One of my favorite records of the year is the Mekons’ Existentialism, a furious live album recorded around a single microphone one night in the summer of 2015. Though gorgeous, the elegiac sing-along you can hear on YouTube, “Fear & Beer (Hymn for Brexit),” doesn’t represent how wild and blue Existentialism is in toto, how deeply it gazes into the abyss of the present moment, how much it hurts.

The Mekons can do this because they are the last authentic punk band. In fact, on the most recent of several occasions when I’ve introduced myself to band member Jon Langford, he fixed me with a wide-eyed stare, raised two fingers, and loudly told me to fuck off. Still got it!

But don’t believe me. No less an authority than Lester Bangs, who would have turned 68 yesterday, proclaimed them the greatest band of all time. “The Mekons are the most revolutionary group in the history of rock ‘n’ roll,” Bangs wrote in his liner notes to the retrospective The Mekons Story 1977-1982. “THEY ARE BETTER THAN THE BEATLES.” History may be bloody murder, but in this instance, at least, its gory tide has borne out Lester’s claims. (Speaking of bloodshed, punk, and Leeds University, did Gang of Four ever play a Halloween show as “Fang of Gore”?)
 

Lester Bangs and Jon Langford working on the liner notes to The Mekons Story (via Buried Treasure Records)
 
Bangs died in ‘82, but that didn’t stop him from singing on the Mekons’ F.U.N. ‘90 EP, which contained so much F.U.N. that it got the Mekons kicked off of A&M Records. It was worth losing a record deal over. Built like a Dagwood sandwich, the B-side of the EP encloses Tony Byker’s (of Gaye Bykers on Acid) reading of a passage from Walter Benjamin’s “Hashish in Marseilles” between the tracks “One Horse Town” and “One Horse Dub,” both of which incorporate audio of Lester Bangs singing Hank Williams’ “Ramblin’ Man.” 

Listen to Lester and the Mekons after the jump…