IN A competitive world, limited specialisation is promoted as the way to get ahead. But Jon Langford — a Welshman and proud of it — is the antithesis of this idea.

A true “renaissance man,” his interests are wide and his excellence isn’t confined to just one area of creativity.
Now resident in the US, he looks fit and relaxed on a whistle-stop trip back in Britain when I catch up with him. While here, he’s been playing with a “special bunch,” The Men of Gwent.

“I have a strong need to keep in touch with my Newport roots,” he explains. “And the plan was that there would always be a band for me to do gigs with and write songs with when I was here. I just never thought it would turn into such a great band and we’d get the opportunity to make a proper record, which is coming out this year on the Country Mile label.

“I played the Green Man and Glastonbury festivals with them and it is really a major part of what I do now — lots of talent and potential and a real democracy with others handling large chunks of the writing and singing.”

Though Langford’s still revered here for his bands The Mekons and The Three Johns, his fan base is now global, reflecting his many new projects with the likes of the Waco Brothers, Skull Orchard and the Pine
Valley Cosmonauts.

What, I wonder, strikes him about Britain when he comes back from all the globetrotting? “The way we’ve absorbed everything shit about the US and ignored the good bits, such as the fact there’s no queen there, is disturbing,” he answers bluntly.

“And all the knowing, cooler-than-thou irony that we have dressing up commercial capitalist consumerism with fake cheerful regional accents on every advert and TV preview makes me nostalgic for stuffy BBC English
and the Milky Bar kid.”

And there are, of course, political similarities. “Britain doesn’t have the crazy religious-right zombie show we have to deal with,” he says.

“But Ukip’s ability to make racism socially acceptable reminds me of the hideous reality gap that allows white Americans to get teary when they watch a Martin Luther King documentary but think the people in Ferguson
are subhuman.

“Obama is a competent Republican president but they can’t see past his skin colour.” The Labour Party immigration controls mug produced during the recent election campaign was “particularly scary,” though he smiles when he tells me he supported the “Ed Miller Band.”

Apart from his renown as a musician, Langford's work as a painter, enthusiastically received for years in the art world, is yet another hugely impressive string to his artistic bow.

He was a first-year art student at the University of Leeds in 1976 when punk emerged but, putting his studies on the back burner, he formed The Mekons and joined the musical fray brandishing a radical manifesto.

“We approached being in a band from the position of being a gang of non-musical art students with leftist leanings and a need to be taken seriously. It was quite harsh — we would never do interviews or have our
picture taken, support anyone but the Gang of Four or put a record out,” he laughs.

“It crumbled in the face of the lurid temptations of rock’n’roll. We wanted to set up a different model for how a band would work and we found other ways to do that beyond being relentlessly negative.”

He had no idea whether he was going to paint again. “I threw away my brushes when punk rock happened but when I arrived in Chicago I had no idea what I might do to earn a living and the time was right to paint
again,” he explains. “Now it’s really a 50/50 thing with the music and the art. Art is more solitary and I can enjoy the quiet time but mostly I’m combining the two things and having a blast.”

Artistic recognition aside, music is still a priority and in his Chicago home for the last 20 years he’s taken full advantage of the musical history and collaborative possibilities on offer.

“I like living in Chicago. It’s a bubble of cosmopolitan brilliance in the strangely dour Midwest but I’m Welsh so it's hard to feel anywhere is home,” he tells me.

“Chicago reminds me of the north of England a bit — it’s a rust belt with a self-assured working class — and it’s been a comfortable place to live and somewhere where I could get stuff done.” Moving to the US was
“weird politically” because “something like the death penalty never existed in Britain during my lifetime but wasn’t even debatable when I got there.”

He did a lot of work on the campaign, which succeeded, to abolish it in Illinois — a “quite gratifying” experience.
From not knowing how to play, the Mekons became actually very good and made a stunning album, 1985’s Fear and Whiskey, a landmark in the fusion of British punk with country music.

Langford has continued mining that seam in the years since, doing everything from playing with Alejandro Escovedo, recording joint albums with Sally Timms, Kevin Coyne, Richard Buckner, Kat Ex and Rosie Flores, to recording tribute albums to Johnny Cash and Bob Wills.

Langford confesses though that he thought he hated country music: “I was a big Tom Jones fan and he was doing country and I just didn’t realise. When I heard the likes of Merle Haggard, Hank Williams, Ernest Tubb and
Patsy Cline in the mid-1980s I became obsessed and the parallels with punk were really obvious — simple song structures that talk about real life. The Mekons never really tried to imitate country music, we just
absorbed it.”

The Mekons are very big in the US today but Langford has no real idea how that’s come about. “We had a strong reaction to the Fear and Whiskey album and while it hasn’t been all smooth sailing we’ve had great
support from US audiences, the press and record labels,” he says.

A Mekons film has been released ,covering the band’s recent past and the recording of their Ancient & Modern album. “It also manages to cram the other 30 years of the band into an hour-and-a-half quite successfully,”
Langford says. “It’s a really great introduction to the band, not just something for hardcore fans — and it’s entertaining.”
Crammed is certainly the word to describe Langford’s artistic career but he’s got no plans to put his feet up yet. “I am a very lucky man because I have loads of opportunities to collaborate with other musicians around
the world and I’m too old to get a proper job now,” he says. “I can’t stop or I wouldn’t survive,” he says with a grin.

There’s a Mekons tour and a new album set for recording in July and sometime during the year the release of the album Jura by the mini-Mekons and Robbie Fulks. Recorded on the Scottish island last summer, it’s “full of weird sea songs, drinking songs and the like.”

And he’s off again. Like many, I’m already looking forward to when he is next in Britain, performing in one of his many incarnations.