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Outsideleft.com independent Arts, Music and Culture Magazine. Newest story: The Mekons: The Outsideleft Sunday Interview

“We’ve always written stuff, not with a capital ‘p’ political, but just about how everything is impacted in people’s ordinary lives, whether you like it or not.”

The Mekons formed in the early days of punk, but quickly evolved beyond the sound of punk to incorporate country, folk, Cajun and world music influences in classic albums Fear and Whiskey (1985), The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll (1989), and I ♥  Mekons (1993). They have a diverse and exciting discography spanning almost five decades, and are known for their raucous live shows. The current line up is made up of Jon Langford (vocals, guitar), Sally Tims (vocals), Tom Greenhalgh (vocals, guitar), Susie Honeyman (violin), Rico Bell (vocals, instruments), Dave Trumfio (bass), Steve Goulding (drums) and Lu Edmonds (instruments). The Mekons latest studio album Horror was released on Fire Records in 2025, and is now being rereleased alongside Horrible, a remix album mixed by Tony Maimone of Pere Ubu. Tom Greenhalgh, one of the original founding members of the Mekon and part of their core lineup ever since, was kind enough to speak to OUTSIDELEFT’s Mekons enthusiast Jonathan Thornton over Zoom.

OUTSIDELEFT: The Mekons’ last studio album Horror is being rereleased, alongside Horrible, which is the remix album done with Tony Maimone from Pere Ubu. Can you tell us a bit about both projects?

Tom Greenhalgh: Yeah. The Horror album was actually recorded in August of 2022. We were planning to do that recording a couple of years earlier, but obviously Covid intervened, so that all got put on put on hold. And then we actually went to Valencia. The band are sort of distributed all over the place, a lot of them in America, some of us in the UK. So we met in Valencia through John Henderson, who does Tiny Global Productions. He’s out there, and he recommended the studio, so we went there, recorded the album, in August of ‘22 in about five days. And then it took another really long period of time to get it mixed and finished. That came out about just under a year ago. So we did a tour around the UK and Europe, and then in the States as well. In the intervening period before that album came out, which was mixed by the Baron who’s the bass player in the Mekons, Dave Trumfio, we spent a bit of time with Tony, because he’s an old friend, and he’d done some mixes of the tracks that we’d recorded in Valencia. But in the end, we didn’t use those on the album. So the idea for doing a remix album was almost simultaneous with the actual album. Tony had done some mixes already, and we told him we wanted it to sound as horrible as possible! So basically, he fulfilled that role. We wanted the remix album to come out as soon as possible after the album. But there were various delays. Don’t ask me what they were, I don’t know! But anyway, now we have both these albums, the first album, and then the remake, with wilder attack on the tunes.

OL: Had Tony had a chance to listen to the final version of the tracks on Horror before he worked on the tracks?
Tom Greenhalgh: No, he was just working on on the track, as they were, before the  other mixes were done. It was all done simultaneously – well simultaneously over a couple of years. So the Horror album, as it were, mixed by Dave Trumfio, was finished around the end of 2024 but Tony had been mixing these tracks basically from on and off over that period of time. There’s lots of different versions, lots of different mixes, so we moved elements and assembled them.

OL: It’s fun to listen to them back-to-back, because Tony’s mix is often very different to the version that ended up on the album.

Tom Greenhalgh: Well yeah, obviously that was the idea!

OL: The Mekons are known for their political engagement, and Horror is understandably a very angry record. Could you tell me a bit about the specific lyrical inspirations for the album?
Tom Greenhalgh: Yeah, but as I say, it was written and recorded in August of 2022, so that was about a year earlier than 7th October 2023, which you can see as a kind of real marker of everything getting even worse than it was before. Another way around, everything’s got significantly worse than it ever was. Now it’s almost like 2022, was this golden age of peace and tranquillity, compared to what it is now. So we have to say that really. I think if we’d done the album with those themes now, God knows. It’d be really, really different.

There’s a lot of lot of stuff going on there, just basic little ideas. John has a song ‘Mudcrawlers’, which was talking about these immigrants from Ireland washing up in Newport in South Wales, and who were left to scramble up the beach in the mud, often not making it, so that 50 years later, their bones were actually found. So that was the sort of spark for that one. David Olusoga, the historian who’s often on TV, I just happened to read something where he was talking about Cromwell’s invasion of Jamaica. I had no idea about that, so I tried to find out what I could about that. So that was an idea for a song. Plus, there was this book by Kojo Koram called Uncommonwealth, about the British Empire, and how Empire strikes back as it were. So there was a lot of different ideas just floating around about that, and of course, about American involvement in privatized wagging, of privatized theft dealing in all over the world, in Afghanistan and obviously in the Middle East. So there’s big companies that enable their employees to do all of that. That’s just off the top of my head. There was just a lot of different ideas. Even obviously in 2022 there was enough going on to provide plenty of material from that point of view. And as you said, we’ve always written stuff, not with a capital p political, but just about how everything is impacted in people’s ordinary lives, whether you like it or not. So it’s all going on.

OL: Within the band you have four different vocalists. How do you juggle having that many songwriting voices within the band?
Tom Greenhalgh: Yeah. There’s Jon, myself, Sally Tims, and Rico Bell. So there’s, there’s four vocalists, really. We’ll work quite freely when we’re writing and recording. And so it’ll be almost accidentally worked out who actually sings the song. Maybe someone will start singing it, and someone else have a better idea and give it a go, or someone will have an idea for a song that would be good for Sally to sing, and so on. So there’s no hard and fast kind of method, really.

OL: It sounds like a remarkably ego free process!

Tom Greenhalgh: Well, I’m not 100% sure about that! It all comes out in the wash, but basically we don’t really come to the studio with someone going, this is my song I’ve written, it goes like this, and I want this to happen. It’s more collaborative, I think.  

OL: You always get that sense listening to Mekons records that it feels like a bunch of people in a room playing off each other…
Tom Greenhalgh: Yeah, hopefully! There’s very much that kind of thing going on.

OL: The Mekons are also known fore the range of different influences you’ve brought into your music over the years, from your punk beginnings to folk and country, then later on Cajun influences. Where does this musical curiosity come from?
Tom Greenhalgh: I don’t know how useful these things are, but technically, the Mekons were not in the very first wave of punk. We were more like what you might call post punk. Punk was very much speeded up rock and roll, which is great, whereas post punk was an opening up. I think the one thing about to me and to us at the time was that it was basically a big permission to do anything you wanted to do, one to actually be in a band. Even though you weren’t necessarily a musician, or even accomplished musicians, you could do that. And you can do anything you wanted to do. The initial feeling around that time was real freedom to do and try anything. I think that’s what a lot of the bands coming up at that time did. We went through a few ups and downs and so quite quickly after our first album. By the time we were doing our second album, which came out in about 1980 I think, we were already really doing quite a lot of different experimental stuff with synths and so on. And then a bit later on, when the punk scene had sort of died a death, really, in terms of any actual creative input, we started listening to country music. And thought okay, this is very similar. When you say country music, it covered a multitude of sins. But the real classic stuff, like Hank Williams or Johnny Cash, you got three chord songs which were about ordinary lives, about ordinary people’s feelings and so on. So we moved into that. And I was really huge fan of Charlie Gillett, who’s a DJ and writer. He’s long, long dead now, but in the 70s, he was DJ on Radio London, which we used to listen to. And he played pub rock and swamp music, Cajun, all that kind of music. I was introduced to by Charlie Gillett, and he then moved into African music and played a lot of that stuff. And he had a record label that put out an album called Another Saturday Night: Louisiana Jukebox Hits, and that was fantastic album of these different Cajun and Cajun-related music. And I think at the time, we did covers of virtually the entire album, just in our live set, and some of them made it onto record. That was a big influence. And then then, basically, we always had a wide interest in different music. I mean, certainly when it was a punk thing, reggae was really important. When you had punk gigs, the format was, you’d have the maybe three or four bands, and in between the bands, the music was strictly dub. So that was always what was going on back then. Reggae and dub music had always been huge. So all that filtered in to what we were doing. We’re not trying to copy them or anything, it’s the basic vibe.

OL: The Mekons have been a band now for almost 50 years. How do you feel about it now, thinking back on your history?

Tom Greenhalgh: I don’t know, really. We don’t give it a lot of thought in those terms. I mean, there is a thing in a pipeline with Fire Records, again, a box set of the first Mekons album and some demos that have never been released around that time, and John Peel sessions from basically between 77 and 81. That’s due to come out hopefully beginning of next year. And we’re doing a book to go with that, which is called Mekons Scrapbook, which is just bits and pieces of the original band. There were kind of two versions of the Mekons, because the original band with the singers Andy Corrigan and Mark White and guitarist Kevin Lycett, bass player Rod Allen, we kind of reformed alongside the other Mekons. So myself and Jon Langford were in both versions. And we did an album around 2017 of the original Mekons, it was called Mekons 77, we will hopefully do a bit more of that at some point. So in terms of sort of a kind of legacy, it’s very much alive, I’d say, because we’ve got the original band, and the ongoing band. So it’s quite a lively thing. And hopefully, the music still stands up.

OL: Yeah, I’d say so!
Tom Greenhalgh: We were in a museum. We were in the Leeds City Art Gallery as some kind of museum exhibit. But obviously, after 50 years, that’s probably quite appropriate! But also, you know, we feel still living and breathing, just about!

OL: Given you’re now all living across different continents, does that make it difficult organising rehearsals and recording new music?
Tom Greenhalgh: Well, we’re talking on Zoom! We very rarely use Zoom in the Mekons. It’s not hard to communicate, get stuff organized. We’re not working all the time as the Mekons. So it’s just like when we do, that’s what we do. It’s just a case of getting everyone together in the same place at the same time, then we can do it

OL: It sounds like a busy couple of years, because there are these two albums out, the reissue coming out, and a tour across the US and UK. Is there more new Mekons music scheduled for the future as well?
Tom Greenhalgh: New music? Yeah, nothing ready to see the light today, but yeah, of course, there’s always stuff bubbling away.

Thank you for speaking with OUTSIDELEFT, Tom Greenhalgh!

Source: The Mekons: The Outsideleft Sunday Interview in OUTSIDELEFT