Bøger af Jon Langford

BOOK + CD PACKAGE. Jon Langford is best known for the music he creates with the Mekons and the Waco Brothers, but he's gained increasing acclaim for his visual art, too, over the past decade. "Nashville Radio," his first book+CD of paintings, writing, and music (Verse Chorus Press, 2005) was a sprawling, jam-packed collection full of punk energy. For this book, Langford has created a highly personal portrait of Wales, where he was born and raised. It incorporates a CD featuring Langford's rare album "Skull Orchard," originally released in 1998 on a label that promptly went bankrupt, and revamped and extended with live material (and a Welsh male voice choir) for this edition. The songs' lyrics, at once autobiographical and fanciful, are illustrated in a series of "word paintings" scattered throughout the book, which also includes an A to Z of Welsh culture and history (personal and general), thematically related etchings and paintings, family photographs, and Langford's first published fiction, a dystopian fable about a whale and a dolphin.

Beyond his work as a musician, Jon Langford has attracted attention as a visual artist in recent years. Nashville Radio is the first collection of his art. It reproduces 215 paintings, as well as song lyrics and autobiographical writings. The book includes a CD of Langford performing 18 of the printed songs. Langford’s “song-paintings” fuse portraiture with imagery derived from folk art, Dutch still life, classic Western wear, and the cold, cold war—all instilled with his trademark sardonic wit. He applies this distinctive style to the depiction of American musical icons like Bob Wills, Hank Williams, and Johnny Cash, but also to more ghostly, marginal figures—blindfolded cowboys, astronauts, and dancers—who are jerked around by success and exploitation, fame and neglect. Underlying his work is a deep love of musical lore, twinned with fierce opposition to the death-dealing tendencies in the culture of his adopted homeland, from the killing off of authentic popular music by mass-marketed drivel to the embrace of capital punishment as a response to social ills. Langford’s work offers an alternative perspective, recalling “a time when great visionaries and pioneers thrived at the heart of the mainstream—and the lid wasn’t on so tight.”