17. Cockermouth 18. Blow the Man Down 19. Land Ahoy (with Robbie Fulks) Went more for chronological order here. I'm drawn less to their rock side and more to their folkish/world music type ventures, which really aren't that way at all. Again, you could have another person post a favorite mix, and it would make it seem like they were a bunch of punk rockers. I actually revisited some of the earlier punk stuff and might end up pulling a track or two.
Couldn't grasp that stuff at all for years! Where is 'Coal Hole?' They revisited the punk years in 2004, and 'Teeth' almost made my mix.
About half of your selections were considered. I made more than one prototype, and the first included 'Darkness and Doubt', as it's a personal favorite, but it's really long, and the real estate too valuable. If pressed I'd say 'The Curse Of The Mekons' is my favorite, and I started with songs from it I thought were essential. 'Wild And Blue' narrowly missed inclusion, as well. There was too long of a gap between the most recent songs and Robbie Fulks 2015 collaboration, plus I haven't really listened to it. I just acquired 'Ancient & Modern', thanks to Anonymous, and I look forward to getting into that as well. Jon Langford's brilliant 'Drone Operator' was on a recent mix.
Their more recent albums are veering towards a more traditional folk/British direction, last one themed towards sea shanties and such (while not being sea shanties. That seems to be their M.O., tinkering with different types of music and adopting them to their style).
So Good It Hurts really hit home with me in 1988. I loved that 'south sea isles' direction they veered off into, like a ship with a broken rudder. For me, their best songs have really dark lyrical content, thus what I think may be their signature song, 'Darkness and Doubt.' But 'Fletcher Christian' is a close second, really captures that sense of mutiny, abandoning one's home country and sense of morality, sailing off into uncharted territories, with the suspicion that you're really going in the wrong direction.
The Mekons' theme! As I recall with Curse, they were in a terrible place after Rock N Roll tanked their major label shot at success with A&M. (I still have problems with critics befuddled by the album wasn't a hit.
When an album starts with the line 'Destroy your safe and happy lives/Before it is too late'. This aint Bon Jovi.) The trend at the time was to try to adapt all these indie bands to the major label systems, a la R.E.M., and everybody wins, but much as The Replacements lost, so did The Mekons. As well they should have - some bands were meant to be indie. I recall not even being able to find The Curse in stores as there was some strange distribution issue going on - I guess they presented the album to A&M, who balked at releasing it, and it eventually came out on an indie after much finagling? All I know is that when I heard the track 'The Curse' (wouldn't argue with anyone calling it their best song), I thought, this is a band just hitting its prime. At that point, they sounded like a bunch of mutinous pirates, which was a good place for a rock and roll band to be!
So it turns out this is a stone-cold masterpiece. It's been out of print for years, but now that it's back, it's being called everything from 'a good set of drinking songs' to 'the seed that sprouted alt-country' to 'the greatest rock album in history.' Fear and Whiskey was the first great statement of 'shambolic punk' band the Mekons, and yes, it is as great as all their rabid fans have always said (though 'the greatest rock album in history' is, of course, a bit of a stretch). As I was digging through my rock library to figure out what defines a classic, I found an essay by Steve Wynn of the Dream Syndicate, listing his top criteria for what makes a great rock album. The most important factor, he argued, was 'the potential of falling apart at any moment': not just that the recording sounds rough around the edges, but that the entire band could have careened off the rails at any time. The Mekons, circa 1985, fit that description wonderfully. Though this album took months of planning, Fear and Whiskey sounds as chaotic and spontaneous as any great night at a dance hall full of the reek of stale beer.
Just like a live show, almost all you can hear through the record's tinny sound are Steve Goulding's drums- pounding out a dance beat crossed with a military tattoo- and Susie Honeyman's fiddle, soaring above, pretty but ragged. Singer/guitarists Tom Greenhalgh and Jon Langford bellow, cheer and grumble through the noise. They sing about booze, they sing about politics, and most of all, they sing about despair: Greenhalgh opens 'Chivalry' with, 'I was out late the other night/ Fear and whiskey kept me going,' while the heroic tune from the violin keeps him upright. But let's move past the drinking and look at what it stands for: failure and camaraderie. The Mekons were born in '77 but were all but defunct by the mid-80s; they reunited to play benefit shows for miners during the strike of '84-85. As 'non-aligned lefties,' the band raged against the Thatcher administration, and watched the suffering of miners who were on strike for a year and then went back to work in defeat.
But against that backdrop, Fear and Whiskey doesn't so much as stumble. Every disaster turns into a victory anthem, from Greenhalgh and Langford shouting through 'Hard to Be Human Again,' to 'Abernant 1984/85,' which is a glorious waltz no matter how bleak the lyrics ('They seek to destroy us/ How much more is there left to lose?' The music is a mess of influences united on the bones of punk music. The Mekons always subscribed to the 'anything goes' rules of Britain's 'Class of '77,' and Fear and Whiskey is their most famous example: this was the record where they started to assimilate country music.
It was a radical move in mid-80s Britain, not least because of the right-wing politics that were associated with the style. Musicologists have labelled this the father of alt-country, that bastard offspring of indie rock and country/western- though for as much as you hear it on 'Darkness and Doubt' (complete with a John Wayne reference), or the cover of Hank Williams' hit 'Lost Highway,' country is just one of the styles jammed in here, along with English folk, Leeds punk, and whatever else was at hand.
Anyone who expects scenic Americana will stop short at the second song, 'Trouble Down South,' a weird mini-drama that would bring a lesser album to its knees: Ken Lite narrates some kind of a military advance over a reggae-inflected drum machine and a wheezing accordion, while soprano Jaqui Callis struggles to hit her highest notes. As far as it fits here at all, it's to force the listener to accept that the Mekons are ready and willing to do whatever they want.
No matter how scattershot the first few songs sound, the second half of the album justifies everything. With a 'proper' band assembled, these last five songs were 'recorded and mixed one fine spring day in 1985,' and they make up one of the most spontaneous, exciting and perfect album sides ever. For fourteen minutes, from 'Flitcraft' to 'Lost Highway,' the Mekons don't touch the ground.
This is music that is effortlessly, spontaneously great, with a massive beat that sweeps along grim lyrics like, 'We know that for many years there's been no country here.' But it's right near the end that they play the crowning song, the most perfect part of the album: 'Last Dance,' a pop song that sounds like it had never been played before that day but where every note falls in place, down to that throwaway guitar solo and Honeyman's beautiful fiddle, so bright it could make you want to cry. The narrator sings about the end of the night, when the music's winding down and it's time to search the room for someone to take home. The lyrics are resigned to failure, but then there are two lines in the middle- 'So beautiful, you were waltzing/ Little frozen rivers all covered in snow'- sung by a man whose desire stretches his capacity for eloquence: he could have just seen the woman he'll marry.
![Fear Fear](/uploads/1/2/5/4/125457849/673220032.jpg)
And he probably goes home alone. The Mekons didn't stand on the brink of collapse because they chose to; they accepted the knowledge that everything could be ripped from their hands. The Thatcher administration could declare war on the people; the miners could lose the strike. You could get one great night out of hundreds of bad ones, and for those fleeting moments you grab whatever you can- even if it's just a handful of rowdy old songs.