Click to listen to Mekons' 'Geeshie'

Barely famous after 30 years of damning the marketplace, Mekons fear no genre. They all but invented country punk in the mid-Eighties, but dabbled in everything from indie-rock thunder to baffling electronic albums. Ancient & Modern, their first in four years, is meaty and grizzled folk rock. Sally Timms’ near-whisper strides through the cabaret-jazzy "Geeshie"; Tom Greenhalgh's pipes anchor melancholy strummers; and semi-leader Jon Langford leaps around the stage ("Space in Your Face"). The title track is almost a play on nostalgia's seductive power, complete with violin and singalong verses about sailing away. After all these years, you still want to join them. 

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“Everyday People”

"Everyday People" managed to trailblaze in two different ways -- it was one of the first pop hits to deal with the subject of racial harmony, and it utilized Larry Graham's "slap" technique on the bass guitar, which would soon be copied by countless other bassists. Graham once said about his pulsating style, "I'd never done that before … that's where the freedom of creativity came in for the band, that we'd be allowed to do that." In 1978, the song's line "Different strokes for different folks" would be borrowed for the title of the hit television show Diff'rent Strokes.