The 'Days Between Stations' columns, Interview magazine 1992-2008: The Mekons (OOOH!)
September 2002
The Mekons are celebrating their 25th anniversary with an album about severed heads. OOOH! (Quarterstick) is about the salutary effect of severed heads—about how, as singer Sally Timms trills in "Bob Hope & Charity" and guitarist Tom Greenhalgh testifies in "Stonehead," only such a head can sing the true song. Or rise to the example of the fifth-century Welsh king Bran, killed in battle with Ireland, his head brought home by his followers, where it sang for 80 years, "like Bob Hope entertaining the troops."
In 1977 the Mekons were the first punk band in Leeds, England; after a quarter of a century, after dozens of sometime members have come and gone, they are a core of eight, living in Chicago, New York, San Francisco and London, dedicated to discovering what they want to say and saying it in the most pleasurable and satisfying way possible, assuming that in the end the two are the same.
As OOOH! begins, with "Thee Olde Trip to Jerusalem''—in the parlance of the English heretics who make up the phantom chorus of the album, from the 17th-century Ranters to present-day London mayor "Red Ken" Livingstone, from the 16th-century Family of Love to 19th-century British folk revivalist William Morris, the Mekons mean "The New Jerusalem," capital of a world turned upside down, where every man and woman is God—the Mekons appear not as a band but a tribe. You hear people holding hands as they dance around a fire. Lead voices are surrounded by others, until no voice is more than one shout among many. Creaking guitars, even a flute, sound like machinery found in an abandoned factory and started up again after a hundred years.
There are specific scenes of heretics' history on OOOH!—members of the Family of Love affirming themselves as drops in God's ocean, Ranters in their "alehouse chapel"—but there's no need to notice a word of that to catch the story the Mekons are telling, the body of which is in "Only You and Your Ghost Will Know." It opens with a flat, lugubrious vocal by Greenhalgh, but even behind his first lines there's a hint of an all-consuming rhythm trying to break out, and almost immediately it does. Other voices join the leader until he ceases to lead and rejoins the tribe. Then any voice can be heard on its own and as part of the whole—and as part of the past it is summoning. Fiddler Susie Honeyman circles over the sound like a hawk, and the music begins to swirl, like a whirlpool, like Neil Young's "I'm the Ocean."
Little guitar notes chime against harsh chords striking down against them, and the little notes sing the song just as the harsh chords carry it. You can't make the song loud enough, not when a single voice and the tribe hammer back at each other on the chorus, after asking a question that is suddenly as thrilling as it is heartbreaking: Is there anything left in your life worth pursuing? "Only you and your ghost will know," they answer. What is the ghost? They offer not a hint.
On tour this fall, in some cities the Mekons will mount an art exhibition; read from their new illustrated book of lyrics, Hello Cruel World (Verse Chorus Press), at Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon; and, in the Bay Area, Chicago and New York, offer three different shows in each place, performing in different clubs as different incarnations: the Mekons of 1977 (where, for example, guitarist Jon Langford, the band's original drummer, will play drums), 1986, 1992, 2002—or whatever stage of their career the night calls up. ("Will you dress in costumes?" I ask Langford. "We always dress in costumes," he says indignantly.)
One artwork they will not have with them, though, is founding Mekon Ken Lite's Spinning Head. Last year in Manchester it was part of an extensive Mekons show of heads: heads made by children, pub-sign paintings of the likes of Jackson Pollock, Margaret Thatcher and King Bran, plus such full-color comix paintings as "Oskar Kokoshka's life-size Alma Mahler Doll"—an inflatable sex doll.
The spinning head was more than four feet high. Voices and songs came out of it. With its dirt-brown features all but smoothed away as if by eons underground, it seemed less made than excavated. One night "juvenile delinquent art critics" (as Langford calls them) broke into the exhibition building and destroyed it.
OOOH! begins and ends with Lite's head. Every song wants nothing so much as to be sung by it, and heard by it. As the head no longer exists, OOOH! takes its place. The album is the sort of artifact that, decades from now, people will find and wonder what it is, where it came from, what it says, and wonder if anyone who made it is still alive.
Originally published in Interview Magazine, September 2002
great record! i’d never listened to it before reading this and i haven’t stopped all day!
The Mekons always seem like a personal secret pleasure. I have dipped in and out of their discography but didn’t even know about this one.