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2023 Launch Party With Jon Langford & Susie Honeyman

Susie and Jon

Our official launch party is at 7:30pm on June the 24th at the Victoria Inn in Alston. We are very pleased to announce that Jon Langford and Susie Honeyman from The Mekons will perform. They will be assisted by Barkley McKay and sets from local heroes, Uncle PAF and Fred Sheriff. This is a Pay as You Feel event but please get a ticket here.

Jon Langford is The Mekons and Waco Brothers founding singer, guitarist, and punk/alt-country pioneer who is also a celebrated painter. Jon is in the UK to complete a few dates with his Mekons band mate, violinist Susie Honeyman. Originally the drummer for The Mekons when it formed at the University of Leeds in 1977, Jon later took up the guitar as other band members left.

One of the leaders in incorporating folk and country music into punk rock, he has released a number of solo recordings as well as with bands outside of The Mekons, most notably the Waco Brothers who have just released a new album ‘The Men That God Forgot’. Susie is a member of Little Sparta as well as the Mekons and has played on many albums such as Viv Stanshall’s ‘Sir Henry at Rawlinson’s End’.

To complete the trio, they will be accompanied by Barkley McKay. Barkley’s 25-year career has spanned performance, recording, engineering, education and composition. He toured with The Pretty Things in the early ‘90s on guitar and since then has worked both as a touring and session musician with artists as diverse as Crystal Gayle and Khaled Mouzanar. The trio are only playing a handful of dates in the U.K. and we have got one. Expect to see this sort of madness:

(And here is some footage of The Mekons when they were all lithe and young)