Jon Langford–singer, songwriter and guitar hero for Mekons and other punky-country bands–makes images as well as music. Hank Williams above (and below) along with the next set of pictures/texts express Langford’s love for classic country. He’s told here how Mekons got heavy into Honkytonk in the early 80s with a little help from a Chicago DJ named Terry Nelson:
The tunes on Terry’s Hard Country cassette lived up to our egalitarian Punk Rock ideals effortlessly. These honky-tonk guys knew their crowd ‘cos they lived in the same world as them, confronting the same realities head on every day with the same defiant humor & fatalism, the barrier between performer and audience melting away in a pool of common experience.
Langford feels his way back toward these anti-heroes of a once knowable community in images like these…
Langford isn’t locked on the American South (or Bakersfield). He’s lived in Chicago for years and his imagination often returns to the UK , where he grew up (like Raymond Williams) in Wales. The following images flow out of the border country in England and Ireland.
Langford has commented on his own artistic practice:
Over the years I picked up some ideas about how art was no isolated activity removed from the world, how you had to be able to talk, explain and justify your work. How it should be about your immediate situation and politics and your place in the food chain and relationship to the powers that be and really, that was never a problem for the Mekons. We had no trouble writing songs about just those things in response to all the music biz crap we’d dealt with day in and day out for all that time. What was the big difference between a song and a painting or even a gig and an art-show, or as I was to discover later a big label and a big gallery? Obviously all my fine art insider baggage couldn’t just be ditched out of some desire to make pretty pictures, I’d have to step around it, poke it with a long pointy stick and see which bits were crippling me. Maybe a painting could be like a song, maybe there is no difference. It’s an idea begging to be shot down but it worked for me, got the juices flowing and helped me straddle the barrier between rock & roll and art. With a foot in both camps it was only in America that I found a way, and a reason, to make any of this work.
These final images, of a feather with the birds of outsider artist Eddie Arning (and “The Cuckoo Bird”–a folk song that originated in the UK in the 1840s but migrated to America) amount to rock & roll art. They bring home Langford’s cross-Atlantic angles on loss, self-laceration and liberation.
All of the images above are available as limited edition prints. You may contact yarddog.com to learn more.