Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Skull Orchard Revisited is a reworking of a solo album called Skull
Orchard I made in the late 90s. It was a bunch of songs that found no
place with my bands the Mekons or Waco Brothers and became my first
solo recordings. I'd been living in Chicago since 1992 and strangely
enough all these homeless songs seemed to be about my thoughts and
feelings about growing up (and leaving) my hometown Newport in South
Wales. When I got the opportunity to work with the Burlington Welsh
Male Chorus a few years ago this project was revived with this new book
and CD being the result
  

    
Newport is a sea-port town about 12 miles east of Cardiff. It's
somewhere I go back to a lot.
  

    
Hang on! Hang on! 

Inkwell is proud to welcome Jon Langford, Renaissance man, who
describes himself thusly:

Jon Langford is a founder member of the Mekons and Waco Brothers, a
visual artist, writer and broadcaster. His latest project is Skull
Orchard Revisited; a reworking of his first solo album Skull Orchard
which has been expanded into a book that features Jon's song paintings,
a short story about the Death Of Moby Dick, a South Wales Alphabet by
his brother David Langford and photographs by his father Denis
Langford. The CD that accompanies the book contains several bonus
tracks and vocal accompaniment from the Burlington Welsh Male Chorus.
  

    
And interviewing him is the Well's own Joe Hobaica. Joe Hobaica is a
bon vivant, raconteur, and man about town. He had a small record label
in the early 90s that put out small records, has smuggled computer
equipment into Russia, read water meters, cleaned roadkill, and helped
host a 24-hour Tom Waits party. He can be counted on to tell an
engaging, and occasionally offensive, story. He lives in Brooklyn, NY
and Black Rock City, NV. 
  

    

Thanks Ed, and welcome Jon, I'm looking foward to this.

Jon, "Skull Orchard Reisited" really seems like a love letter
both to, and with, your family and Wales. Is your family still in
Newport?
  

    

What made you want to come back to the  Skull Orchard" album, and
how did the collaboration with your brother, noted author, David, and
your father Denis come about? Were there other family members who
felt left out?
  

    
Hello Joe
My Mum still lives in Newport but she's currently packing her bags to
fly over here tomorrow. The Burlington Welsh Male Chorus is performing
with me at the Hideout Block Party in Chicago on Sept 24th (and the
night before at Thomas Masters Gallery in front of all the S.O.R. art)
and she wanted to be there. She's 86 this year but still game for a
trans-atlantic flight on her own. She's being doing this ever since my
Dad died in 2001; her only grandchildren live with me. 

I have a lot of family and friends in Newport and up the valleys in
Cwmbran and Pontypool. I've been back three times this year already and
did a nice concert & art show at Barnabas Art House in Newport in
July. 

Two thing triggered the Skull Orchard Revisited project - the 
original album was sold out and unavailable and selling for silly
amounts on e-bay AND the Mayor's office in Chicago asked me to get
involved in their Celtic Fest which was really just an Irish Fest as
they couldn't seem to find any other Celts. It was around that time I
met the choirboys
  

    

I believe that when speaking of any parent who is 86
and traveling to see children and grandhildren, you HAVE to
say, "Bless her heart."

Did you find that you didn't appreciate Newport until you
left, or did you always want to spend time there, but
had to go away, Leeds, London, Chicago to do art, music,
interpretive dance?

I like the idea of you being the First Union Celt on record
with the Chicago Mayor's office, "We need a Celt! Call
Langford and see if he has a mandolin!"

Good luck on the Chicago shows, and I'm looking forward to the
NY and Brooklyn shows in October. A Mekons show always seems
to involve a fair amount of cat wrangling, as you guys live all
over the globe. Were all of the Burlington Welsh Male Chorus able
to make it? Did you have to tell Rico Bell he could come to
the show but not get on stage?
  

    
I may not have been the first Celt-ster but I was the first official
welsh act if you don't count the sheep dogs & timid woolly flock they
had running around Grant Park all weekend.

I can't really remember what I thought of Newport when I left - I was
desperate to get away and go to art school etc. I really thought I was
going to be a painter but circumstance made me into a punk rocker
instead and it was the punk rocking that took me back to Newport and
introduced me to a bunch of people I didn't know when I was living
there. Being a Mekon and getting played on John Peel gave me this thin
veneer of cool I've been dining out on  for the last 34 years and I've
been going back to Newport and collaborating with a bunch of people
there pretty consistently since the late 70s. 

It was a boom town when I was a kid. They shut down most of Llanwern
steelworks in 1976, the year I went away to art college, and Thatcher
shut all the mines in the 80s and after that came the economic decline
and surprisingly defiant response I've been observing and documenting
with the exile-eyes ever since. 

I remember going down to the docks with my Dad when I was really young
and seeing the big Soviet ships and right there in my hometown at the
very height of the Cold War there was commie sailors off drinking and
scoring cheap baggies of weed in the West Indian dance clubs of Pill.
Joe Strummer heard reggae for the first time down by Newport Docks and
I was born the week the Sputnik went up and somehow it's all linked up
- in my head at least... 
  

    
So are you the first rockin' Newporter? Was there anyone back in
Beatle days or some hoary psychedelico?
  

    
Can't claim anything like that - Amen Corner were the Gwent Beatles
(If Paradise was half as nice etc.) Green Gartside of Scritti Politti
is my direct contemporary and lived a few hundred yards from me - we
were in Leeds at the same time as well. Man were from South Wales and
they were the hoariest psychedelicos about in the mid 70s when I was
growing my hair....

My re-connection with Newport came about via Bob Last of Fast Product
(the label that put out early Mekons, Gang Of Four, Human League etc.)
who met a band of loonies from Newport called Ralph & The Ponytails
while he was tour managing the Rezillos. They were a bunch of guys I
didn't know from other parts of town but they got me to produce their
debut 45 because I'd actually played on a record. It was my first stab
at producing a band. 

Julian Murray was one of the 7 or 8 guitarists in the Ponytails and
after they'd split up he moved to Canada and joined the Burlington
Welsh Male Chorus and masterminded the current project. I also met my
pal and collaborator Carlton B. Morgan (I did the Great Pop Things
comic strip with CBM for over 10 years) via the Ponytails... 
  

    

Loved the compiled Great Pop Things!

Seeing the Soviet ships, and being born the same week as Sputnik,
how much did the Cold War influence you? It seems to be a theme
in your artwork, or was at one point. A friend of mine once said that
Gagarin was the first soviet that didn't seem part of the Big Evil
that wanted to steal my TV and Cap't Crunch.

And I love that you got to produce a record since you had already
played on one.
  

    
Oooh, Man! "I like to eat bananas/Because they have no bone/I smoke
marijuana/Because it gets me stoned..."

They recorded that with a male choir, too, I remember!
  

    
Ed just rumbled the whole premise of the album - getting the choir to
do the oooooohs on Sentimental Marching Song is a complete steal from
C'Mon on the final side of Man's breakthrough (chart-entering!) 1973
album Back Into The Future - live at the Roundhouse with the Gwalia
Welsh Male Voice Choir - that huge anthemic Welsh choir sound permeates
the stucyure and feel of the original Skull Orchard album; I just
didn't have a choir at my disposal in 1997.

Gagarin was a hero and the sailor's wandering around my town at night
were just sailor's doing sailory things... they weren't blowing stuff
up or stealing the children. The Aberfan Disaster (when a slag heap
slid into a village school not far from Newport and killed 114 kids in
1966) is a big theme on the album and I think welsh school children
felt they had as much or more to fear from the National Coal Board than
from the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
  

    
Skull Orchard Revisited is fantastic.

Right now, i have two questions:

1. in this era of digitization, when so much music only exists as a series
of electronic charges, disembodied from any physical package, Skull Orchard
Revisited seems almost defiantly artifactual--it's a CD, a book, a book full
of reproductions of actual paintings.  Was the choice to create a physical
object a deliberate, artistic choice?  What considerations were involved in
creating a book/CD in today's climate?  Where there any hesitations about
it?

2. what is the relationhip between the creation of your paintings and your
music?  Are your paintings visual representations of the songs--or do your
songs come from your visual ideas?  Is there any sort of synesthesia going
on--do you 'see' your songs? can you 'hear' your paintings?
  

    
My mother arrived safely by the way... armed with Marmite and a bar of
Cadbury's the size of Delaware
  

    
I like to think the songs and paintings come from the same part of my
brain - sometimes there's a chicken/egg element - When I came back to
painting in the early 90s I had to use the toolbox I'd built up making
music to rid myself of the formal art baggage I'd been carrying around
that left me paralyzed. 

There was a big art school in Newport when I was a kid, just the other
side of the river right downtown. Joe Strummer had mates who went
there and that's how he ended up in Newport in the mid 70s. Around the
time I was seriously thinking about painting again they moved it out of
town to a campus and announced they wouldn't be teaching painting,
sculture, printmaking anymore but only digital computer arts. Went to
see their final shows and the art all seemed to be governed by whatever
software was current and started thinking I should just try to make
some rectangular painted objects that you could hang on a wall and see
if there was any life left in the old dog 
  

    
I just like the presence of books in my life and it was amazingly
cheap and easy to make the thing - mostly thanks to Steve Connell at
VERSE CHORUS PRESS who did most of the design and helped me put my
thoughts in (and out) of order.
  

    
Wow!  

For those of us who are soaking up the enthusiasm, but are still
clueless about the sound, might there be a link to where we might hear
a sample from Skull Orchard Revisited, beside being a physical CD?
  

    
Aaaaand, if you're not on the Well, but you want to ask a question
here, just send an e-mail to inkwell [at] well [dot] com and one of our
highly trained operatives will port it right over here with all due
dispatch. 
  

    
Here is a live performance of Tubby Brothers, one of my favorite songs from
the CD:

<http://youtu.be/ZDuQL-NFxGs>

Live performance of Sentimental Marching Song:

<http://youtu.be/09jP4jPZOMY>

Live performance, with the Burlington Welsh Male Choir, of Pill Sailor:

<http://youtu.be/ce4kjq5S9eA>

Live performance, with the Burlington Welsh Male Choire, of Butter Song:

<http://youtu.be/PTfaRyyopzg>

Live performance, at the capital in wisconsin, of the Ballad of Solomon
Jones:

<http://youtu.be/OFsOU80xsSg>
  

    
This isn't from Skull Orchard Revisited, but it's an excellent, recent, live
in studio performance of Getting Use to Uselessness:
<http://youtu.be/kMowBoqy9UU>
âˆ
  

    
Whee!
  

    
It'simportant to see how gorgeous the choir are as well

http://sisson.smugmug.com/Documentary/Theater-Music-Dance/Jon-Langford-Celtic-
Fest-2007/17982809_hXtxJB#1377436063_cJDKfkz
  

    
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dXqCnxoMvE0&feature=related

R U An Entertainer?

this isn't in the book or on the CD but it's a song of mine the choir
demanded to perform