Every week the Guardian has readers of post their favorite songs online about a given topic. This week is alcohol. Predictably, the Pogues are getting quite a few mentions. Its pretty likely they will make it onto the list. So far the most cited songs have been:
Streams of Whiskey
Whiskey in the Jar
The Wild Rover
What are your favorites? Post them here and post them there
The Guardian Takes a Drink
3 posts
• Page 1 of 1
Fri Dec 16, 2005 8:47 am
In the end The Pogues came in at No. 2...
Link
Dorian Lynskey
Friday December 16, 2005
The Guardian
When you write a song that features alcohol in the chorus, it doesn't matter what the rest of the lyrics are actually about: you're doomed to appear on albums with titles like The Best Pissed Up Party Anthems Ever. Underworld's Born Slippy, a troubled, impressionistic account of a heavy night out, has become simply the "lager, lager, lager, lager" song; while thick-necked men in football shirts don't necessarily savour the bitter irony of "we don't talk about love, we only want to get drunk" in the Manic Street Preachers' A Design for Life.
Article continues
But then it's interesting how few unequivocal, hooray-for-booze songs there are. Addiction, depression and premature death keep creeping in. As you'd expect, many of those who wrote most articulately about booze drank too much of it. Elliott Smith, Mark Eitzel and Uncle Tupelo's Jeff Tweedy all sang from the belly of the beast.
As did Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. In the mid-1980s, the Minneapolis band George Bested their chances of a commercial breakthrough by getting blazing drunk and swearing on Saturday Night Live. The 97-second song Beer for Breakfast finds them at their liveliest, and inaugurates this week's potentially tasteless Readers Recommend drinking game. Simply drink whenever and whatever the people in the songs do. You should already be feeling quite merry.
In Streams of Whiskey, Shane MacGowan dreams that Brendan Behan advises him that the answers to all of life's problems do indeed lie at the bottom of a glass. I'd be intrigued to know how much MacGowan tried to blame on the dead playwright: "I assure you, officer, the ghost of Brendan Behan told me I'd be fine to drive." We move from whiskey to brandy with the Streets' rowdy chronicle of an all-night bender in Amsterdam. Nouvelle Vague's bossa nova reinventions of punk classics have become stealthily ubiquitous over the past 18 months. Here they deftly relocate the Dead Kennedys' delinquent anthem to a Parisian cocktail party.
Back when their west coast peers were painting themselves as brutal, unyielding killing machines (plus ça change), the Alkaholiks were a bunch of party-hearty stumblebums rapping about throwing up and wooing, er, physically unappealing women. Their signature tune is so good-natured it includes a warning against drink driving. Two angles on alcoholism next: a young Nina Simone covers a prohibition-era blues standard and Gil Scott-Heron, whose achilles heel turned out to be not drink but crack cocaine, casts a sympathetic eye over alcohol's poorest victims.
During the 1970s, Tom Waits specialised in Hopperesque vignettes of LA nighthawks. Delivered in a woozy slur, The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) should ideally be played in a dimly lit dive, amid a blue haze of cigarette smoke, just before closing time. Then, fittingly, it's the mother of all morning-after country songs, Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down. Boasting a cinematic grandeur that Johnny Cash's version couldn't touch, it gave radio programmers palpitations with its line about having a beer for breakfast and "another for dessert".
We end with an ode to sobering up for good. Having weaned himself off drugs but on to alcohol, in 1981 Lou Reed holed up in rural New Jersey and wrote The Last Shot about his struggle to go straight: the title can be read two ways. Anyone still playing the RR drinking game at this point should probably glug some water, pop some paracetamol and have a long lie down.
This week's playlist
1 Beer for Breakfast The Replacements
2 Streams of Whiskey The Pogues
3 Too Much Brandy The Streets
4 Gin House Blues Nina Simone
5 Too Drunk to Fuck Nouvelle Vague
6 Only When I'm Drunk The Alkaholiks
7 The Bottle Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson
8 The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) Tom Waits
9 Sunday Morning Coming Down Kris Kristofferson
10 The Last Shot Lou Reed
Link
Dorian Lynskey
Friday December 16, 2005
The Guardian
When you write a song that features alcohol in the chorus, it doesn't matter what the rest of the lyrics are actually about: you're doomed to appear on albums with titles like The Best Pissed Up Party Anthems Ever. Underworld's Born Slippy, a troubled, impressionistic account of a heavy night out, has become simply the "lager, lager, lager, lager" song; while thick-necked men in football shirts don't necessarily savour the bitter irony of "we don't talk about love, we only want to get drunk" in the Manic Street Preachers' A Design for Life.
Article continues
But then it's interesting how few unequivocal, hooray-for-booze songs there are. Addiction, depression and premature death keep creeping in. As you'd expect, many of those who wrote most articulately about booze drank too much of it. Elliott Smith, Mark Eitzel and Uncle Tupelo's Jeff Tweedy all sang from the belly of the beast.
As did Paul Westerberg of the Replacements. In the mid-1980s, the Minneapolis band George Bested their chances of a commercial breakthrough by getting blazing drunk and swearing on Saturday Night Live. The 97-second song Beer for Breakfast finds them at their liveliest, and inaugurates this week's potentially tasteless Readers Recommend drinking game. Simply drink whenever and whatever the people in the songs do. You should already be feeling quite merry.
In Streams of Whiskey, Shane MacGowan dreams that Brendan Behan advises him that the answers to all of life's problems do indeed lie at the bottom of a glass. I'd be intrigued to know how much MacGowan tried to blame on the dead playwright: "I assure you, officer, the ghost of Brendan Behan told me I'd be fine to drive." We move from whiskey to brandy with the Streets' rowdy chronicle of an all-night bender in Amsterdam. Nouvelle Vague's bossa nova reinventions of punk classics have become stealthily ubiquitous over the past 18 months. Here they deftly relocate the Dead Kennedys' delinquent anthem to a Parisian cocktail party.
Back when their west coast peers were painting themselves as brutal, unyielding killing machines (plus ça change), the Alkaholiks were a bunch of party-hearty stumblebums rapping about throwing up and wooing, er, physically unappealing women. Their signature tune is so good-natured it includes a warning against drink driving. Two angles on alcoholism next: a young Nina Simone covers a prohibition-era blues standard and Gil Scott-Heron, whose achilles heel turned out to be not drink but crack cocaine, casts a sympathetic eye over alcohol's poorest victims.
During the 1970s, Tom Waits specialised in Hopperesque vignettes of LA nighthawks. Delivered in a woozy slur, The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) should ideally be played in a dimly lit dive, amid a blue haze of cigarette smoke, just before closing time. Then, fittingly, it's the mother of all morning-after country songs, Kris Kristofferson's Sunday Morning Coming Down. Boasting a cinematic grandeur that Johnny Cash's version couldn't touch, it gave radio programmers palpitations with its line about having a beer for breakfast and "another for dessert".
We end with an ode to sobering up for good. Having weaned himself off drugs but on to alcohol, in 1981 Lou Reed holed up in rural New Jersey and wrote The Last Shot about his struggle to go straight: the title can be read two ways. Anyone still playing the RR drinking game at this point should probably glug some water, pop some paracetamol and have a long lie down.
This week's playlist
1 Beer for Breakfast The Replacements
2 Streams of Whiskey The Pogues
3 Too Much Brandy The Streets
4 Gin House Blues Nina Simone
5 Too Drunk to Fuck Nouvelle Vague
6 Only When I'm Drunk The Alkaholiks
7 The Bottle Gil Scott-Heron and Brian Jackson
8 The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me) Tom Waits
9 Sunday Morning Coming Down Kris Kristofferson
10 The Last Shot Lou Reed
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firehazard - Sports Forum Groundskeeper
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Fri Dec 16, 2005 9:13 am
The Pogues may have come in at no. 2, but the only illustration to the article is predictably Shane!
And to prove that The Pogues are in everybody's minds now, a review of Gogol Bordello calls them "the Pogues with Slavic accents".
And to prove that The Pogues are in everybody's minds now, a review of Gogol Bordello calls them "the Pogues with Slavic accents".
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