Shine on Brightly: A Chat with Jon Langford

“Jon Langford’s been in more bands than you have digits,” boasts the multimedia folk hero’s website.

You wonder how exactly he keeps count of them all himself. To a distinguished roster which includes Mekons, the Three Johns, Waco Brothers, the Pine Valley Cosmonauts, the Killer Shrews, the Wee Hairy Beasties and the Men of Gwent, Langford has added the Bright Shiners, a quartet featuring keyboardist and arranger Alice Spencer, violinist Tamineh Gueramy and guitarist John Szymanski. Earlier this year, they put out the delicate yet arresting Where it Really Starts, for which they’ve just wrapped up a tour.

Going into 2025, Langford will be slipping his Mekon costume back on – the post-post-punk veterans just finished a new album, and will perform live for the first time in years. But other projects will surely arise, alongside the visual art with which the Welsh-born Chicago resident Langford earns the other half of his keep.

“He’s the real deal,” effuses my dad, who chatted with the famously fan-friendly performer after a show – and ended up buying his painting of John Prine. I sat down for a chat of my own with the tireless artist, who’d just woken up (or so he claimed – his discography suggests sleep is rare), last Wednesday.

How’s the tour been going?

It’s great. We’re just coming up to the last gig of the final leg [on June 20th]. We did about seven or eight gigs in the UK, and about six gigs on the West Coast, and then we just finished seven gigs on the East.

How often have you been able to get out, in the wake of the pandemic?

Looking back on it now, we immediately started finding ways around it, even that first summer in 2020. There were a couple of false dawns, when we thought we could go back on the road, and we didn’t. But then there was just an incredible demand for you to go out. We did a drive-in gig where we were on the backs of pickup trucks, with the Waco Brothers, just driving around the neighborhoods of Chicago. You pull up to someone’s house, play them three songs, and then drive off. It was extraordinary.

The Mekons really haven’t done a tour since the pandemic, which is sad. We did just record an album, and that’s coming out next year, so we will tour next year. But [it’s been] almost six years.

It seems like “necessity is the mother of invention” is kind of a throughline through your career. You’re making a record, or going out and playing, with the people who are available then.

The Mekons are always geographically challenged. But we managed to do a Waco Brothers album and tour last year, which was great. So this year was always gonna be the year of the Bright Shiners.

You’ve never made an album that sounds particularly like this before. It’s very arranged, and there’s almost a sort of chamber quality to it. It’s clearly a special combination of musicians.

The mellotron makes a massive [difference]. I’ve not really had a project based around a keyboard. The Men of Gwent have a piano player [Barkley McKay], he plays whirly and organ and stuff. But I feel like the mellotron was kind of the key instrument in the songwriting. That’s a good word for it, “chamber.” What’s happening is very simple, but there’s a lot of working parts that kind of depend on each other. A lot of post-punk stuff and dub-reggae stuff have similar attitudes, where everyone’s a part of a machine.

Like your friends in Gang of Four. It’s very much about interlocking parts. But your records from the Mekons on have generally been much looser, more about just the sound of people playing at once.

Mekons, with that many people, we’ve had to work really hard to keep it down to the essential elements. It’s been easier in the Bright Shiners. I would write sketches of songs and send them to Alice remotely. A song like “Seahouses,” there’s whole sections that when it came back, I was like, “I like this bit, where’s this come from?” She’d actually sliced up bits of the chord sequences. It was very illuminating. Mekons, we work in a studio together, but we don’t really plan things beforehand, and with the Waco Brothers, I write my songs and Dean writes his. But this was a real songwriting collaboration. We had very strong ideas going in about structure and instrumentation, how economical and understated we wanted to be.

Does it put different demands on you as a musician, as well?

I think it’s made me a better singer – I’ve had to up my game. Alice is a vocal arranger; I knew she’d be weaving under and around what I was singing. It needed to be more consistent than I’d normally be – I had to commit to phrasings and melodies; otherwise it screws it up. But the discipline of that is great.

Was there a particular flavor to these songs that set them apart from songs for other projects?

It’s only become apparent since the record came out what I was writing about. [Which is] probably what you’d expect of someone my age. Sort of fatalistic. And I’m quite an optimistic chap – I tend to just push ahead. But there’s been a tremendous amount of loss and grief in recent years. Suddenly you get to the point where – I’ve got kids, and they’ve moved out, and everyone in that generation above me is gone. It’s been particularly hard this last year. But I mean, you plow on. There’s no point in thinking about retiring.

That would be very off-brand for you. Just in recent years, you’ve put out great records under a few of your many guises. For instance, that terrific Waco Brothers album you put out last year.

We’d just lost Joe Camarillo. Dan [Massey] had filled in for him while he was sick, but the last thing I’d written to him was “get better. That’s your drum stool sitting there, mate.” But I think he knew it was never going to happen. So we said, OK, Dan’s a different sort of drummer, we’ll make a different sort of record. We’d been getting into some odd stuff with Joe, and it was kind of free – which I loved. But for this one, working with Dan, we kind of went a little bit back to how they used to describe us, “Cash meets Clash.” So this time we said it’s “Cash meets Clash in Hamburg.” It’s got like this big beat going on behind it.

VIDEO: Jon Langford’s Men of Gwent “Adrian Street”

I want to ask about the very Wales-focused Men of Gwent project, which is three albums deep now.

It’s a local history punk band. When I first moved to the ‘States in ’92, I decided we should form a band, just so there was a reason for me to come back. But it turned into much more than that. We made an album that never came out in 1995, and it drifted off for a while, but people kept asking us to do things. This time last year we finished the new album – we went to a studio in mid-Wales for about five days, and just sat around and recorded. It was great, and I can’t wait to do it again. It’s a really great band.

It’s amazing how many great records are littered through your discography. And I wanted to ask, decades in – has it gotten easier to sort of keep the business up? To be a touring and recording musician, who puts out records regularly, and hustles art on the side to keep things afloat?

There’s people that recognize what I’ve done in the past who are interested in new material. I’ve always found that very encouraging. We’ve had labels who just [say], “why would you make a new album? You don’t sell any records. Just do a box set of the back catalogue, that’s what people are interested in.” It’s not why I’m interested in it. So the weight of the past kind of builds up on you. The Mekons just did a deal with Fire Records over the back catalogue, but they’re also really keen on the album we’ve just finished.

I’m sure the Mekons are the project most sought after for ‘boutiquing.’ Though you did put out that Three Johns reissue some time ago [box set Volume, released on Buried Treasure records in 2015].

That was my way of putting a period at the end of that. Some stuff was unavailable, and then some of what was available was terribly mastered. I knew we could fix it if we tried. The period of when the band was really on fire, I thought, was about ’83 to ’87. I said, I want all that stuff available, and remastered. The other guys in the band weren’t very happy with the money I was spending, but I went to a studio in Chicago with one of the best mastering engineers in the country, Blaise Barton, and took stuff from every source to get the best. Comparing vinyl to tapes to CDs, so there was a consistency. It was agonizing.

AUDIO: The Three Johns “The World By Storm”

Were there ever any kind of reunion discussions with the Three Johns?

There were a couple of things over the years, and then we lost John Hyatt earlier this year. Another one, and he had been sick for a long time, but it was still and incredible shock to me when it happened. We’d communicated so much over the years, I didn’t realize how sick he was physically. There was footage of him at an even this year, and he couldn’t speak, his voice had gone. But he had never mentioned that.

The timing is so unpredictable. You just can’t know. But it makes me think about, for instance, your taking the opportunity to reunite the original Mekons for a wonderful album [Is it Twice Blessed].

That was amazing.

What inspired that, at that moment?

What happened was, Honda Acura wanted to use “Where Were You” on an advert. And we all spoke to each other to decide what to do, and ended up in the same e-mail inbox. We’d never made any money out of this – they were going to just give us some paltry amount, and we didn’t really care. But then they made it a much bigger thing and upped the money considerably. So everyone was a bit nervous about it.

Those are such different circumstances than you’re forming. That’s nearly the opposite of punk.

Yeah, a car commercial brings us together. But we’d started talking, and I said you know, we’ve got an anniversary coming up, this and that. We’re thinking of doing Mekonville. And everyone’s alive and happy – why not try and put something together? Everyone was getting friendly, there was no kind of grudges or old history lurking around. So we decided to do it, and the recording part was actually really fun. It was just me and Tom and then these four people who hadn’t had any involvement in music for a long time.

And now the evolved Mekons have a new album on the way.

In LA, ten days ago, we finished it.

Incredible. Every Mekons record is distinct. What distinguishes this one? Or is it a surprise?

The album’s called Horror. We went to Valencia in Spain. We like to go somewhere – if we record in any particular person’s home city, they get very distracted. We’ve found it works better if everybody’s in the same position, away from home and away from responsibilities. Valencia was this big studio space – all eight of us could set up in a circle, with vocal mics. So everyone’s there in the space, just kind of reacting to the material – writing as we were sitting there, changing things, and then putting something down.

This defines the Mekons process in some way, right? Intense, in-the-room collaboration?

We need to be in the same room. We need contact. And we’re, as I said, geographically challenged. But it’s very immediate. Different than Waco Brothers – different goals, or different starting points. This time, I talked to Tom about what we were gonna do, and we had one thing – I think I’d sent him some lyrics and he’d sent me a tune with him singing it. And it was just really great – I was like, “that’s a proper song!”

Then Tom was saying, “I like that song of yours, ‘Drone Operator.’ We should have one like that.” I said, “well what’s it called?” And he said, “‘Private Defense Contractor.’” [Laughs] There’s a catchy pop song. So we got to Valencia and I was like, “what’d you write?” And he goes, “Oh. Well, I’ve just got the title.”

He had three titles. ‘War Economy.’ ‘Private Defense Contractor.’ And ‘Western Design,’ which is about the beginning of British Colonialism. He had some notes, but not lyrics. So we started about midnight, we were going into the studio the next day, and we ended up going till about four in the morning. Just me, him, and Dave Trumfio, and we made three songs, which I recorded on my phone. And then we showed everyone else the next morning, and they went, “oh, really? We’ve got more demos? This is great!”

The Mekons have been consistently active, but there’s that brief period in the early ‘80s when the project kind of sputters out, before you reconvene for the Fear and Whiskey era. Was there a time you thought the Mekons were over, and then perhaps, a time you realized they’d never be over?

I would say around ’81, we did a single for a label called CNT. We thought that was the sort of swan song. But there was some interest in it. The Three Johns started the next year, but we also made a thing called The Mekons Story, just us fiddling with synthesizers and making up songs. And Greil Marcus wrote about that, and that was the start of sort of taking it more seriously. In a way, it was fueled by what the Three Johns were doing, it was more drum-machine-based. I got quite good at programming drum machines.

Then the miner’s strike happened. I was away with the Three Johns, and Tom [Greenhalgh] asked if it was okay to put together a Mekons to do benefit shows in early ’85. I thought it was a great idea. When I came back, Lu [Edmonds] and Steve [Goulding] had joined. Dick [Taylor] and Susie [Honeyman] were already in it, and Rico [Bell] and Sally [Timms] were kind of on the fringes of it, but starting to get more involved. And by ’86 we had our tour of the States, and it was all full speed ahead. But even then, I don’t think we’d realized that we were probably never gonna end. After we got fired by A&M in 1990, I think then me & Tom were like well, we should just keep doing this, you know?

The 1990s are such an interesting time for the Mekons, almost a wilderness time. No record sounds like, or really has anything to do with, the previous record. But each is clearly a passion project. In a way, they’re records “for you,” but you’re clearly going to make a record every chance you get to.

Well that was definitely the case. We were making music for ourselves, to interest ourselves, and there was no thought, any thought about consistent sound, consistent audience. It was just pushing forward.

Your discography is littered with wonderful albums. Are their particular ones you’re very proud of?

I’ll say – maybe, rose-tinted glasses, but that I really like this Bright Shiners record surprises me. It was a surprise to make something that sounds so different. But there’s a Mekons album called Journey to the End of the Night, which immediately, when it was finished, I enjoyed listening to. That was strange: to not have regrets, or ideas about what’s wrong with it. We’d gone back to making an album with songs on it for the first time in a while, and it’s lovely. It has a mood different to anything we’d done before. There’s almost like an ease to it which – normally we’re very uncomfortable, and you can feel that discomfort. Here it was like we were all on the same page, and knew what we wanted to do. I found that quite nice!

Are your kids involved in music as well?

The oldest one’s gone back for his masters, but the youngest is a recording engineer in Austin. He’s got good ears, we’ve worked on stuff. Though I worked with both of them when they were little, for the Wee Hairy Beasties album. That was us trying to make kid’s music that wasn’t completely offensive to adults.

FIVE GREAT ALBUMS FEATURING JON LANGFORD

1. Mekons, Curse of the Mekons
2. The Killer Shrews, The Killer Shrews
3. Pine Valley Cosmonauts, The Executioner’s Last Songs, Vol. 1
4. Jon Langford & Skull Orchard, Here Be Monsters
5. Men of Gwent, Lost on Land and Sea

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Ryan Maffei

Ryan Maffei is a freelance writer, musician and actor in the Dallas area. He was a member of the lost punk group Hot Lil Hands and the lost pop group the Pozniaks. He loves the Go-Betweens and was lucky enough to write liner notes for their box sets.

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