Mekons Deliver a Lesson in Deconstruction

As various critics’ polls inevitably strive to find what was best about the 1980s, one rock album keeps rising to the top: the Clash’s “London Calling.” The depressing thing is, that was almost one of the best albums of the 1970s, coming out just a hair after the turn of the decade.

Do we have to look that far back for music that matters? Ten years later, does the long-defunct Clash have any heirs apparent? Who can replace those slashing guitars? That galvanizing energy? Those leftist politics? Those lower-strata accents? Those bad teeth?

A small but growing contingent of fans is finding the spirit of the Clash carried on in the music of the Mekons, an acclaimed band from Leeds, England, that played a furiously fun, provocative show Thursday at Bogart’s (and were scheduled for another show Friday at the Roxy). Not that there aren’t sharp differences: Where the Clash was often terribly earnest and somewhat populist, the Mekons are far more cynical, slyly humorous, dryly intellectual and obscure. But they have the same deconstructionist instincts, and they could get a slam pit going just the same.

Iconoclasts that they are, the Mekons themselves would hate to be thought of as carrying on in any tradition. The title of their latest album is “The Mekons Rock ‘n’ Roll,” and since they do rock ‘n’ roll throughout it, the name can’t be meant entirely tongue-in-cheek--but it’s pretty close to a full irony jacket. Like their bourgeois comrades in pop, they put rock myths up for sale, but only because they want to clear them out of the garage.

Perhaps no sub-genre is more justifiably dreaded than the rock ‘n’ roll song about rock ‘n’ roll, but the Mekons pull off a whole batch of them, precisely because they profess not to care about it. Of course, they do, which makes things more interesting. The set Thursday, like the album, was kicked off with the song that should be called “Rock ‘n’ Roll”--but is actually called “Memphis, Egypt” (or, as they introduced it Thursday, “Dresden”)--and much as the lyrics suggest rock is more despotic than liberating, the song sounds like an anthem just the same.

Soon after that came “Club Mekon,” which starts off with Sally Timms singing, “When I was just 17 sex no longer held a mystery / I saw it as a commodity, to be bought and sold like rock ‘n’ roll”--as if everyone, even teens, takes it as a given that rock is sales-driven and its purveyors long bought out.

If the Mekons have a weakness, it’s that the non sequiturs in some of their fascinating lyrics are too rambling for the songs to shape up as cohesive wholes, leaving only bits and pieces of statements remaining. That obfuscation may be part of the game plan, if you listen to the anti-censorship “Empire of the Senseless,” which basically espouses getting around PMRC types by going over their heads.

In any case, there was no confusion of intent at Bogart’s, with the Strummer/Jones-like power team of Jon Langford and cohort Tom Greenhalgh augmented right prettily by singer Timms and fiddler Susie Honeyman. Though that violin is a welcome holdover from different days, the experimentation of the last couple albums seems to have given way to a new, more straight-ahead Mekons who have resigned themselves to--and resolved to rise above--only rock ‘n’ roll, of all things. May they never “like it” as much as Mick Jagger.

LIVE ACTION: The Jesus and Mary Chain will be at the Universal Amphitheatre on Feb. 1. Tickets on sale Sunday. . . . Also on sale Sunday for the Universal is a bill of Conway Twitty, Merle Haggard and George Jones, Jan. 16. . . . On sale now is Joe Satriani at the Santa Monica Civic, Feb. 1, and a second night for Motley Crue at the Forum, Feb. 13.