If I had to choose one group from the post-punk era to represent all that I loved and aspired to most about the music of the eighties, it would be Leeds band The Mekons. Here’s my brief paean to some less well remembered Yorkshire musicians.
I’m not sure how I first discovered the band. I suspect it may have been my theory of “good album cover = good album.” This may seem like a dodgy way to determine how to invest £2.99 of your student grant, but I often relied upon it as a good guide to purchases. If the record company couldn’t be arsed to invest in decent design and printing, I reckoned that the product within was not likely to be worth the listen. On the other hand, good quality card, artistic imagery and expensive colour reproduction suggested interesting music within. Naive, perhaps, but it usually worked.
I saw The quality of mercy is not strnen and loved the Shakespearean concept and the joke. I bought the album in an indie record shop in St Mary Street, Southampton and, when I got home to my turntable, I was not disappointed. These were songs of ordinary teenage life in a Yorkshire town. I knew exactly what they were going on about- and they sang in my language. The romantic sufferings and teenage traumas they described were the stuff of my South Yorkshire teens- as I have described in my two semi-autobiographical stories, Freak or smoothy? and in punk rock focussed Feeling called love. Down the road from Leeds in my hometown of Barnsley, I had gone through the same tortures, the same ecstasies that those early tracks described.
I adored the slightly shambolic structure to the songs which was yet highly virtuoso; I liked the fact that the vocals were a bit strained and reedy and wobbly. I was hooked. I bought the Fast Records compilation album which included some early singles and which also introduced me to 2.3, another fine Yorkshire band- and hailing from Sheffield (which for a Barnsley lad seemed more like ‘home’ than Leeds- which of course is in West Yorkshire…). See my soundtrack to Feeling called love for a sample song.
I embarked on a musical adventure with the Mekons. They slowly moved away from the basic-sounding punk of those initial releases to something more new-wavey. Their second album The Mekons was no longer the thrashing punk of their first compositions; there were hints of the loose reggae style inspiration of The Slits. I still adore the song, ‘Another one’ for its instrumentation and its lyrics.
Then they surprised us all and became a kind of mutant country and western band. The tracks ‘Fear and whiskey’ and, above all, ‘Hello cruel world‘ are at the top of my list of all time faves. Even in this phase, though, there was a reassuring Northern-ness to their music, with references to Armley jail and to the train ride from Leeds to Sheffield- a lyric from ‘Beaten and broken:’
“I caught a train to Sheffield, but in my mind, I was already in hell.”
The Mekons have remained a source of uplifting inspiration since. I have two great regrets: one is that I never saw them live. They played Birmingham once when I lived there, but the Sunday night gig clashed with me having to be in Hastings for work. Worse perhaps was that one of their members used to live next door to an ex-girlfriend of mine in Mile End- but we never got to meet….. Nevertheless, I have still have the records on my turntable (yes, I mean phonogram) and the songs in my head which, ultimately, is what really counts.
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