“A feeble voice from a wilderness no one cared about…” (interview excerpt, 1994)

I saw the Mekons’ failure, and their bravery, and their persistence, as a metaphor for a life I would probably lead for the foreseeable future. Which is crying out in an ever more feeble voice from a wilderness that no one cared about. That’s what that’s about. I don’t mean to be pompous about it, I mean to be pathetic about it. Because the Mekons were pathetic then. They were also wonderful. But that song “King Arthur“—“people hiding/people like bees/divided and lonely/too weak and too late”—I knew who they were talking about. They were talking about me, and all the people I cared about. Left behind by a history made by people far older than we were. And there were other people who were in tune with that. You know that Mike Leigh movie Life Is Sweet? That’s about people like that. They’re just going to be rolled over. A steam roller’s going to crush them, and they don’t care.

– interview with Nick Pemberton, in Closed Volumes, 1994 – collected in Joe Bonomo’s Conversations With Greil Marcus