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Artist
The Three Johns
12+ albums
post-punknew wave80savant post-punk weirdosenglish
about
The Three Johns was an English post-punk/indie rock band formed in 1981 in Leeds originally consisting of guitarist Jon Langford (co-founder of The Mekons), vocalist John Hyatt and bassist Phillip "John" Brennan, augmented by a drum machine. The band split in late 1988 after a disastrous US tour, but reformed in 1990, releasing Eat Your Sons, a concept album about cannibalism, before splitting again. They reformed again in 2012, playing five shows, and continued to perform intermittently through 2017 in the UK, mostly in the Manchester and Leeds-Bradford areas. A side group started by Mekons co-founder Jon Langford, the Three Johns specialized in abrasive, politically charged, danceable rock. Sounding almost nothing like Langford's main band, the Johns were a silly-serious bunch of political and cultural provocateurs. Recording during the height of Margaret Thatcher's ill-conceived Tory rebellion, the Johns were openly antagonistic to this new, conservative vision of Britain's future. And while their elliptical and epigrammatic lyrics might not offer the sloganeering that would easily identify them as lefties, certainly there were enough hints dropped along the way to remove any doubt. Unlike other rock agit-prop, the Johns played a fairly accessible version of polemical post-punk anti-pop that embraced big, messy arena-rock-sounding guitars and hard, repetitive, quasi-hip-hop dance beats. Perhaps the most subversive thing about the Johns is that, despite Langford's and Hya
