Arkansas Democrat - CRITICAL MASS

[MacRua]

CRITICAL MASS : Rowdy Pogues frontman still alive and kickin’
by Philip Martin
Arkansas Democrat
24 Oct 2006
Full URL
<blockquote>
“If you had the luck of the Irish, you’d be sorry and wish you were dead,” John Lennon sang, and the fact that the Pogues are still around — and Shane MacGowan is not only still alive but back fronting the boys — is a beautifully ironic illustration of the sentiment.

Not that it is such bad luck to be alive, though Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Tupac and even Elvis have demonstrated that death can be a splendid career move. Yet those of us who are not Pogues can at least entertain the idea that becoming more or less an oldies band might represent a fate worse than death for a spittle and blood Celtic punk outfit like the Pogues we cherish. Those guys were doomed, real “hope-I-die-before-I-get old” types, so what happened ?

How come they’re still touring, still working, still striving — though the last album that really mattered to us was 1990 ’s Hell’s Ditch. (Though to be fair, who gave any of the albums after MacGowan left and took his blackgummed poetry and two remaining toofusses with him anything like a fair shake ?)

Yet the fact that Shane and the boys are back on the road isn’t the occasion for this piece, the occasion is Rhino Records’ recent rerelease of the five Pogues’ albums — Red Roses for Me (1984 ), Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985 ), If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988 ), Peace and Love (1989 ) and aforementioned Hell’s Ditch.

No matter what the re-formed Pogues do — and it’s notable that they haven’t released any new material since MacGowan rejoined the band in 2001 — that clutch of albums will always be the Pogues’ canon to us. Though only the Elvis Costelloproduced Rum, Sodomy... is an arguably great record, they all have their moments of ramshackle grace and taken collectively make the case for the Pogues as a Celtic version of the Band, in that they refreshed traditional folk themes by fusing them with modern forms — in the Pogues’ case, punk rock — without putting any ironic distance between themselves and the old songs.

The Pogues make perfect sense in the context of their predecessors, the Dubliners, or the Chieftains — those gloriously cheeky traditionalists who seem to abide without beginning or end in sight. The Pogues make Clannad explicable; they remind us it was four Irish guys — whose families crossed the sea to Liverpool — who make rock ’n’ roll a legitimate pursuit for serious people.

Or, to take it in another direction entirely, perhaps they did to Irish folk what the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin did for country blues — they latched onto to its depressive ruefulness and bitter humor, sped it up and hammered it down. Van Morrison was sui generis, but the Pogues punked his Gaelic Soul; MacGowan’s “yarrghh” was filtered through a mouth of pulp and busted teeth, conceived in Dublin and casehardened on the streets of London.

All right, we never thought MacGowan would make it this far — “The British press has been giving me six months to live for 20 years,” he purportedly said — and it’s great that he’s alive but it’s still depressing to think of the Pogues in middle age.

Because it’s depressing to think of ourselves in middle age, if that’s what we are, you young kids who probably discovered the Pogues (or are — the writer’s vanity insists — just about to discover them ) through your mum’s old cassettes or the shining new Rhino rereleases of their first five albums (prettied up with bonus tracks and essays by the likes of Jim Jarmusch ) are probably sick of being told what all you missed back in the days of glory before the Internet and hippie sex.

Sorry, you’ll have your own selfmythologizing pasts to look back on someday, and if that includes seeing a 29-year-old MacGowan tear it up in front of a teetering, reeling band of drunkies, then who are we to undermine the pleasure by insisting that the shock of the Pogues tilted us off our high steeds back in 19 and 85, and that hearing the bands that came along in the Pogues’ wake — the Black 47 s and the Dropkick Murphys and the Tossers and Mixtwitch and even the Gourds out of Austin, Texas — has an inoculating effect on the first-time Pogues listener.

We can’t pretend to have been there at the beginning — Mac-Gowan had a band before the Pogues, and he had a shot of reality show type fame in 1976, when he was photographed at a Clash show, shortly after a girl he had been kissing bit off his earlobe. He was a product of Ireland, who grew up in England keenly aware of his roots. He was influenced by the poet James Clarence Mangan and the playwright / poet / erstwhile Irish Republican Brendan Francis Behan. Like a lot of famous alcoholics, he came from comfortable enough circumstances, and won a music scholarship to the posh Westminster School — the Royal College of St. Peter at Westminster — from which he was expelled for drugging.

The Pogues came together in 1982 in King’s Cross in north London, and they first called themselves Pogue Mahone, an anglification of a Gaelic vulgarism. They specialized in traditional Irish folk music, to which they brought a punk sensibility even though they incorporated traditional Irish instruments such as bodhrans, tin whistles, banjo, citterns, dulcimers, mandolins, accordions, et al., playing them with a reckless fury that bordered on contempt.

But it was MacGowan’s original songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “ The Old Main Drag, ” “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” — and his vocal interpretations of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town” and Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” on Rum, Sodomy..., that marked the band as something special. (Bassist Cait O’Riordan also contributed a beautifully discomfiting version of the traditional Irish ballad “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day.” )

The package was completed by the album cover art, a reproduction of Theodore Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa with the faces of band members superimposed on the luckless sailors. And the title of the album itself was derived from an infamous comment oft (and probably inaccurately ) attributed to Winston Churchill: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”

And the fall-off after that sophomore effort was, if not precipitous, at least noticeable. There were rifts between the increasingly unstable MacGowan and the rest of the group. O’Riordan married Costello and left the band, to be replaced by bassist Darryl Hunt; the virtuoso Terry Woods, formerly of Steeleye Span, was added as a multi-instrumentalist.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God was released in 1988, and though it further expanded the band’s ecumenicalism by incorporating elements of jazz and Spanish folk (elements that would become increasingly important in later releases ), it clearly wasn’t as strongly written an album as Rum, Sodomy... (the album’s highlight was “Fairytale of New York,” a Christmas ballad which paired MacGowan with guest vocalist Kirsty MacColl ).

While both Fall From Grace and its follow-up, Peace and Love, were modestly successful commercially, MacGowan’s songs weren’t up to the caliber of his earlier work (probably because he was smashed most of the time ) and his vocals were increasingly mushmouthed.

And Hell’s Ditch — Mac-Gowan’s final album as a Pogue — suffers from MacGowan’s obvious estrangement from his former mates. Not even Joe Strummer’s tender production could coax anything like the old manic fire from the band. At best, the band sounds comfortable in its own skin, but MacGowan’s sloppy, seemingly indifferent approach to the material is clear evidence that he had other things on his mind at the time. It’s no wonder he quit shortly after the record was released, leaving producer Strummer to step in and front the band for a brief period. So endeth the story of the Pogues, though they put out a couple of records in the 1990 s, with electric guitars and an almost canny accessibility. Others can point out that there were other great musicians in the Pogues — among them Spider Stacy and Jem Finer (who have done some very interesting work, like the Longplayer project and a song “composed” by the weather ) — but the Pogues were, for better and for worse, always Shane MacGowan’s band. And, against all logic, Shane’s not dead.

E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline. com </blockquote>

[pogues24]

Again as with the other reviews, If I Should Fall From Grace With God seems to be catching a rather bad rap as of late. While none of the recent reviews bash the album, it seems still that it's taken it share of abuse as of late. Yes, the album did mark the emergence of the Pogues incorporating other styles into their sound, but the original sound was never abandoned until Hell's Ditch. While each review had nothing but good things to say about If I Should Fall, this one claims that MacGowan's songs weren't up to his usual caliber. Obviously, he didn't listen to The Broad Majestic Shannon, Sit Down By the Fire, Lullaby of London, Birmingham Six, the title track, and even the MacGowan/Finer numbers Bottle of Smoke, Turkish Song of the Damned, and the all time classic yuletide anthem Fairytale of New York. Now when you compare this album to Red Roses For Me or even Rum, Sodomy there are some differences, but overall the Irish element was not abandoned as of yet, even on Peace and Love, the Irish element was still intacted (White City, Young Ned of the Hill, Down All the Days, Boat Train, Gartloney Rats, and London You're a Lady,) it wasn't until Hell's Ditch that the Pogues musical scope had completely changed.

Iain

[philipchevron]

Hey Arkansas dude! We lived!! Get used to it, I have.

The Pogues NEVER had anything resembling a deathwish. As we got very tired of saying very early on, a recognition that death is a part of life is a great survival tactic, not a morbid preoccupation.

[dawson]

What a miserable bitter reviewer.

[Sober]

The beginning of the article was good, but bullshit started to appear as soon as he started talking about IISFFGWG.

[shaney mac]

Hey Arkansas dude! We lived!! Get used to it, I have.

The Pogues NEVER had anything resembling a deathwish. As we got very tired of saying very early on, a recognition that death is a part of life is a great survival tactic, not a morbid preoccupation.

For someone who claims that other peoples opinion of you are none of your business.... you dont half have something to say when you read a review you don't take kindly to.!!!!

[philipchevron]

Hey Arkansas dude! We lived!! Get used to it, I have.

The Pogues NEVER had anything resembling a deathwish. As we got very tired of saying very early on, a recognition that death is a part of life is a great survival tactic, not a morbid preoccupation.

For someone who claims that other peoples opinion of you are none of your business.... you dont half have something to say when you read a review you don't take kindly to.!!!!

Oh, you know, there's only one bad review I can ever remember (everyone has one) and just one good review too, perhaps because in each case they contained a kernel of truth greater than the point the reviewer thought he was making. But this reviewer is not offering his opinion - his narrative would be more gratifying to him if the bunch of "drunkies" of whom he writes had fulfilled the death wish he appears to have seen in them. Nobody who loves or understands the Pogues feels that way and that has been true for almost 25 years and counting. That's not opinion, friend, that's fact.

[Benno]

the thing that makes the pogues better
than any band that died young
cobain, hendrix, joplin (just those 27year olds)
or i should say
what has allowed them to live where the others died


is the strength of the tradition of their fathers
the truth of the tradition they fit into

[RICHB]

CRITICAL MASS : Rowdy Pogues frontman still alive and kickin’
by Philip Martin
Arkansas Democrat
24 Oct 2006
Full URL
<blockquote>
“If you had the luck of the Irish, you’d be sorry and wish you were dead,” John Lennon sang, and the fact that the Pogues are still around — and Shane MacGowan is not only still alive but back fronting the boys — is a beautifully ironic illustration of the sentiment.

Not that it is such bad luck to be alive, though Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Tupac and even Elvis have demonstrated that death can be a splendid career move. Yet those of us who are not Pogues can at least entertain the idea that becoming more or less an oldies band might represent a fate worse than death for a spittle and blood Celtic punk outfit like the Pogues we cherish. Those guys were doomed, real “hope-I-die-before-I-get old” types, so what happened ?

How come they’re still touring, still working, still striving — though the last album that really mattered to us was 1990 ’s Hell’s Ditch. (Though to be fair, who gave any of the albums after MacGowan left and took his blackgummed poetry and two remaining toofusses with him anything like a fair shake ?)

Yet the fact that Shane and the boys are back on the road isn’t the occasion for this piece, the occasion is Rhino Records’ recent rerelease of the five Pogues’ albums — Red Roses for Me (1984 ), Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash (1985 ), If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988 ), Peace and Love (1989 ) and aforementioned Hell’s Ditch.

No matter what the re-formed Pogues do — and it’s notable that they haven’t released any new material since MacGowan rejoined the band in 2001 — that clutch of albums will always be the Pogues’ canon to us. Though only the Elvis Costelloproduced Rum, Sodomy... is an arguably great record, they all have their moments of ramshackle grace and taken collectively make the case for the Pogues as a Celtic version of the Band, in that they refreshed traditional folk themes by fusing them with modern forms — in the Pogues’ case, punk rock — without putting any ironic distance between themselves and the old songs.

The Pogues make perfect sense in the context of their predecessors, the Dubliners, or the Chieftains — those gloriously cheeky traditionalists who seem to abide without beginning or end in sight. The Pogues make Clannad explicable; they remind us it was four Irish guys — whose families crossed the sea to Liverpool — who make rock ’n’ roll a legitimate pursuit for serious people.

Or, to take it in another direction entirely, perhaps they did to Irish folk what the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin did for country blues — they latched onto to its depressive ruefulness and bitter humor, sped it up and hammered it down. Van Morrison was sui generis, but the Pogues punked his Gaelic Soul; MacGowan’s “yarrghh” was filtered through a mouth of pulp and busted teeth, conceived in Dublin and casehardened on the streets of London.

All right, we never thought MacGowan would make it this far — “The British press has been giving me six months to live for 20 years,” he purportedly said — and it’s great that he’s alive but it’s still depressing to think of the Pogues in middle age.

Because it’s depressing to think of ourselves in middle age, if that’s what we are, you young kids who probably discovered the Pogues (or are — the writer’s vanity insists — just about to discover them ) through your mum’s old cassettes or the shining new Rhino rereleases of their first five albums (prettied up with bonus tracks and essays by the likes of Jim Jarmusch ) are probably sick of being told what all you missed back in the days of glory before the Internet and hippie sex.

Sorry, you’ll have your own selfmythologizing pasts to look back on someday, and if that includes seeing a 29-year-old MacGowan tear it up in front of a teetering, reeling band of drunkies, then who are we to undermine the pleasure by insisting that the shock of the Pogues tilted us off our high steeds back in 19 and 85, and that hearing the bands that came along in the Pogues’ wake — the Black 47 s and the Dropkick Murphys and the Tossers and Mixtwitch and even the Gourds out of Austin, Texas — has an inoculating effect on the first-time Pogues listener.

We can’t pretend to have been there at the beginning — Mac-Gowan had a band before the Pogues, and he had a shot of reality show type fame in 1976, when he was photographed at a Clash show, shortly after a girl he had been kissing bit off his earlobe. He was a product of Ireland, who grew up in England keenly aware of his roots. He was influenced by the poet James Clarence Mangan and the playwright / poet / erstwhile Irish Republican Brendan Francis Behan. Like a lot of famous alcoholics, he came from comfortable enough circumstances, and won a music scholarship to the posh Westminster School — the Royal College of St. Peter at Westminster — from which he was expelled for drugging.

The Pogues came together in 1982 in King’s Cross in north London, and they first called themselves Pogue Mahone, an anglification of a Gaelic vulgarism. They specialized in traditional Irish folk music, to which they brought a punk sensibility even though they incorporated traditional Irish instruments such as bodhrans, tin whistles, banjo, citterns, dulcimers, mandolins, accordions, et al., playing them with a reckless fury that bordered on contempt.

But it was MacGowan’s original songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “ The Old Main Drag, ” “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” — and his vocal interpretations of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town” and Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” on Rum, Sodomy..., that marked the band as something special. (Bassist Cait O’Riordan also contributed a beautifully discomfiting version of the traditional Irish ballad “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day.” )

The package was completed by the album cover art, a reproduction of Theodore Gericault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa with the faces of band members superimposed on the luckless sailors. And the title of the album itself was derived from an infamous comment oft (and probably inaccurately ) attributed to Winston Churchill: “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition. It’s nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash.”

And the fall-off after that sophomore effort was, if not precipitous, at least noticeable. There were rifts between the increasingly unstable MacGowan and the rest of the group. O’Riordan married Costello and left the band, to be replaced by bassist Darryl Hunt; the virtuoso Terry Woods, formerly of Steeleye Span, was added as a multi-instrumentalist.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God was released in 1988, and though it further expanded the band’s ecumenicalism by incorporating elements of jazz and Spanish folk (elements that would become increasingly important in later releases ), it clearly wasn’t as strongly written an album as Rum, Sodomy... (the album’s highlight was “Fairytale of New York,” a Christmas ballad which paired MacGowan with guest vocalist Kirsty MacColl ).

While both Fall From Grace and its follow-up, Peace and Love, were modestly successful commercially, MacGowan’s songs weren’t up to the caliber of his earlier work (probably because he was smashed most of the time ) and his vocals were increasingly mushmouthed.

And Hell’s Ditch — Mac-Gowan’s final album as a Pogue — suffers from MacGowan’s obvious estrangement from his former mates. Not even Joe Strummer’s tender production could coax anything like the old manic fire from the band. At best, the band sounds comfortable in its own skin, but MacGowan’s sloppy, seemingly indifferent approach to the material is clear evidence that he had other things on his mind at the time. It’s no wonder he quit shortly after the record was released, leaving producer Strummer to step in and front the band for a brief period. So endeth the story of the Pogues, though they put out a couple of records in the 1990 s, with electric guitars and an almost canny accessibility. Others can point out that there were other great musicians in the Pogues — among them Spider Stacy and Jem Finer (who have done some very interesting work, like the Longplayer project and a song “composed” by the weather ) — but the Pogues were, for better and for worse, always Shane MacGowan’s band. And, against all logic, Shane’s not dead.

E-mail: pmartin@arkansasonline. com </blockquote>

To be honest its just the type of rubbish that everyone has become used to over the years. You know drunken paddy band with a death wish. (Shane will be dead by July 1988, sorry we meant 1998, sorry scap that he will be dead by 2008 and on and on). What does the article say, 'Reeling Drunkies' Its all about other peoples perceptions and unfortunately most people buy into the perception the mass media force upon them. Look at all the stuff that’s written about Pete Doherty and the amount of people who call him a waste of space, a useless smack head with no talent. I presume nobody has read his lyrics or heard his music. Even if its not your cup of team you cant help but see that he is very talented. Sorry I digress. As its been pointed out almost every other band around at the time and since drank and did whatever but its rarely reported. You cannot continually produce material of that standard if your completely out of it all the time. Maybe some of the band towards the end of their recording career did but I mean in general. The article is so American stereotyped that im surprised it doesn’t come with a big shamrock and a pint of Guinness with every read. I mean 'it was four Irish guys-whose families crossed the sea to Liverpool?? Well obviously he's on about the Beatles there. )I think only two of the beatles have Irish connections anyway but I could be wrong.) The point is he seems to make this comment just to fit it into the article, i.e. it has no real relevance to what he's saying.

[pogues24]

Thanks guys for defending the greatness that is If I Should Fall From Grace With God, I mean every review I have ever read praises the album to high heavens calling it the best one that the Pogues ever recorded. However, anyone one of the first three albums makes that award. This reviewer is a simple-minded twat, and bravo Mr. Chevron for your opinions of the matter, I'm getting rather sick and fucking tired of every single Pogues review of late always mentioning the bands struggle with alcohol, and always lambasting Shane's problem with the bottle all the time. The music the band made is what is really important.

Iain

[philipchevron]

Thanks guys for defending the greatness that is If I Should Fall From Grace With God, I mean every review I have ever read praises the album to high heavens calling it the best one that the Pogues ever recorded. However, anyone one of the first three albums makes that award. This reviewer is a simple-minded twat, and bravo Mr. Chevron for your opinions of the matter, I'm getting rather sick and fucking tired of every single Pogues review of late always mentioning the bands struggle with alcohol, and always lambasting Shane's problem with the bottle all the time. The music the band made is what is really important.

Iain

I understand that the band's "struggle with alcohol" , or at least the struggle of certain members of the band with alcohol, is one of the things that makes us interesting. There's nothing the matter with that in itself, however much the subtext is really "drunken Paddy". But I find it interesting - interesting, no more than that - that the total sobriety of half the band has not found anything like as much traction. It makes me wonder if real alcoholism, as opposed to a general sense of Bacchanalian excess - is beyond the maturity of these writers.

[dawsonn]

the thing that makes the pogues better
than any band that died young
cobain, hendrix, joplin (just those 27year olds)
or i should say
what has allowed them to live where the others died


is the strength of the tradition of their fathers
the truth of the tradition they fit into

I think the fact that none of the pogues have tried blowing their brains out is why they have all out lived Kurt Cobain! But what you said was nice too.

[Benno]

Thanks guys for defending the greatness that is If I Should Fall From Grace With God, I mean every review I have ever read praises the album to high heavens calling it the best one that the Pogues ever recorded. However, anyone one of the first three albums makes that award. This reviewer is a simple-minded twat, and bravo Mr. Chevron for your opinions of the matter, I'm getting rather sick and fucking tired of every single Pogues review of late always mentioning the bands struggle with alcohol, and always lambasting Shane's problem with the bottle all the time. The music the band made is what is really important.

Iain

I understand that the band's "struggle with alcohol" , or at least the struggle of certain members of the band with alcohol, is one of the things that makes us interesting. There's nothing the matter with that in itself, however much the subtext is really "drunken Paddy". But I find it interesting - interesting, no more than that - that the total sobriety of half the band has not found anything like as much traction. It makes me wonder if real alcoholism, as opposed to a general sense of Bacchanalian excess - is beyond the maturity of these writers.

that's exactly what i feel

carousing is only the first stage of a good drunk
it's followed quickly by repose
thought
and then i forget


also, i think that only kobain willingly(?) killed himself
while the others ODed

[RICHB]

Thanks guys for defending the greatness that is If I Should Fall From Grace With God, I mean every review I have ever read praises the album to high heavens calling it the best one that the Pogues ever recorded. However, anyone one of the first three albums makes that award. This reviewer is a simple-minded twat, and bravo Mr. Chevron for your opinions of the matter, I'm getting rather sick and fucking tired of every single Pogues review of late always mentioning the bands struggle with alcohol, and always lambasting Shane's problem with the bottle all the time. The music the band made is what is really important.

Iain

I understand that the band's "struggle with alcohol" , or at least the struggle of certain members of the band with alcohol, is one of the things that makes us interesting. There's nothing the matter with that in itself, however much the subtext is really "drunken Paddy". But I find it interesting - interesting, no more than that - that the total sobriety of half the band has not found anything like as much traction. It makes me wonder if real alcoholism, as opposed to a general sense of Bacchanalian excess - is beyond the maturity of these writers.

Because its easier to write his article around stereotypes. Its a shame because the article in its self is well presented but the content destroys any talent. It must have been so frustrating for you guys to have been producing something so fresh and new and to just have that thrown at you all the time. I remember reading something one of you said about other bands asking for drinking contests with you I mean whats all that about?

[Andy P. Davies]

As Mr Chevron and others rightfully point out this review just reinforces all the negative stereotypes The Pogues regularly get saddled with. Understanding the journey the band have been on and the distinction between "Excess All Areas" and Real Life Alcoholism and substance misuse issues relating to our beloved Pogues seems to be quite beyond the comprehension of most rock journalists.