Met Bob at the NYC shows last year. FaceB announced his book several times

http://www.amazon.com/gp/offer-listing/0615445446/ref=dp_olp_new?ie=UTF8&qid=1331088337&sr=1-2&condition=new

Good stuff if you haven't read it.
I believe the seller "John Rose Store" about the 5h down the page is his store. Selling signed copies.

Edit: whoooops, haven't seen there's already a thread......

jabba 69 wrote:Is this book going to be avalable in the uk? From amazon or anything?
If not, does this site ship to the uk?

I'm certain it ships to the UK and more. See the link below. Let me know if you have an issue.
https://www.createspace.com/3552090

Is this book going to be avalable in the uk? From amazon or anything?
If not, does this site ship to the uk?

"Listen to his performance of “Boys of Kilmichael” in London’s Brixton Academy on St. Patrick’s Day, 1994."

was at the Clapham Grand, I remember it well

Jesus Rich! I can't read all that (one-eyed) at the moment...i'll give it a go on monday prob'ly...ya gotta remember you aredealing with drunken fools here!

Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context (Preface, part two)
To that end we talked a good bit about Irish history. Much of our conversation was about Tipperary history, especially in regard to the Black and Tan War in the 1920s. In one regard Shane was easy to interview. I’d prepared nearly 100 questions just in case he wasn’t talkative or was terse in his answers. I needn’t have worried. He warmed to the subject and talked at length, often going off on tangents for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. At times I was tempted to interrupt him but thought it unwise. I did, however, have to interject periodically to guide the conversation and keep it on track. At times it was difficult to follow his line of thought as he tended to go in several directions without noticeable transitions. Frequently he would stop in mid sentence, searching for just the right word before completing a thought.
Sometimes Shane would cram so much new material into the answer to a question that I was unable to follow up on new topics he referenced. When he told me, with obvious satisfaction, that as a child he had met Dan Breen, I asked a general question about anybody he might have known who had fought in the Irish Revolution or the Irish Civil War. His answer hit on most of the themes this book explores. “My own family were very much involved… They’d all been really young from 1916. Our place was a safe house… In the country the fighting took place everywhere. Practically everybody I knew as a kid, certainly in the country, was active back in the day. The Lynches and the Deans were related somewhere along the line. They were the local – who were – who pulled off a couple of the biggest ambushes on the Black and Tans and Auxies in North Tip. People at the time were also having this huge – it followed the Land League, which was claiming back the land from the landlords, who were generally absentees. My great grandfather was one of the local leaders of the Land League. And the Land League had incited the Young IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood), which was formerly known as the United Irishman, the Young R&D, various names – White Boys. Supposedly secret organizations, but everybody knew who they were. It was like it was happening yesterday. People were always telling me stories. They always told the right stories about other people. So then you go and check with the other people and they tell you the stories about the first people.”
In one rambling response, which I’ve edited here for brevity, MacGowan touched on themes that permeate his art: the IRB which gave birth to the IRA; the absentee landlords who hired the Irish to farm the confiscated land they’d once owned, a confiscation that led directly to the horrendous potato famine, waves of Irish emigration, and increased hatred of the British; the old Lynch “ramblin’ house” where musicians stopped by all hours of the night, playing and singing while IRA men hid from the British; and the land itself, Ireland. Moreover, he indicated that he was immersed in these themes as a young boy, soaking up the oral tradition of Irish Republicanism in the stories the adults around him told.
MacGowan heard an awful lot of Irish rebel songs in that 350 year-old stone, ramblin’ safe house. For my money, nobody sings an Irish Rebel song like Shane. Most people in the know readily admit that Shane MacGowan is one of the greatest songwriters of our time. Many, however, overlook the power of his singing. Listen to his performance of “Boys of Kilmichael” in London’s Brixton Academy on St. Patrick’s Day, 1994. Then compare that to any other version of the song – Jimmy Crowley, Donie Carroll, or Oliver Kane. There is no comparison. The others are pretty. MacGowan makes you want to go out and kill an Englishman. Isn’t that what Irish rebel songs are supposed to do?
Every country has its share of patriotic war songs. The Irish raised the genre from that of a convenient propaganda vehicle to an art that became intrinsic to a movement, the Republican movement. The closest parallel I know is the American Civil Rights Movement, whose song catalogue pales by comparison. One thing that distinguishes Irish patriotic songs is their universality. Songs like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” are about kicking butt for God and feeling good about it. But outside of that context, it has limited appeal. The United Methodist saw that several years ago and removed it from their hymnal. Patriotic Irish songs are not narrowly defined. Irish Republicans blame nearly all the island’s problems on the English, perhaps justifiably so. That blame allows songs about emigration, songs about the famine, songs about heartless landlords, and of course songs about battles to fall into the box labeled rebel songs.
The tradition goes back long before the Easter Uprising of 1916. Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the 1798 Rebellion, often called the “Father of Irish Republicanism,” wrote rebel songs. In days past the streets and markets of every Irish city were full of singers lamenting the plight of the nation. A German traveler in 1842 wrote in his journal, “In Kilkenny there were literally twice as many ballad singers as lamp posts standing in the street.” In those days less than half of the island’s population could read, so the songs were vital in reporting and propagating resistance against the British. The British did their best to stamp out the rebel songs. Arrests were commonplace. At the trial of a songwriter from Limerick in 1831 the judge concluded that “nothing can be more injurious than inflaming the minds of the lower orders by disseminating ballads…with an intent to create sedition against the government, and disunion among His Majesty’s Protestant and Roman Catholic subjects.” In many cases the seditious words weren’t considered necessary to inflame those lower orders. Dinny Delaney, a blind uilleann piper born in Ballinasloe in 1819 was nicknamed the “Rebel Piper” due to his many arrests for playing “seditious tunes.” In County Limerick, in 1881, a six-year-old child was arrested for whistling “Harvey Duff,” a song famous for infuriating the British. The following year, in the same county, a constable struck and killed an eight-year-old girl with his baton when she whistled the tune.
Given that type of law enforcement it’s not surprising that there was often a fine line between rebels and outlaws celebrated in political ballads. A case in point is “The Lamentation of the Two McCormacks Who Died Innocent in Front of Nenagh Goal.” The song commemorates an infamous case that took place in Shane MacGowan’s beloved Tipperary. In October of 1857 William and Daniel McCormack, brothers in their early twenties, were arrested for the murder of a Mr. Ellis. There was little evidence they shot Ellis, an English landlord’s agent despised in Templemore, the brothers’ hometown. Suspicion fell on the McCormacks since they were thought to be holding a grudge against the English because their teenage sister was pregnant by an Englishman. They maintained their innocence to the end. In May they were hung from the top floor of the Nenagh Prison gatehouse. In the months following the execution public outrage grew, making Republican martyrs of the McCormacks. That summer a rally outside Nenagh Prison drew nearly 15,000 protesters. Many years later, on his deathbed, an Irish immigrant living in New York confessed to the crime.
Rebel songs played a huge part in the Irish Revolution and subsequent Civil War. Padraic Pearse, the teacher-poet who was chosen to proclaim the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office (GPO) during the Easter Uprising, edited an anthology called Songs of the Irish Rebels in 1914. He reported that in fighting lulls during the Easter Uprising, volunteers under siege in the GPO kept up their spirits by singing rebel songs like “A Nation Once Again,” “The Memory of the Dead,” and “God Save Ireland.” New songs were written soon after the events that inspired them. When 15 of the 16 uprising leaders were executed, “Convict 95” was written about Eamon de Valera (he was spared because of his United States citizenship) while he was still incarcerated. Ernie O’Malley, an officer in both the Revolution and the Civil War, was surprised to hear songs about his own recent exploits sung at dances he attended. He wrote that people were moved by “the fierce exultance of song expressing a buried national feeling.”
A basic premise of this book is that Shane MacGowan, throughout his life, has been so moved. Moreover, much of his songwriting and his impassioned vocals on the traditional songs he has covered have so moved others. While in my view this is nearly too evident to bother stating, there was a time when it was a controversial position to take. Throughout the Pogues’ heyday in the 1980s the band members were at pains to play down their Irishness. Given that the IRA was setting off bombs in Belfast and England at the time, that is understandable. Jem Finer told the late Carol Clerk, “To be perceived as an IRA propaganda tool, self-appointed or otherwise, would have been a terrible thing. I mean, it would have been complete rubbish, but it would have been quite a liability to life and limb. I think we were at all pains to point that out.” In 1989 Spider Stacy told the Chicago Tribune, “Only a fascist numbskull would think that when Shane and I played together onstage that it was some kind of political statement.” It is not my contention that Shane MacGowan ever advocated blowing up anything. Nor would I call him anybody’s tool. It is my belief, however, that Shane MacGowan seldom takes the stage without making a political statement. And for the record, I’ve been called much worse than “a fascist numbskull.”
The Pogues publicity in the 1980s frequently pointed out that half of the band had no ties to Ireland, and the rest of the band’s ties were marginal. This book, however, is not about the Pogues. It’s about Shane MacGowan, who is decidedly not a marginal Irishman. He is the reigning monarch in a long line of hard drinking Irish writers. He is a living legend in Ireland, a national treasure, an icon, a household name. In a poll taken to determine what people like most about Ireland he topped the list, beating out James Joyce, Jameson whiskey, and Guinness. In 1981 I was shocked to see Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show casually chatting with Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. That’s it, I thought. Cash is no longer a Country and Western star. He is mainstream. He has hit the big time. He belongs to the ages. I felt the same when I saw Shane MacGowan chatting with Podge and Rodge, the plastic puppet hosts of a popular Irish TV show in late 2006. MacGowan had become far more than a gifted singer-songwriter. It was obvious that while the public perception of MacGowan had changed considerably over the years, Shane remained much the same.
Rodge: Do you think he’d manage a song at all? Do ya?
Podge: No matter how bullocks he is, he can always manage an old song.
Rodge: Oh God, you know what though? It’ll probably be a Brits out song. Wouldn’t it?
Podge: Oh God, you’re right. A bash the Brits and blow them to bits song. We’d never be able to show that! A disaster.
Rodge: Not at all. Not these days. No. They wouldn’t allow it. They wouldn’t put that out.
From there the scene cut to Shane singing “Boys of Kilmichael,” the traditional rebel song celebrating the day Tom Barry’s West Cork Brigade annihilated a platoon of 18 British soldiers.
A last point I want to make is that this book is written from the perspective of an American trying to understand Shane MacGowan’s work. In retrospect, it started in 1971 during the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. I was invited to my father’s friend’s house, John Shanahan, an Irish immigrant from Cork. The Shanahans were seeing off relatives, who after an American visit, were returning to Ireland. John’s young son Tony, now Patti Smith’s bass player, was there. The room where the party took place was cleared, except for a dozen or more straight-backed chairs that lined the walls. The Irish men and women there danced, sang, and told stores in the middle of the bare wooden floor. And they drank. The young parish priest, not long arrived from Ireland, probably drank the most. I’d never experienced anything like it, but I liked what I saw and heard. At one point I mentioned that one of my favorite singers, Van Morrison, was from Ireland.
“Where?” I was asked.
“Belfast,” I replied.
Things got quiet very quickly.
“Belfast is not in Ireland,” I was told.
I was confused. Nearly 40 years later there is still much about Ireland that confuses me. This book is an attempt to better understand Shane MacGowan’s homeland, and in so doing, better understand his work.

Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context is available exclusively at

https://www.createspace.com/3552090

When Santander finally send me a new bank card I will be getting hold of this. It looks like it will, be a good read. Damn bank holidays...

Thanks Rich. Your kind words are much appreciated.

Keep up the good work Rich

Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context is NOW available for purchase at this link

https://www.createspace.com/3552090

Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context (Preface, part one)
“What made Ireland a nation was a common way of life, which no military force, no political change could destroy. Our strength lies in a common ideal of how people should live, bound together by mutual ties, and by devotion to Ireland, which shrank from no individual sacrifice. This consciousness of unity carried us to success in our last great struggle. Now in that spirit we fought and won. The old fighting spirit was as strong as ever, but it has gained a fresh strength in discipline in our generation. Every county sent its boys whose unrecorded deeds were done in the spirit of Cuchulainn at the ford.”
Michael Collins (1922)

“I agree with that statement totally,” Shane MacGowan told me the week after his 50th birthday. “And if the Brits just accepted the fact that it was over and stuck to it. Everybody knew that they – Collins knew that they weren’t going to stick to their treaty. De Valera knew they weren’t going to stick to the treaty. Everybody – most people knew they weren’t going to stick to the treaty because they never stuck to a treaty in their lives – ever! Anywhere.”
“Like the Americans with the Indians,” I suggested.
“Bloody Americans! Krsssssssh,” Shane laughed as only he can. (Throughout the rest of this work I’ve edited out Shane’s trademark laugh, but you can rest assured that most of the MacGowan quotations I’ve used were punctuated by his laughter.) “Actually, there’s always been a very strong common feeling between the American Indians and the Irish,” Shane continued. “During the great famine – there were lots of them, but the big one, the really big one there was some relief in Ireland provided by the Quakers and people like that, and there was also relief sent from the Irish in America, and also from the red Indians in America.”
The day before, New Years Day, I’d made arrangements with Victoria Clarke to interview Shane in their Dublin home. My wife Anna and I had been in County Tipperary researching this book when Clarke invited us to meet her and Shane in Portlaoise. He was doing his usual guest spot in a Sharon Shannon concert on New Year’s Eve. The show was held in Portlaoise’s best hotel, and it was outstanding. MacGowan did about a half dozen songs, including the traditional “Courtin’ in the Kitchen,” which we had never heard him sing before. We expected Shane to be with Victoria when we met around noon the following morning over coffee in the hotel’s café. He wasn’t. She explained that he had just got in from the previous night, was “a bit pissed,” and was in no shape to be interviewed. She was very gracious, a lovely person all around, and invited us to come by their home in Dublin the next day.
On the way to their house we passed the Four Courts building where the Irish Civil war kicked off more than 80 years earlier. We crossed the O’Connell Street Bridge with its elevated statue of O’Connell, the 18th and 19th century Catholic Irish Republican leader. Many of the stores still had signs up that said “Merry Christmas” in Gaelic. Our cab driver, who had once emigrated to Australia and had recently returned to Ireland to get in on its economic boom, explained that the shop owners got government grants for the signs, but not if they were in English. He dropped us off in front of a row-type house, typical of those in any large city. It was brick, not fancy, but nice, just off a main street. The cabby said it was an expensive neighborhood. MacGowan later told us that his friend Ronnie Wood, the Rolling Stone’s guitarist, lived nearby.
I knocked on the door. In retrospect, I don’t know why we were surprised, but we were when MacGowan himself opened the door. Shane was surprised too. He said Victoria told him we’d be by at 3:00 PM. She never told us that. She just said to come over in the afternoon. It was only about one o’clock, so I offered to come back later. Shane said, “No,” and invited us in. Victoria was out. Press reports had prepared me for the possibility that he’d be semi-hostile. He was anything but. Shane was hospitable, friendly, and polite. He even kissed Anna’s hand. He led us through a foyer into a small room, more of a TV room than a living room. It had a hardwood floor and shelves crammed with books and some Christmas cards. Past that room, through French doors, there was a kitchen. The room we were in had a small, black leather couch opposite a flat screen LCD television mounted on the wall. A straight back wooden chair held the top hat and long leather coat he had worn onstage with the Pogues several nights before. The chair also held a paperback of a Greek classic, Homer, if I remember correctly. He said he still reads a lot. There was a guitar in a corner, a CD player, and a large stack of CDs. Overall the house was tidy and unremarkable.
MacGowan appeared to be wearing the same clothes he had on at the Sharon Shannon concert two nights past: a black suit with white pinstripes; a black shirt with white pinstripes; and a ton of chains, amulets, and assorted jewelry around his neck. He was a bit disheveled, his clothes rumpled. It seemed a distinct possibility that he’d been in that suit for three days. I don’t think he had combed his hair. I got the impression he hadn’t been up long. At his feet on the floor was an array of opened beverages: a bottle of Gordon’s gin, a bottle of white wine, Bulmer’s cider, some beer, and God knows what else. I didn’t look too closely lest he take offence. To my amazement he bent over an ordinary canvas duffel bag on the floor, reached in and pulled out an ice cold Tuborg beer. All afternoon he sipped at a Bulmer’s and a glass of clear liquid. I suspect it was the Gordon’s gin. Shane was a little wobbly on his feet, but he was lucid and coherent.
When we arrived MacGowan was watching the Gaelic channel on the television. It was a show with people doing traditional Irish set dancing. There were subtitles in English. It struck me as a sort of Irish Lawrence Welk Show. When I tried to ask him some questions he stopped me, indicating that he wanted to finish watching the show first. He was really into it. When we finally got started I asked his permission to record our conversations so that I could quote him accurately in this book. He said I could and complained that nobody is ever accurate writing about him. He paid me what I took as a nice compliment by adding that my book was the most accurate he’d seen. Perhaps that was one reason he offered to help with the project after reading early drafts of a few chapters.
Throughout the time I spent with Shane my goal was to get him to speak about things that are important to him, and things that are important to someone trying to appreciate his work. We talked a good bit about Christianity because so much of his art is steeped in Christian imagery. Among other things, I wanted to ask him about the randy priest in “Donegal Express,” but I remembered something he once said about being interviewed. “I usually know within a couple of minutes if someone’s gonna be a pain in the arse,” he said. “If people are gonna be stupid to me, then I’m gonna be stupid back, because at the end of the day, what I do isn’t that complicated. I don’t set out to confuse people. I write simple songs that people can sing along to. Like, there’s no point explaining what ‘Summer in Siam’ is about because the bloody thing’s about what it says it’s about.” Shane once told a critic from New Musical Express (NME ) who was going on and on theorizing about music, “Jesus, shut up! You're boring the arse off me.” So, instead of mentioning “Donegal Express,” I started a conversation about celibacy in the Catholic priesthood.
“The apostle Paul said it’s ok to get married if you’re – basically he said if you’re horny go ahead and get married,” I said, paraphrasing Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, “but if you’re not it’s better to be celibate. The church went and twisted that around.”
“No, no, no, no. I think he was a psychopath, personally,” Shane replied. “A self-obsessed psychopath. All those bloody letters! I think this, and I think that, you know? Slagging off on St. Peter who was appointed by the boss.” Being an ex-Catholic Protestant, I took exception to Shane’s casual reference to Peter being the first Pope, and designated as such by Jesus to boot.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The Bible says Jesus asked, ‘Who do people say that I am?’ Peter said that some think you’re John the Baptist come back from the dead, and some think that you’re Elijah, but I think you’re the Christ. And Jesus said, ‘You are Peter, the rock, and upon this rock I will build my church.’ You can interpret that two ways. Some people say He was saying He would build his church on Peter, but I believe He was saying on this truth that you just spoke I’ll build my church.”
“You can interpret it loads of different ways,” Shane countered, “but you’re probably – that’s definitely more likely than meaning let’s start a worldwide organization that makes lots of money out of poor people. Because that wasn’t really Christ’s trip, was it? But, yes, that’s the closest thing I’ve heard to a reasonable interpretation of something that’s been doctored and translated through several languages and all the rest of it. But if He did say that, then He meant something like that, not how it turned out.”
MacGowan is anything but a typical Catholic, but Catholicism is rooted deep within him. In the summer of 2006 during the DaVinci Code phenomenon his fiancée, Victoria Clarke, was working on a newspaper column about Kathleen MacGowan, an American woman who claimed to be a direct descendent of Jesus and Mary Magdalene. The woman had just gotten a seven-figure advance on a book based on her claim. The book contended that Magdalene was never a prostitute, but was in fact the legitimate wife of Jesus and the mother of his two children. Shane was adamant that Clarke let people know that he was no relation to Kathleen MacGowan. Stopping just short of calling the American a heretic, he told Clarke, “I think it’s blasphemous, because the whole point of the Mary Magdalene story is that she was a prostitute, and not only that, a prostitute that worked on the Sabbath, which was why they were stoning her. Jesus forgave and accepted her. If she hadn’t been a prostitute, there wouldn’t have been any point to the story.”
I was impressed with MacGowan’s knowledge of Christian scripture. Most of the Catholics I know in the States don’t know much Bible. I was even more impressed, but not surprised, by his knowledge of Irish history. What did surprise me was his reluctance to say anything negative about anything except the British. I asked for his thoughts on why Tipperary, Cork, and Kerry counties were so much more active than the other counties during the Irish Revolution.
“I didn’t say they were so much more active,” he said. “We just got it together a lot better. We were large counties. So there was a massive network going on.”
When I reminded him that both Tom Barry and Ernie O’Malley had complained that those three counties did all the fighting, and that the others were content to drill, drill, and drill some more without actually shooting anybody, he relented a bit.
“Well, Tom Barry was a rabid – was a very – I mean, yes – I’m not going to start nothing with the other counties. You know, like there were various reasons. But it’s true. But you’d have to put Claire in there with that. It’s a massive generalization, but it is basically true. Tom Barry has got every right to – he’s right, he’s right, from what my family said. They did. But Ireland is Ireland, that’s the main thing.”
For Shane MacGowan, Ireland is indeed the main thing. He gets annoyed when people mention his English accent, asserting “I'm completely Irish!” He says his Irish accent was “kicked” out of him as a schoolboy in England. Joey Cashman, his close friend and long time manager, once cautioned an interviewer, “Don’t use the phrase British Isles. It’s England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. If you say it any other way, he’ll probably throw his glass at you.” To understand Shane MacGowan, one must understand Ireland, and Ireland’s relationship to England.
To that end we talked a good bit about Irish history. Much of our conversation was about Tipperary history, especially in regard to the Black and Tan War in the 1920s. In one regard Shane was easy to interview. I’d prepared nearly 100 questions just in case he wasn’t talkative or was terse in his answers. I needn’t have worried. He warmed to the subject and talked at length, often going off on tangents for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. At times I was tempted to interrupt him but thought it unwise. I did, however, have to interject periodically to guide the conversation and keep it on track. At times it was difficult to follow his line of thought, as he tended to go in several directions without noticeable transitions. Frequently he would stop in mid sentence, searching for just the right word before completing a thought.

(Part two of the Preface will be posted here soon.)

Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context is available for purchase exclusively at the link to be posted on the Pogues Facebook page.

Philip Chevron wrote;
You haven't really seen it until you've seen it occupy the ENTIRE window of Celtic Note in Nassau Street. Personally, I think it's a bit camp and the Diamond Dogs Guy Peelaaert parody inside is just kitsch. But Gav can do very little wrong by me, so he gets a pass anyway.[/quote]



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You say that like its a bad thing.

The Big Fella
Laverys painting of Michael Collins, Love of Ireland, now in the Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery.