Jon Langford is the paintin’-est, drinkin’-est, singin’-est cowboy west of Sheffield. He granted an interview by cell phone from Washington, D.C., where he was on his way to perform at the Kennedy Center, having just changed into ‘a fresh pair of pants.’ He was particularly concerned that children not see his horribly scarred knees.

The Mekons fled Thatcher and moved to Chicago in the mid-’80s. So how are you faring under the current American regime?
I’m hoping at the moment I’m going to sit back and watch it unravel beautifully. That’s me being optimistic, though.
Have you been following the military occupation of New Orleans?
Yeah, it looks like that’s getting pretty disgusting–well, it’s been disgusting all the way along, but now they’re jostling people out of their homes at gunpoint, y’know. I feel like the hurricane is interesting on one level–it’s not that interesting for the people who’ve been watching what’s going on for the last five years, but I think most people aren’t really watching what’s going on. So this is quite a shock for people to see what a racist, class-based society this is–how nobody even really gave a second thought to these people. It’s amazing how America can descend into being another third-world country so fast. In a matter of moments, really.
Did you have any romantic illusions about this country when you moved here?
Oh yeah, tons of ‘em. Still have.
Is that from American music?
Yeah, that’s the positive side of the yin and yang of this place, you know. Definitely. Especially somewhere like New Orleans, you know, that was just like–you grew up in South Wales, and you heard all that music, and the fact that you could go to some of those places and see some of those people playing was completely extraordinary. The first time I was in DC was in 1985 when the Three Johns were touring. We went out for a walk the day after the show and saw the Balfa Brothers play. America is constantly surprising; a lot of really positive things, a lot of really negative things about it. The same as everywhere.
What’s the gig at the Kennedy Center? Part of your anti-death penalty project?
We’re doing the Executioner’s Last Songs show, a multimedia thing we’ve been working on. The anti-death penalty project was the Executioner’s Last Songs albums, and this is a spoken-word project about making those albums that I was commissioned to do by the National Performance Network, which involves music, the artwork–a lot of visuals, film–and a lot of talking. For me, this show is mostly about my experiences coming to America and being really shocked at this huge tradition of great country music being replaced by this fucking piss-weak rock crap that they call country music now, you know? Just turn on the radio, turn on US 99 in Chicago, hear the kind of dross they’re playing–it’s just crap! I always thought with pop music I would be like, ‘Ooh, these young people, what are they listening to? It’s so awful!’ But I just get bored with all this stuff now–it’s so predictable, so manufactured and awful. I’m totally addicted to college radio in Chicago at the moment, where they just play drones and free-form jazz and stuff like that–anything rather than listen to that series of commercials that they call country songs now.
Any Mekons plans for the future?
We never really ever had any plans for our future.

THIS INTERVIEW BY OLIVER HALL