Sitting pretty: Sally Timms and the rest of the Mekons sing out another San Francisco Saturday night. All photos by Ashleigh Reddy.
By Ben Sinclair
This year is the Mekons’ 30th anniversary, and it's been a particularly fruitful year. It's odd to imagine this Leeds group had once been an edgy punk outfit and then a trad-rock and country combo, slipping into new wave songs now and then. This weekend, they were a folk band.
And a very smart folk band, at that. After the Oct. 6 show at the merch booth, drummer Steve Goulding wouldn’t let me get away with passing off my last $12 for a $15 disc. Perhaps this is an attitude that has helped keep the band alive for so long. I promptly retrieved another $3 from the folks I came with and returned for a limited-edition copy of Dance on the Volcano, the new album by Tom Greenhalgh’s other band King Tommy’s Velvet Runway. A good decision. We all missed Greenhalgh’s voice that night, as he couldn’t make it for this leg of the tour, but the band rocked the hell out of “Hard to be Human Again” anyway.
Otherwise the classic lineup was present, and the banter between members felt warm and, at times, invigorating. I sat - and stomped and clapped - through the entire set with a happy-go-lucky grin on my face. “Give Me Wine or Money” was the night’s opener, further permeating the “fair trade” section of my mind. “Yeessss…,” I heard myself thinking, “Stop downloading this band from now on.” Later, casting like a smoky, pagan warlock, founder Jon Langford recommended the whole audience not hesitate to spend a bit in the back - after all, Greenhalgh now needs all the money he can get. He and his wife are having their third child.
Smart, sure - but afterwards they lost the night’s sharpie-drawn set list to the sticky fingers of my sprightly cohort. We now potentially had all the spiritual power of the Mekons, locked in an object they’d passed so much of their energy through - well, assuming the guy at the mixing boards didn’t just scratch it out before the show. A Crowley-like ritual is yet to be undertaken with the list, but some of us are hoping to contact deceased Mekons producer and friend John Gill - may he rest in peace - for lost secrets of the band.
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