Sat Dec 27, 2008 2:23 pm
Brixton is an area notorious for it's unfriendliness. It isn't the populace's dedication to avoiding your eye, banging your shoulder and only smiling when you fall. It isn't just that. It's the constant capped capacity of violence unique to English towns, the very real chance someone will slip a blade into your soft gut.
There is, though, a magic to Christmas. It's cheapened by television, what Harlan Ellison called 'The Glass Teat', and the myriad songs on the radio, with their asinine rhyming couplets and incessant ringing bells. The magic of December comes from people remembering the necessity of love. This was the atmosphere I found on Brixton's streets as I made my way to the Academy on the 20th. Strangers were smiling at each other, joking as they passed in the streets. And not all were on their way to the same gig as I.
The band was the Pogues.
John Lennon once said of blues music; "It's not perverted or thought - it's not a concept. It is a chair, not a design for a chair or a better chair, or a bigger chair or a chair with leather or with design. It is the first chair, it's chairs for sitting on, not chairs for looking at or being appreciated . You sit on that music." The Pogues aren't a chair and don't play the blues. But their music has the same inarguable presence. Whatever they are, you jump on it as it gallops beneath you joyously out of your control.
When the band come on stage, they're just middle aged men holding instruments to a crowd's adoring cheers. When these men snap into Streams of Whiskey something shifts. The world is just what's in front of you, and spiteful nagging reality disappears as all that exists is the music and the movement of the spectators in the moment. Except at a Pogues gig, there are no spectators. Everyone's as important to the show.
I had my own moment at the front of the crowd. By an enthusiastic and intense elbowing and pogoing I had brought some space around me as I gripped the railings, directly at the middle of it all. There's a vicious twisting dance that gets people away from you that I only unsheathe at a Pogues gig. My back was banging again and again against some poor soul's stomach. My entire family's Irish, I'm the first generation to be born in England and it took me sometime to deal with what I was exactly. I've got there, I know that everyone is just the sum of their family plus their circumstances. I don't think this has anything to do with my aggresive dancing. What I mean is when I heard an accent say "I am not a gay, you know." I ignored it, listening only to the music.
The crowd pushed forward against the people behind me and I twisted against them to get breathing space. Again in my ear I hear "I am not a gay, you know!", less indulgent more pointed. As though that were an acceptable pejorative. The ancient, omnipresent common-sense Irish bohemian in my heart heard that and was offended (as opposed to the non-common-sense Irish with the rosary bead bruises up the back) that people would think like that. But then the English football hooligan cab driver in me answered, feeling the same offense. "Then get your fuckin' dick out of my arsehole you cunt." came the shoute. If there was a wide berth around me before it increased for a few seconds before the tide of the crowd came back in for the next song.
Quite ludicrous. I suppose my thinking was something like "Bloody immigrants, coming over here insulting our faggots." I'd like to apologise here and now to that gentleman who didn't deserve such a reaction.
It's that divide the Pogues speak straight to. That wonderful-terrible confusion of immigrant identity. Like oak, they're just getting tougher as they age. Time's an enemy no one can beat. Even scythe-wielding Death can be beaten if you master the chessboard. But time takes so much. Nevertheless, when you see James Fearnley, six years shy of his sixtieth birthday, leaping about the place with his accordian it lets you know that with the right attitude you can keep anything at bay. It's the lunatics that charge into a fight in which they're greatly outnumbered, assured of the inevitablilty of their loss but only speeding up and laughing as they get closer to the fray, that are really alive.
The Pogues are timeless. The best way of avoiding getting dated is to take from the best elements of what went before. That's the better option to swanning on the absurdities of fashion. It's called style. Compare a photo of a seventies mod-revivalist to one of a contemporary Disco Stu. It's the ones who drew on a tradition that still look good.
The band played hard and long. They put a lot into their shows and reap the rewards with the most faithful fans in the business. Wherever you stood in the venue, the sound was crystal clear. There was an occasional propensity to lose Spider Stacy's whistle in the layers of instruments, and I honestly don't think there's any need for saxophones on any of the songs, but on the whole it sounded amazing. Moshing to the Benny Goodman jazz of Metropolis is an experience never to forget or repeat. The rhythm managed to be both tight and flexible, Andrew Ranken's drums thundering through a two hour set gelling with Daryl Hunt's ("Daryl Hunt, Daryl Hunt, Daryl, Daryl Daryl, Daryl HuuuuuntT!") bass and sub James Walbourne's guitar. Jem Finer still plays the banjo in a way that holds down the rough beat of the music and gently carries the melody of individual songs. As a professional unit they are unapproached. On vocals is Shane MacGowan. His personal charisma lies somewhere between the cockney king bearings of Paul Weller and spaced out Jim Morrison with a dose of a laudanum binged romantic poet.
His voice has deepened as it's aged, lending a richer resonance to some songs, not quite always hitting the high notes of others. Shane's voice warms up as the concert progresses and he sings his songs. They're songs for people who find the real world a baffling ordeal, looking for the escape that great music, like great love, a great fight, a great film, a great book, great sex (most sex) brings. Where you get out of yourself and the unimportant decorations of personality around your soul. Several thousand of us found it that night.
By the end of the concert, I hugged many a stranger then embraced the chill twilight of the December night.
--James Murphy.
Why spend your leisure bereft of pleasure?
and could you blame her? The tray was in better shape than me! Now that people know who the gobshite jumping around in a Celtic shirt lashing pints was, I'd like to extend an apology for my behaviour...
