Mekons Finally Get Their Revenge: An Interview with Sally Timms of the Long Running UK Band

There are many reasons writing about rock and roll music is a complete and utter waste of time, and that anyone who partakes, either as writer or consumer, should be completely fucking ashamed of themselves. One particularly compelling reason is that the entire history of Rock and Roll™ music, nay, the entire history of popular culture, late era capitalism, and the sexual mores of the second half of the 20th Century has already been written and perfectly encapsulated in two lines from a Mekons’ song. In the second song of their 1989 (solitary major label) album, the appropriately named “Rock and Roll, “ Sally Timms sings, “when I was just seventeen sex no longer held a mystery/I saw it as a commodity, to be bought and sold like rock n' roll,” drawing a direct line from the start of the postwar, post-Elvis cult of sexualized youth of The Beatles to the impotent-rebellion-for-sure-but-you-keep-trying of Gang of Four/punk to the eventual undeniable reality that commerce encompasses all, both the body and the body music. Every piece of cultural criticism written about before or after these lines suffers in comparison. Reasonable people can disagree on any of these points, but it’s a pretty good song.

The Mekons formed in 1977, in Leeds, England. Bored art students, too many current and ex members to comfortably list here, mixing high-minded politics and low skill sets, their expectations, outside of destroying all that came before, were aggressively reasonable. Ignored by most and rapturously revered by some (if you think this writing on them is grating, you should see the other stuff), they’re still going, playing Bowery Ballroom on July 21st, 2015. A few things, of varying importance, have happened in the intervening years. One can learn of these few things using either the abundant and febrile resources of the Internet or one can watch the newly released Mekons documentary by Joe Angio, Revenge of The Mekons. The film wonderfully documents, through archival footage, following the band on a semi-disastrous UK tour (where they find out about show cancellations from the audience), and interviews with various ex-members, fans, and illustrious talking heads, the last thirty-odd years of The Mekon’s existence. “Inspiring” is a word pretty easily tossed around these days, but it occasionally applies.

Sally Timms, long time co-front-person, if such a term is applicable to your average anarcho-socialist collective country post-punk band, was kind enough to talk to at length about the documentary and The Mekons’ upcoming records. She made the call from the basement of the Chicago law office where she’s a paralegal. I appreciate her taking the time.

Noisey is proud sponsor of a screening of Revenge of the Mekons at Nitehawk in Brooklyn on 7/22. Tickets are still available.

NOISEY: You’ve had some time to sort of live with the documentary for a little bit, how do you feel about it in general?
Sally Timms: I think we all went through different phases with it. When were asked to do it, some of us didn’t want to do, it some of us didn’t care, and some of us did and then as the process went on, I would say I was one of the real naysayers and found it really invasive and difficult and other people were either indifferent or enthusiastic, it varied. And then when it was first edited I think we felt strongly that we were shocked by what it was cause I don’t know if we had any idea what it meant to have something like that made about you and how it feels to see yourself on screen and also someone basically create a narrative for what you do. So Id say it was a lot of weeping and wailing and mashing of teeth and then the movie actually got released and we started to watch it at the screening, and it took me about four goes watching it with other people to say that now I actually feel quite peaceful about it. Eventually I had to realize it's not for us it's for other people and it's a separate project. So, in the end I just thought alright, it is what it is, it's okay, you just have to let it go and it's not doing us any harm, it's actually beneficial and I suppose in some ways it's kind of nice to see a lot of that old footage and see something that has been encapsulated in that short period of time and I don’t really think back over our history. It's not something that any of us do. We just do what we do now.

I may have just completely pulled this from my ass but I think I was under some impression that you were always sort of the one that was – maybe not the least comfortable but generally not comfortable with the whole mythology of the Mekons as “drunken inaptitude raging against inevitable defeat…”
I think there was an element to the movie that we felt like- Joe was there when we had a very very problematic British tour where the shows were getting cancelled and that has never ever happened in our history other than that tour, and so when we were watching it, it was like “ok this becomes the narrative now that people think that we go on tour and people think that the shows get cancelled,” well it's never ever happened before but then perhaps to us that becomes larger than it is in reality to someone watching the movie because they’re not really focusing on that but for us the things that jump out will go “ugh” and then you know I watched and went “great, that: thinner, that: fatter, thinner” I mean all I could see was that my waistline is going up and down, it was like watching- my brother calls me “Oprah;” that’s his nickname for me. My weight can fluctuate. That’s all I could look at initially. I mean it's vain but I mean who can blame anyone you're just going, “Jesus Christ, what am I wearing.” Like those were basic things so I’m just looking at it and just thinking “this is totally embarrassing.” And then I’m holding a bottle of tequila on stage and just standing there. So you look at it from a personal point of view and it's like well I’m a human being I could be classed as a performer but it's not like I’m chasing fame and I think it takes a while to get used to seeing that.

But I do feel like Joe started with the premise, “why do they continue to do this?” And that did bug me, and I said that to him, it's like that isn’t a question that ever comes into my mind, my question is “why wouldn’t we continue to do this?” We get to travel, we get to go all around- well not all around the world, but we definitely go to nice places. So that was what bugs me. It was like this idea like people view us as this kind of weird… to us, we’re not a failure because we never set ourselves up to kind of conform to the music businesses rules about what was a success. So, that kind of bugged me, that premise of “why would you carry on?” It's not that fucking hard. It's actually the opposite; it's really great. I'm paid to go off and travel with my friends and see beautiful places and eat nice food and swan around and meet friends. And sometimes no one comes to the show but we just consider the shows a vehicle for our social life essentially.

I wonder if there's a certain amount of that stuff that’s been perpetuated by the aesthetic; you guys did have in the Curse the Mekons and even the in between song banter for Mekons New York …
Yeah, you know we’re self deprecating like “look at us” and Joe made that point, if you make yourself something of a jester you can say more than other people can. So we play with that a little. But it also does become a kind of journalistic trope but the idea of that “why would we do it?” to me, is just… we’re not climbing mountains here and everything that’s happened to us that’s negative has happened to every single band that has gone on for more than five years.

I got Rock and Roll when I was fifteen from the Columbia Record and Tape Club for a penny, so I owe u guys like 11 dollars, but the lyrics to Club Mekon were really formative to my thinking. That was a really important thing for a fifteen year old. That sort of shaped how I viewed rock and roll history. Obviously I wasn’t thinking of it in a sophisticated way when I was 15 but eventually I saw the continuum from “she was just 17 if you know what I mean” to punk to everything. And I do wonder if the journalistic tropes do kind of overshadow the lyrics and what your actual songs were about.
That’s okay though, I agree. I mean I suppose we’ve always been an unfashionable band. Even The Fall is far more fashionable than we are. We have had people who’ve liked us who are, I suppose, cultural touch stones but I wouldn’t call us a fashionable band and in a way I prefer that even on a low level. Does it bother me? I don’t know. It’s, like, think of all the great people who sat around making work and then died. I mean, I doubt Herman Melville thought he would be one of the most remembered and revered American writers when he put Moby Dick out, and not that I consider that we’re on a class with him. But it's true! It's like does it matter? Like, okay, well what are our dues? What are we entitled to? To us, really not much, so it's okay. How much recognition is alright? You know sometimes it’s a little frustrating. I’ll tell you a funny story. We were on Blast First for a long time which was subsidized by Mute which you probably know, Daniel Miller from Mute and Paul Smith put out our records on Blast First, Paul actually picked us up at a time when no one cared. To Paul’s credit I would say if anyone who’s ever dealt with us, he is really the one who, in the industry, understood us more than anybody, I will absolutely say that about Paul Smith. He understood the band, and what we did. He signed us in the ‘80s and Daniel Miller was always going “ugh why did you sign The Mekons? A bunch of crap losers.” And once Paul said-once he was driving around in a car with Daniel Miller in it and he was playing The Mekons and Daniel Miller went, “this is great! What’s this?” and he's like “oh it's the Mekons, Daniel” and I thought…“exactly.” It's like we almost have this thing where people can’t say, “oh, it's good” I don’t know why, but they can’t. Which is fine and that may not even be a true story but I believe it to be true.

I choose to believe it.
I choose to believe it’s not true cause you can do anything you want now, right? As long as I choose to believe it my magical thinking is okay. It's real. I don’t know, is it sometimes frustrating? I mean what would it be if it weren’t? You know, people telling us how great we are. It doesn’t matter. So enough people tell us we’re great and then the rest don’t care so it's fine.

There's a part in the documentary that one of the members-there's a bit of a talk about how, you know with the aging process there's a bit less overt politics and I don’t know if that’s…
I would say that being older you're perspective and your reaction to things probably changes in the way it manifests itself as far as political activism is concerned and also when the band started things were pretty volatile so if you think that- I mean the 60’s, sorry the 70’s/late 70’s, it was really depressed in Britain people were scrambling around, there were loads of Rock against Racism concerts because there was the whole movement because there was a ton of racism, it's not like their isn’t now but it was people having pitched battles. And there were, there was Thatcher there was the miner’s strike so it made sense being a young band, the band would be much more stridently political than it is probably now. I would say we do express things in more subtle ways but I don’t know if that means we’ve necessarily developed to different political beliefs or if we just express things in a different way or maybe after a while perhaps it's true, perhaps you get a little jaded and you get to a point where it's like well how do you say something again in the same way when you’ve been saying it for a really long time

Right and the facts don’t change
Some things are the same. They haven’t changed. How do you keep saying that? And that is youth; the ability to be angry and really proactive, you know, as you get older I supposed that does change somewhat. You can be is angry but I don’t know maybe it's true that you become more fearful and things become more complex although I think that’s a cop out. I don’t know. Maybe we’re just bloody middle class.

This might be a pretentious question but just to sort of go a little bit further about the politics. For a while you were a UK band and now, from the genres of music that you focus on to just a lot of you living here I don’t know if you guys consider yourself an American band or maybe don’t even think about it. Do you feel more comfortable talking about UK issues or American issues? Or as America is the empire so you don’t really have to worry about it cause we’ll always be the general bad guy?
When the band initially started it really focused on UK issues, I wasn’t in it then, but America has always loomed large in everyone’s politics around the world. So the songs we were singing about, Reagan and during the Reagan era and I would say now we probably, I mean the last record was really about the end of World War One, which was particularly a British subject. Ancient and Modern was about that and Natural was about… well Natural was about a lot of things but it kind of covered paganism. We recorded it in the wild of Wordsworth Country in the Lake District. I would say it varies, and I would say I don’t think we define ourselves as an American band but we definitely wouldn’t say we defined ourselves necessarily as a British band at this point. That’s hard to say, there's no real consciousness going on to identify what do the songs relate to as far as different countries are concerned. The lyrics are always pretty global I would say.

Do you think you're as much into English folk music as you are American country now? Or is it just purely like whatever the winds take you guys at any given moment?
I wish I had a good answer for you there but I'm really not the mover and shaker of our directions.

Is anybody?
I would say Jon and Tom really kind of- we all have-you know it's sort of a collective but within any collective people will do different things so… and we formulate our ideas or we write songs when we’re together but how those get percolated I would say, Jon and Tom are percolators of ideas, so is Lou. And actually sometimes we’ve relied on other people. We were talking to a guy, years ago, who was writing either a dissertation or a book, I cant remember, about the British opium wars in China and we ended up writing a record that encapsulated that. We did Pussy King of the Pirates with Kathy Aker so sometimes the directions of the records can be shaped by other people so there's a variety of influences going on. And Jon listens to a lot of country. I would say Tom listens to a lot of country but listens to a lot of African music and a lot reggae, a lot of folk, you know people are kind of all over the map. Suzy does a lot of experimental music, avant-garde stuff she does all sorts of things…

So what's your focus?
My focus? I don’t really listen to much music. It's true! I just went through a huge phase of going back and listening to tons of 1980’s house and then early 90s underground British dance music. But I would say I’m not a consumer of music in that way.

So I’m assuming you haven’t been paying any attention to the little country wars among writers and who can write about country music and who can play country music…
I have no idea about that

The debate gets to that thing of-I know you guys are going to be collaborating with Robbie Fulks and he has that song “Countrier Than Thou”- where there is the sort of people that look down on popular country music and then there's the people that look down on anything that isn’t popular country music…
Well some of that popular country music, if you mean what comes out of mainstream is pretty god-awful. But having said that I wouldn’t really know. I’ve seen some really nasty hybrids that I was thinking “oyyy” can we just keep it country? But I don’t know.

(I ask Sally about the upcoming album The Mekons and Robbie Fulks recorded in Scotland. She repeatedly states that Fulks wrote about it better than she can describe, so, in the interest of keeping this interview’s word count somewhat 21st Century Internet manageable, Fulks’ blog about it is here. Timms at the end of her telling repeats the canard of The Mekons’ fabled inability to play their instruments…)

I mean at this juncture, I don’t know if you’ve heard any contemporary bands but the whole abysmal musicianship thing doesn’t really fly as much as it did in 1985, I mean you guys are pretty good.
We’re pretty good?

Well, comparatively.
Not compared to Robbie Fulks. I mean this is like a world-class guitar player and we just sound like Spike Jones band banging rocks together. It depends. Lu (Edmunds) and Susie (Honnyman) are very good. Steve (Goulding) is an amazing drummer but Steve wasn’t there. But we’re fine. We’re not bad musicians, but when you're looking at people who are actually sort of virtuosos there's a little bit of a leap. There's a leap for us forward, and a huge leap backwards to Robbie. That’s okay though, we’ll provide the exciting punk element.

Is this upcoming tour long for you guys?
It's not long. At this point I was talking to a friend the other day and I said there's no way that we are going on tour where you have to go to a different city every night. There's absolutely no way. We will not tour like that. I will not do it. We will not go on stage after 11 o’clock at night, 10m o’clock to me is too late. And it's like we make it comfortable for us and actually. We have an old rule: when we can, we play in interesting places We don’t wanna play the same place that we played when we were 20 and so we are playing in a really old Victorian opera house in Wisconsin and we’re doing a show at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago where we’re going to do kind of a mixed media show. We’ll do regular shows too but we’re playing at Jalopy in New York where we’re actually recording, did they tell you this? We’re recording a new record in real time.

I didn’t know that
Well we’re playing in New York at this place called Jalopy in Red Hook, and it's not really a show; we’re recording and seventy-five people have paid seventy-five dollars to attend but they will form parts of the choir that will sing and be on the record. So it's not a show and it's not a live record in a sense that we’re going to play some songs and record them live; it's actually a recording session and Jon or Tom came up with the quote saying “why should a record take longer to record than it does to listen to?” So we’re recording it into a single microphone in real time and that is the record.

New songs?
All new songs

So the people will come in and they’ll sort of be told what to sing? Or told how to do the part?
Yup, we have Dave Nadler, who’s our friend a choir master and an excellent musician, he will be conducting them and they’ll sing on some stuff, not all of it cause they wont know what they’re doing, but probably neither will we but we’re better at winging it. And they’ll be arranged in the room and it won’t be set up like a traditional gig cause it's not. And there wont be clapping, they’ll have to sit quietly and not knock their drinks over and everything else. We’ll record each song with their participation.

Well that’s fucking terrifying
For us you mean?

Yeah, for you!
No, were not scared of that! How bad can it be?! It can’t go that wrong. I mean it can but it doesn’t really matter. What could happen to us? We could be arrested by the audience? I don’t think so. They’ll be too terrified themselves.

And they did pay seventy-five dollars
Yeah, and it's not that bad. I mean someone said it was too cheap I went “it's not too cheap” this way, if it's rubbish then they cant really complain because seventy-five bucks, it's a stretch, but it's not crazy. If we charge five hundred dollars, which the market I doubt would’ve have born that but, should we have tried, there might have been some serious complaints. I mean they’re gonna get their seventy-five dollars worth regardless. We can provide that for them somehow.

That sounds fantastic and exciting. It's going to be fine.
It has to be interesting to us. If it's interesting to us it will be interesting for other people. And I think that’s really important, I have friends in Chicago and they play the same venue every single time, I think how do you even get excited about this? You’ve been in this room a million times and how does you audience differentiate in their minds, which show they saw of yours? It's like you can create environments for people to make the whole event an event. And I really love that idea you know?

I think a lot of people now see both rock and roll and punk as something that serves as a comfort, you know community is so important and the sort of warm hug of existence of doing the same thing and I think there something to be said for that but…
That’s not punk rock. Punk rock is about doing different things, doing anything! That’s what punk rock was you know? That’s what it means. It's not kind of sitting around watching a revival band play things that you liked when you were 19, that’s the antithesis of punk. Then you get to the point where you're like well what's the difference between that and the spandex bands? The whole idea of punk was to-and obviously I’m not saying we redefine ourselves every time, we don’t, but…you can make gigs fun! You know they have to be fun for us otherwise we wouldn’t do it. If we’d just gone on regular tour just playing all the standard venues I wouldn’t go.

It’s also a tough proposition cause I think there's a lot of very young still good punk bands that wont play any established venues they’ll only play art spaces, they’ll only play…
Like house parties and things?

Yeah but you guys are in a strange position where you maintain all you ideals but it doesn’t logistically make any sense for you to seek out the all ages basement show…
Well we don’t do a lot of all ages shows actually but-and I think we should try but there aren’t that many people who are breaking our door down saying “why aren’t you playing an all ages show?” Occasionally there are young people and you look at them and go “wow! Young people!” Like unicorns or something. But no, a band at our level isn’t going to play a load of basement shows, but great for the bands that do. That is great! That’s like people make thing happen themselves. Jon's son Jimmy is in a punk band and they go and play in all these weird little house parties and things but that’s how all of us started.

What’s Jimmy’s band?
The Ungnomes. They’re great! They’re opening for us in Chicago. They’ll piss everyone off and then we’ll hopefully not piss everyone off.

Then you’ll placate everyone. The soothing sounds of the Mekons
Exactly.