DJ: Well Jon, thanks so much for calling in.

Jon: Hello. How are you this evening?

DJ: Well, good, good.

Jon: Whatever time of day it is.

DJ: Well, I've only been to Wales once and I was only 19, actually just a short stop on the way to Edinburgh. I don't remember much about it because I really wasn't there much, but you were born in Newport, I think…isn't that near, Cardiff?

Jon: Yeah. Newport is a town, just, it's another Seaport town. Just kind of up the Severn Estuary from Cardiff near the English border and uh, yeah, kind of an industrial town of steel works and then coal mines above it, up the valley so we spent the, uh, you know, my youth was, spent there and it was kind of, gray and wet and there wasn't much going on. But, I'm very fond of it.

DJ: Yeah, whenever I hear of Cardiff, I think of the infamous  Dave Davies Mick Avory Kinks incident where Mick practically killed Dave over a little spat they had on stage.

Jon: Well that there was a cymbal. I didn't, I didn't know that was in Cardiff, but they, maybe there's a lot of violent energy or there certainly was when I was a kid. We used to avoid it. We used to go, we used to go to Bristol to see gigs, so, yeah, which was in England, but it was about 20 minutes the other direction.

DJ: Well, when you were younger, I know you have an older brother. Is he the only sibling?

Jon: Yeah. Yeah. I got, uh, my brother David, he's a kind of big wig in the science fiction world.

DJ: Yeah, I did read that he was an author. Yeah. Fiction.

Jon: Yeah. He's written a lot of novels. He edits a thing called the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy. I think.

DJ:  Wow.

Jon: So that's he’s, you know, he made his, that's how he is made his living. Right. Which is, which was kind of an example to me, you know, neither of us really had proper jobs ever, so.

DJ: Well, you played rugby and I started to say soccer, but I guess you call it football, played rugby and football when you were in, I guess your teens or in school.

Jon: Yeah, that was what I did sort of. I was kind of obsessive up to about the age of 15. I was playing three games a weekend and it was, you know, suddenly running around in the freezing cold and mud and rain in Wales. I suddenly realized that maybe there were other ways to, you know, express yourself. And I think about the same time I started hearing T-Rex and Slade and bands like that, and realized that maybe I wanted to be in a band instead.

DJ: Yeah. Something indoors.

Jon: Yeah. Something warm, something warm indoors (laughs).

DJ: Yeah I was really into T-Rex as well. And The Kinks, that we mentioned.

Jon: Yeah. It was just a very exciting time, the glam rock thing, ’cause it was…music before that was, seemed to be still the kind of the, you know, the sixties and it, that wasn't my time. Obviously I was too young and that was like, everybody was rhapsodizing over how that was the most fantastic music that’s ever been made in the history of the world.

And it was just kind of, you know, there was a kind of narrative about the sixties about how it went and then suddenly, you know, glam rock and David Bowie and people like that happened, were taking it right back to kind of, you know, rock and roll entertainment. And I don't know, it was just, it was very immediate and it really appealed to younger kids.

And we were kind of like wanna be football, hooligans, who, you know, I think Roxy Music, Bowie, Slade, T-Rex brought a lot of those kids into listening to music who kind of thought before that it was their, their older brothers kind of like, you know, world. And we suddenly, like, it was, we had our own music.

DJ:  Yeah. It was the same thing. I was the youngest of two brothers and yeah, it's like all of our older siblings or friends of our older brothers and sisters were, we were kind of following their lead, but yeah. Then some more music came along that we were really into. Well, at the University of Leeds, that's where you formed The Mekons, right?

Jon: Uh, yeah, the first day I got to, to Leeds, I met Andy and Mark, who would, would become the, the singers in the original Mekons lineup.

And, uh, Tom arrived the same time as me. We were in the same year and basically the studio next to mine. So we were, we were kind of mates and, uh, yeah, they, and the first day I was there Andy told me that his mate Andy Gill was forming a band and it was a cross between Velvet Underground and Dr. Feelgood.

DJ: Nice.

Jon: And I was, and I was like, I wonder, wow, that sounds quite good. I said, I'm not quite sure Dr. Feelgood are, I mean, I'm not sure, quite sure who the Velvet Underground were at the time I was quite young. Then someone explained to me that it was John Cale and Lou Reed's band. And then I understood, but Dr. Feelgood, I was very excited by it because they were, the only band in the mid seventies in England who were like short songs, short hair, tight jeans, you know, everybody else was stoned out hippies playing mellotrons, which, you know, I don't mind that. I don't mind that either, but, you know, but it wasn't. Just wasn't my thing. It, wasn't very exciting. And I saw Dr. Feelgood on the TV show when I was about 16, 17. And that was just, you know, this is something that, I mean they were playing kind of like only brutal hard R & B music, but to us, it was very, very different from the kinda, you know the hippie hangover, the sixties that, you know, kind of ruined my teenage years.

DJ: And that guitarist for Dr. Feelgood, Wilko. He was like, he played a really interesting style. I’ve seen some great old footage of him playing and it’s great.

Jon: No, he's absolutely fantastic. And is still. Huge influence, you know, or was a huge influence on, you know, Andy from the Gang of Four. And, uh, you know, and I think Andy's guitar playing was the antidote to a lot of the punk rock guitar playing, which was, you know, people were just kind of ripping off most punk bands just kind of ripped off the Ramones.

You know, you just big bar chords and, and he really took it somewhere else. And I think that was a lot to do with him, listening to Wilko Johnson.

Andy Corrigan, right? Who was in Gang of Four?

Jon: No, Andy Gill.

DJ: Oh, Andy Gill. I'm getting my Andy’s mixed up.

Jon: Yeah, Andy Corrigan was, Corrigan was the singer in The Mekons. Still is, if we do anything, we still have, we have two Mekons now. And if we have The Mekons 77, played a bunch of gigs over the last sort of 10 years. And it was, it was really nice to get back together with the original lineup.

But then the Mekons is, you know, The Mekons is still plowing on. So…

(Song clip – “Inhuman” by The Mekons)

DJ: You took, art and painting at Leeds.

Jon: Yeah, it was a fine art course. And, uh, yeah, all, I think all, most of the Gang of Four were on that most of The Mekons were on that course. It was a quite, quite radical left wing kind of college. So that was its saving grace as far as I was concerned, ’cause I was just, we kind of kept creeping back into, you know, go to lectures. And I think the stuff we were kind of like talking about there in college really informed, what we were trying to do inside punk, you know, and then also informed, you know, the stuff I've done since. It was quite, I don't think I appreciated it very much at the time, but looking back on it, it was quite an interesting little hot house to be in, you know?

DJ: Yeah. Well, at some point in those days, you switched from playing drums to guitar at some point in one of the bands, right?

Jon: Well, Mekons kind of broke up after we, never really formally broke up, but there was hardly anyone left. You know, people just wandered off after we were fired by Virgin Records. And about that same time, I went back to art school and we started, started doing a band called the Three Johns, which was, sorry, that was a dog barking. Started trying to do a band called the Three Johns and, uh, that used a drum machine. And I became very interested in drum machines. And I played a bit with a band called the Sisters of Mercy who used drum machines as well. So their main guy, Andy kinda helped me a lot with that.

And, um, yeah, I started playing guitar. I didn't do it. I didn't kinda leave the drums. It was just a different situation. And then when The Mekons started to try to do things again, back ’82, ’83 I, uh, I remained singing and playing guitar and it wasn't until like 1985 that Steve Goulding joined the band and we had a drummer again, we worked with, mostly worked with, machines and, you know, sequencers and stuff for those few years.

But during the Miner’s strike in England, in ’84 ’85, we really wanted to show solidarity with the miners and try and raise some money for, you know, for them and their families ’cause they were basically being starved by Margaret Thatcher and her kind of monetarist capitalist, evil government. So, uh, we put the band back together. I don’t know how much we helped, but , it was, you know what, it, it provided a lot of material and I think it was a, it was an important stand to make at that time. It was really the last stand of the trade union movement in Britain. Where it was really, really powerful and Thatcher did achieve what she wanted. She wanted to destroy that working class power and she did. So it's been a sorry, state of affairs ever since, frankly.

DJ: Yeah. Well, I do want to talk about some of the other bands you've been in. And I absolutely wanna talk about your artwork at some point, but before that  I'd like to talk about one of my favorite weekly radio shows, which has been one of my favorites for years, uh, which is now available as a podcast also. And that's This American Life. My routine years ago was on Sundays. It was my afternoon to relax. And I would always listen to that week's episode of This American Life. And I happened to hear, I think it might have been like in the early 2000s, but I, there was an episode called “Classifieds” and Act Two* of that was the segment called “Help Wanted”,** and I probably getting this sort of right. You could do a better job of explaining to the listeners, but what I remember was that you did an experiment of sorts finding people to form a band by placing various and separate classified ads, looking for kind of very specific types of musicians that were from kind of diverse backgrounds or played diverse instruments, uh, including a theremin. It’s one of my favorite episodes of all time.

Jon: Yeah, that was, that's what we found. I mean, we didn't really look for a, theremin player, but people,  we thought we’d place the ad and see what would happen. And then, uh, It was a, uh, the producer, one of the producers and writers for the show was Starlee Kine. And she's fantastic.

And she, uh, she kind of got persuaded me, nudged me into doing it. I thought it sounded like it sounded like it was gonna be kind of like a sarcastic type thing to, you know, sort of like, we would kind of make fun of these people who, you know, the sort of people who would pick, who would answer an ad in the paper to be in the band, you know?

’Cause I'd never done that in most of my bands. So I, I, I dunno, I felt I had real kind of like misgivings about doing it. And uh, then we sort of got into it and it was actually really great. And the people we met were fantastic and it wasn't that wasn't the tone of it at all. It wasn't, you know, dismissive of them. It was actually like, wow, look what you can do. You can just bring random people together and they can naturally make something pretty great. And they all bring their own stories. You can have a band with people from really wildly different backgrounds. And yeah, it was hilarious. I, I totally enjoyed the whole thing.

DJ: Yeah, I've gone back…

Jon: A lot, a lot of crazy things happened around, around making it as well. And then I ended up taking a bunch of the people we met doing that on the road.

DJ: Oh, wow.

Jon: And they recorded with me as well, you know? It was very, I didn't want it to be a negative thing. That's what I was worried about I just wanted and it was, it didn't, you know, the people involved didn't allow it to be that they were all sort of strong personalities and it became a very positive story, I thought, but funny, you know, funny as hell. The way people interact with each other is great.

DJ: Well, for listeners who haven't heard that it's an old episode, it's in the archives, but if you haven't heard it, the song that they decided to do, which I think Jon, you decided, was “Rocket Man” by Elton John.

Jon: I was tryin’ to think of a song that everyone might like. Yeah. And I was like, who doesn't like “Rocket Man”? It's brilliant.

DJ: And it was great. It, it turned out so great.

Jon: Yeah, it’s really, it's a very nice version of the song. And then the fact that we, the fact that we acquired a theremin player, ’cause we had to go around to all these people's houses and like interview them. And there was this guy, Eric, he was a theremin player. He was, I don't know. He's just one of the most interesting people I've ever met in my life, to be honest, he was absolutely fantastic. And he said, his card said “Prepare to be amazed.” and yeah, I'm here, Eric. Amaze us. And then he amazed us and, but yeah, literally he came out, he came out on tour with us with, with This American Life. They did a little tour and we, we took him out on the road with us. It was fantastic.

DJ: That’s great. Every time now that I hear “Rocket Man”, and even when I saw the film,  I think of that old episode, it was…that's great.

Jon: Yeah. It was a very, it was quite just a unique and unique moment. Yeah. I didn't, I like it when you think things are gonna be certain way and then it turns out different.

DJ: Well, back to the subject of bands, you've been part of, I, I love the names of some of your band names, like, like we, Harry Beasties and The Men of Gwent – there's a humor there that I love.

Jon: The Men of Gwent is an ongoing, ongoing situation. Wee Harry Beasties is sadly demised, but that was only ’cause our, it was meant to be a kids' band. And it was only around for the length of time that our kids were interested in kids’ bands.

So once my kids weren't interested, we just, we let it go.

DJ: Yeah.

Jon: But Wee Harry Beasties band, uh, I mean The Men of Gwent is a band, uh, based in Newport, in South Wales. So all, everybody else lives in the UK and we write, the project was to write songs. Mainly about, uh, kind of six mile square area.

DJ: Well, I was a fan of, uh, The Darling Buds too. Was somebody from Darling Buds in the band?

Jon: Yeah. Two, two members of The Men of Gwent are in The Darling Buds, Eric and, uh, Matt still play with The Darling Buds and, uh, yeah, I love The Darling Buds.

DJ: I did too.

Jon: We had a record company up in Leeds that put out the Sisters of Mercy and the Mekons and The Three Johns. And we actually paid for their initial demos because we heard of them and just thought they were great.

DJ: Yeah, it's great stuff. Well, I've seen the Waco brothers a couple times in St. Louis, uh, once at, a Wood House concert, uh, where I met you.

Jon: Oh yeah.

DJ: I bought some of your artwork at the, uh, wood house concert.

Jon: Yeah off Broadway as well. We used to like to play

DJ: Yeah. Still, we talk about that on a couple episodes. We've some of the other guests agree that we still think that's our favorite venue in St. Louis is Off Broadway. I've got an affinity for that venue.

Jon: Yeah, Steve's fantastic. I mean, I've played it a number of times over the years.

Can't wait to go back to be honest.

DJ: Yeah.

Jon: It's this pandemic's been very strange, but

DJ: Yes. Yeah.

Jon: you go, you know, you have, you have these relationships with people you only see once or twice a year and you don't see him for like nearly three years. It's it makes you kinda, it's kinda strange.

DJ: Well, quite a while back, I discovered your artwork that I mentioned on the, uh, yard dog site. And I just love it. And, um, yeah, right here in this room, I'm speaking in, I've got three pieces that you did  so

Jon: Really?

DJ: Yeah, well, one is of Bob Dylan. Uh, one is a masked cowboy singer, I think it's called the unknown singing cowboy and then one of a bird, uh, which you signed for me at the, Wood House concert.

Jon: Oh, right. Well, those, I mean, he's, he's just moved hasn't he? Rick Wood?

DJ:  He did. Yeah. We're all very, very happy for Rick and Nancy, but, yeah.

Jon: Are they, are they out in the Ozarks somewhere now?

DJ:  You know, I don't think it’s quite, you know, I should know that by now, but I don't think it's quite that far. Um, but yeah, it

Jon: I'm open to, I'm open to go and see him anyway.

He's he says, he thinks it's a good place for musicians to come and turn up and do
yeah, once he starts getting it together, I'm I'll be back there.

DJ:  There's such great shows.

Jon: Oh yeah.

DJ:  And you were, and you were, uh, gosh, I forget how many years ago, you were gracious enough to let us use some of your artwork and kind of weave it into some of the Twangfest, uh, materials like badges and posters and stuff like that. So that,

Jon: Yeah, no, they, I remember he had a big, he had a big giant shield up behind the stage. Yeah. Yeah. His gig. That was great.

DJ:  Yeah.

Jon: Well, TW Fest. Well, we have a lot of history with twang

DJ: Yeah. It's a great thing.

Jon: Twangfest, I’m still apologizing to members of Twangfest for, ripping them off at the hotel. One night when we played the dice game, were you there?

DJ: No, I wasn’t.

Jon: Well, we kept winning. We could, we invited all these people back to a hotel to play this dice game. And then we, we kept winning. And by the end of it, it was almost mutinous or they wanted to, to hang us up by, you know, by meat hooks because we, we were clearly cheating, but we weren't cheating. There was no, there was really no way to cheat. We were just winning all the time and it was like, I think people got pissed off, but.

DJ: Wow.

Jon: It was still quite fun.

DJ: You also illustrated a comic strip under the pseudonym Chuck Death.

Jon: Chuck Death. Yeah, me and my mate, Colin B. Morton. Well, Colin, B. Morton was his name on the, uh, strip. His real name is Colin B. Morton.

He's a musician from south Wales and we collaborated a lot of musical stuff. And then, uh, he had this idea to do a kind of fake history of rock and roll as a cartoon strip. And, you know, Some of the people we lampooned liked it. And some of them didn't like it. So some, some bands asked if they could use it on their record sleeves and then other more thin skinned people. Objected, but it was, it was all kind of, I think David Bowie liked it, which was nice. ’Cause I think he had a sense of humor. So there was lots of jokes about David Bowie, but Morrissey not so much. Humorless. Surprise, surprise. Sorry.

DJ: So how would you compare life in Wales and England with living in the Midwest of the United States? Or, I mean, do you get back there much?

Jon: Yeah, I go back a lot and uh, I miss it very much and I've missed it during this pandemic. It's been quite hard to not be able to just nip back over. I have family there and I'm, you know, I try and stay connected with them, but it's, it's just, it was rough not being able to see them.

I dunno, there's a lot of things I probably wouldn't have done if I'd stayed there that I'd been able to do here. And Chicago's been relentlessly welcoming to me, you know, I just have, I’ve just had a, I've had a fantastic time in Chicago. Just opportunities, you know, but I don't know it is like life's, you know, it's one path.

I don't know. I didn't, I don't know which forks I didn't go down. So I like to get back to Wales as much as I can in Newport. Um, it's a kind of little hotbed of people and creativity and, you know, there's, there's clubs there that, that, that still, you know, promote music and support music. So it's a, it's an interesting, very interesting place. So I, I can't wait to get back. I get back there in may. So I'm got a gig on may the third at Le Pub in Newport

DJ: Oh, nice.

Jon: With the men of Gwent. So that's, you know, that's an exciting thing on the horizon. 

DJ: Well, a more recent band, is Four Lost Souls.

Jon: Yeah, we did that band. Uh, in 2016, we went to, Muscle Shoals to a studio called The Nut House, but it was one of the people who, uh, was an engineer at the FAME Studio and, uh, Norbert Putnam, who was an original member of the Muscle Shoals rhythm section. He produced the record. I met him at the Country Music Hall of Fame at this event for I'd done a lot of artwork for. It was the Dylan, Cash and the Nashville Cats exhibit, which was hugely successful. And everyone had a great time and I got to sing with, you know, Norbut Putnam, Charlie McCoy, David Briggs, Matt Gaden, uh, the opening night, cuz it was really the festivals.

You know, the whole exhibit was really honoring the Nashville musicians who, you know, were sought out during the sixties by, you know, Bob Dylan first came there. Then everyone wanted to come to Nashville and played with these Nashville Cats. So, uh, Norbert, I met Norbert and he said, you sing like a pirate.

You should come down to Muscle Shoals and make a record. And I was like, all right, good pirate music is that big down there? I'll I'll come and do it. But I, I was well aware of the history of Muscle Shoals, especially the, the racial history of like that music, like, which I think is kind of fascinating and something that after 1967 kind of fell apart because of that sort of black and white people making music together.

DJ: Yeah. Right.

Jon: You know, after Martin Luther king was shot and he was just a different world, all of a sudden, but there's something very special about what was going on down there that these were know, I said to nor, but, you know, he said, well, that was all the music I listened to.

You know, they said, I played, they said I was in Muscle Shoals. I played black music. Then when I moved up to Nashville, they said, I played white music. I just, I was playing the same music, you know? And they said, yeah, they, they didn't have those categories and, uh, stuff that came out of Muscle Shoals. I wanted to kind of express something through songs.

I wrote about the nature of, you know, Country music and blues music kind of all bubbling up from the same place, you know?

DJ: Yeah. Nice.

And, um, and, uh, that's what we tried to do so that I'm still working with John Szymansky a lot, the two women who sang on the, that album, Bethany Thomas and Tawny Newsome have both gone onto huge fame and success.

DJ: Tawny Newsome from Space Force, right?

Jon: Yeah. And she's, she's constantly doing amazing things. And Bethany, she's a pretty big sort of theater actor in Midwest, in Chicago. She's got, does  one woman shows and she's in the Christmas, Carol at the Goodman theater at Christmas. And she's you, they're both, they're both doing, they're both very, very busy, which I'm really pleased for them,  but me and John kinda like, still throughout the pandemic, we kind of kept a little acoustic du pod together. And, uh, we branched out more recently with a, you know, we wanted to play noisy music during the pandemic and we decided, we'd see if Alan and Dan from the Waker brothers will be interested in being the rhythm section and coming around my house and wearing masks in the basement and playing really noisy music because we, we, after about, you know, 18 months of that, we got, got a bit sick of  acoustic guitars.

So, so we've, yeah, we've got a, we've got a new record coming out with a new band called Jon Langford and his Fancy Men.

DJ: Fantastic.

yeah, which is we took it down to, uh, South by Southwest, which was great. Did some nice shows done there?

DJ: Yeah. I wish I could have been there. I, I slowly getting back out, but I was, yeah, it was the last couple years I've been kind of,

Jon: Yeah. I know people have different comfort levels and we, we were just like, wow, it's time. It's time now to go and do something. So we actually, yeah. We seem to survive.

DJ: Yeah, and I I've been to a couple shows recently, but, uh, yeah, there was a long stretch there. I was really missing it, but, anyway, well, you've always got something going on, Jon.

Jon: Yeah. There's a lot going on this year, you know, so I'm yeah. We, you know, we, we are, uh, still been, we're still allowed to do it. So I think, you know, being a musician is a position of some privilege, really. So, um, and I love the fact that we can, uh, get out and do loads of different things.

Now, hopefully this summer, you know, in the winter's it’s tough, but in the summer we get to do a lot of outdoor stuff and then people are going back into the clubs again. So we'll see if there's, I hope there's not another wave, but if there is we'll, we'll batten down the hatches.

DJ: Yeah, Jon Langford, thanks so much for calling into Frets.

Jon: Thank you. Bye.

DJ: See ya, Jon.