It’s no exaggeration to say the Mekons changed my life. I was minding my own business, trying to find my way in the musical world just a couple of years into young adulthood, when their simultaneously-ironic-and-not album Rock ’n’ Roll crashed into my consciousness, providing me with a perspective that would allow me to both take art more seriously and the horrors of life less so, or maybe the other way around.
But that’s a story I’ve already told elsewhere. Here, I want to talk about the strangest corners of the Mekons extended universe, as chronicled by Aadam Jacobs.
Though the Mekons first formed in the UK — they began as a bunch of student at art school in Leeds, “the first punk band that didn’t know how to play their instruments” — many of them eventually migrated to the United States, the country that introduced them to country. In particular, singer/songwriter/drummer-turned-guitarist Jon Langford and chanteuse Sally Timms both landed in Chicago in the early ‘90s, just in time to catch both the alt-country wave and the peak of Aadam’s recording activity.
As a result, there’s a ton of Mekons shows in the Aadam Jacobs Collection. And more than that, there’s a ton of Mekons-adjacent shows, each more unlikely than the next:
- Freakons, Hideout, September 22, 2013: Rumors of this first burbled up as what sounded like a joke at a live show somewhere in the early 2010s: Jon and Sally were planning to join forces with Freakwater — another part-Chicago-immigrant band, in this case from Kentucky — to form a supergroup called the Freakons (or possibly Mekewater). This eventually coalesced as a project of songs about coal mining to benefit attempts to stop mountaintop removal mining in Appalachia, and a 2022 album that is well worth picking up. But as befits two of the most hilarious bands that ever interrupted a performance with endless stage banter, the Freakons’ true genius shows up in this live performance, neatly summed up by Hideout impresario Tim Tuten in his equally rambling intro as “from my little goldfish, mighty whales become!”
- Jelly Bishops, Record Riot, July 11, 2015: The Jelly Bishops were a one-off band that existed for only three shows in 1986, all in and around Chicago, after Langford’s spinoff band the Three Johns imploded on a U.S. tour and he, John Brennan of the Three Johns, and Tom Greenhalgh of the Mekons decided to form a new one on the spot. Twenty-nine years later, their sole EP, Kings of Barstool Mountain, was reissued, and the Jelly Bishops (or two of the three, anyway) chose to reform to open three Chicago-area Mekons shows, learning all of one of their original five songs, and adding a Mekons song and a Hank Williams cover before departing the stage. It is all faintly ridiculous, in the best possible way.
- Mekons, Schubas, October 10, 1999: An actual Mekons show, but also not an actual Mekons show, as the band performed in the guise of the “Australian Mekons cover band Where Were U2.” Was this accompanied by terrible Aussie accents and terrible jokes about how “we discovered the Mekons because they were next to Men at Work in the bin at Tower”? Of course it was. Was it also a terrific musical performance, with songs from throughout the band’s then two decades of releases? You bet.
- Sally Timms and Les Garçons, Martyrs’, October 16, 2010: Sally Timms doesn’t play all that many solo shows, and those she does are mostly in Chicago. This one is notable for its unusual backing band: members of the instrumental surf band Mar Caribe, playing as a classic banjo-cello-trumpet power trio. One song on the setlist baffled me so much that I finally messaged Sally to ask her what it was; her answer: “It’s from one of Susie’s albums that I sang on,” though she didn’t remember the title. This turned out to be the mesmerizing “Silenus” from the two-song CD Little Sparta & Sally Timms, Little Sparta being the side project of Mekons mad fiddle genius Susie Honeyman, which I immediately had to click the “Buy Digital Discography” button for on Bandcamp.
- Jon Langford and Sally Timms, Hideout, March 13, 2005: This was one of a series of rehearsal shows in various cities workshopping “The Executioner’s Last Songs,” a multimedia piece by Jon that explored the death penalty, murder ballads, the history of punk rock, high and low art, and lower-division football fandom, all through songs and spoken word and video of Jon appearing on a TNT kids’ TV show as a sailor in a tiny rowboat in a sink. When I saw the New York performance a month later it featured numerous extra musicians, including Mekons drummer Steve Goulding accompanying on percussion made up of a plastic bucket and a fire extinguisher, and that was pretty great, but Aadam’s capture of this two-person rendition (Sally joined in as well) is by far the most high fidelity.
- Moxie Tung, Hideout, August 31, 2015: For a certain kind of Mekons completist, Moxie Tung was legendary: Sally Timms and Freakwater’s Janet Bean, performing some sort of … performance art? It all existed only in occasional photos passed along on Facebook with cryptic descriptions, until this partial Aadam recording of a Moxie Tung live show turned up, and all was … still pretty unclear, actually. What are those backing tracks they’re shouting revolutionary (?) slogans over? Is someone playing some kind of trumpet? There are some things, it seems, that music fans are not meant to know.
And that’s just from the first 5% or so of Aadam’s collection. No one knows what treasures the rest of his tapes hold, though I for one am holding out hope of one of Jon and Sally’s legendary Christmas pantomime performances, which are reported to have involved Daleks and Moby Duck, the Pantomime Quacking Whale. It might not make much sense with audio only, but then, making literal sense has never been the point of the Mekons.