Sonic adventurers, punk rock fundamentalists, exuberant luddites, willing outcasts.
“The mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll”
– wrote rock critic Lester Bangs
The genre-defying mekons formed in Leeds, England in 1977. Born from the emerging British punk scene, they progressed from art students with no musical skills to the prolific, raucous progeny of Hank Williams. This current classic line-up has remained intact since the mid-1980s, continuing to regularly tour and release new music through to now. Theirs is an improbable history – a surprising and influential embrace of folk and country music with occasional forays into the art world. They have always worked collaboratively and collectively with all work credited to the band, never to individuals. Their mind-boggling output consistently blurs the lines between high art and low and has included exhibitions in the UK and US, a deranged pirate musical recorded and staged with Kathy Acker, an art performance with Vito Acconci, and several books including the unique art catalog/unfinished novel Mekons United. “Revenge of the mekons”, a documentary about the band received nationwide release in 2015 on Music Box Films. The mekons continue to make bold, unpredictable music while staying true to the punk ethos. Their mind-boggling output consistently blurs the lines between high art and low and they remain one of the truly great live bands.
Their last album “Exquisite” was recorded completely remotely during the early months of lockdown and released on Bandcamp in June 2020. The band are working with Fire Records on their new album which comes out in 2025. The single from that album “You’re Not Singing Anymore” will be released on Fire Records in early November 2024.
“Check this guy out if you dare.” So ran the last line of a profile titled “Johnny Dowd Slithers Onto Music Scene” back in 1999. That gives you a pretty decent idea of how Johnny Dowd’s music works — “slither” and “dare” being the key words. Johnny does both. In the traditions of Waits or Bukowski, he slithers into places most of us don’t imagine or see. They might be back alleys, back porches, or just a bar down the street, but wherever he goes he dares to sing out what he sees. Will you dare to listen?
Dowd conjures up characters with bluntness and an eye for telling details — a true writer’s songsmith. Perhaps that’s because he only came to the art after forty years of hard living. Even at that age, “I never wanted to be a songwriter,” he says. But when it became a matter of sink or swim, back around 1988, he dove into the deep end. “I was in a Memphis/Texas swamp blues band,” he says, “but then the singer quit. He was the only one who was enough of a musician to learn a song off a record and show it to us. I couldn’t figure out how to do that! So I said, ‘Fuck it’ and started writing songs — just so we could play.”
The group he first led became Neon Baptist, but by 1995 Johnny had gone solo and self-released his debut cassette, Wrong Side of Memphis. As songs like “Murder” and “John Deere” made clear, the rock he built his songs on was a forlorn outcropping of life in deepest, darkest America — both tragic and mundane. “I’m an average guy,” he sang. “I don’t mean anybody harm/I got reckless eyeballs/I got a suicidal heart/I got a robot girlfriend/Rippin’ me apart.” Within two years, the home recordings were remixed and released on proper labels, including Munich Records in the Netherlands, with whom the singer would work for years. And as international audiences learned of Johnny, it was clear his songs struck a nerve.
“A moving man from Ithaca, New York, embarks on the scariest ride of the year in this homemade work of genius,” Chris Morris wrote of Dowd’s debut in Billboard. By the next year, with Johnny turning 50, he released his second album, Pictures from Life’s Other Side. Jon Pareles of the New York Times was a fan, writing “If Willie Nelson turned into Mr. Hyde, he’d be Johnny Dowd. Backwoods Gothic tales of love, death, and a perverse God arrive with a twang and a junkyard clatter, reaching for laughs that grow uneasy.”
That twang comes naturally, Johnny having spent his youth in small-town Oklahoma or Memphis before striking out on his own. He joined the Army, lived in California, then settled in Ithaca in the 1970s, where he lives to this day, twang intact. Moreover, he carries the Mid-South of his youth within him. It echoes in Johnny’s voice like the ghost of William Burroughs creaking through an empty house.
From his first cassette release, Johnny’s voice sprang to life wholly formed. And he’s continued to fascinate critics and listeners with his minimalist masterpieces ever since, each dark tableaux rendered in deft strokes of the pen and the plectrum. But while much of his debut was on solo electric or acoustic guitar, some tracks featured a beguiling mix of mandolin, percussion, melodica, and haunting background vocals. That prefigured the imaginative arrangements that colored Johnny’s many albums to come.
1999 saw the first of Dowd’s US and European tours. A Dutch TV documentary on Dowd was filmed in 2000, and in early 2001, the New York Times highlighted him as one of four “Country Singers Who Still Display a Country Heart”. He continued to release a record every year while touring both the US and Europe, making his major film debut in Jim White’s “Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus”. Record titles like The Pawnbroker’s Wife, Cemetery Shoes, or A Drunkard’s Tale seemed to suggest the stories within. The album Cruel Words, released in 2006, featured Sherwood-Caso on background vocals and The Mekons’ Sally Timms and Jon Langford, with whom Johnny toured, on “Drunk,” ultimately winning the Independent Music Award for Best Alternative Country Album the following year. “There isn’t a better band out there,” Johnny said of The Mekons at the time. A collaborator with numerous alt-Americana luminaries, he contributed to 2021’s release of “The Wanderer – A Tribute To Jackie Leven”.
He’s often found a fan base with punk rockers, though the music underpinning his words can range from country to jazz to blues and beyond. That’s part of the charm: every song builds a world of its own, centered on his soulful, wry voice. And that world-building is most complete on Is Heaven Real? (How Would I Know?), his 19th studio album. In addition to his longtime bandmates, drummer Jif Dowd (his sister) and guitarist Mike Edmondson, Dowd recruited a slew of Memphis ringers, including the gifted couple Will Sexton (who co-produced and played guitar) and Amy LaVere (on bass and vocals), among many others. It was a way of bringing it all back home to Johnny’s youth in the South, but also to the gripping soul and R&B that captivated him in those years. With a cover designed by Jon Langford, it’s his greatest work yet.
“I’ve always had a bunch of good bands,” Johnny says today. “But the kind of band that I had in Memphis for this album, sounding like something off Stax/Volt records? That’s the stuff that I grew up with, but I never recorded in that context at all. So it was like, ‘Okay…This is it!’”
Indeed, that feeling of urgency has shaped his whole career. That “now or never” feeling has fueled all his art, prompting him to return to his craft over and over again. “I wouldn’t call it inspiration,” he says of what drives him. “I just call it perspiration. As a musician, you’ve got a session to do. They’re gonna count the tune in and there you go. You’re not waiting to get inspired. You gotta fuckin do it. It’s not like you’re gotta wait. That’s the way I feel when I’m writing.”
