SOURCEThor wrote:Went to see THE POGUES last night at the Filmore and it was nice not to be the oldest person in the room. The crowd was quite old in fact, must have been the high ticket price. Funny watching a bunch of 40 plus punks trying to re-live a past they never really had. I was right there with them. GREAT SHOW, you should all go out and see them now. I heard a woman leaving the Filmore say to her friend that it was the last time in ages she had a really great time at a concert. Those old guys can really put on a show. So what if no one but Spider Stacey can understand what Shane McGowan is saying, he is a great singer/mumbler.
SOURCEJane wrote:London, earlier this year:
Other Pogues: Shane, lad, wake up.
Shane MacGowan: Blargh.
Other Pogues: Shane, we're going on tour.
Shane: Bleh?
Other Pogues: We have to tour, Shane. You need a new liver. Frankly, you need the whole Keith Richards Package. That costs money.
Shane: *belch*
Other Pogues: We're doing this for you. We haven't toured in years, and when we did Australia you weren't even upright. We all have gotten on with our lives, but you did write most of our brilliant lyrics and we figure we owe you. In spite of embalming yourself you're still twitching 20 years later. So up with you, we're going on tour.
Other Other Pogues: Where should we tour?
Other Pogues: Let's go to San Francisco. It'll be foggy and he won't know the difference.
Other Other Pogues: How will we get him there? Have you smelled him? He's a volatile liquid.
Other Pogues: In cargo?
And so they came to San Francisco as part of a short west coast tour and played four sold-out nights at the Fillmore. We went last night. It was the full drunken Irish rocker experience.
First, the genius of seeing a band that hasn't toured or had a new album in years and is only playing about six dates is that they have nothing better to do than belt out song after song that you know by heart. To an outsider, Sarah for instance, they start to sound very similar after about the second one, but the rest of us gave cheers of recognition and bounced accordingly.
A barricade stood about three feet in front of the stage. Before the show we speculated whether it was to guard against possible moshing, but when the band staggered on it became clear that it was to protect the audience from Shane's likely plunge into the first row. While stage-diving performers sound fun, you get the feeling he'd leave a residue.
As slurred and inchoherent as many of their recorded albums are, the live performance is much more so. Shane was literally clinging to the mike stand early in the show, presumably because his blood was thickening up due to insufficient alcohol. As the evening wore on he kept returning to stage with more and more large tumblers of potent drinks and got marginally better. Through the first few songs, you could see the rest of the band eyeing each other, constantly trying to judge whether he was going to pass out on the spot, forget lyrics or just stop singing. He only did the latter two a few times and the band helped him as best they could, repeating a bridge or a few bars to give him a running start at making it all the way through. Each time he lurched offstage we wondered if he was done for the night. Some other Pogue would take lead vocals and the quality and tightness of the performance increased by several orders of magnitude, but it wasn't quite the same. Then they'd prop him up and push him back out and the crowd would cheer because for all his pickling, it's just not the Pogues unless he's screaming and slurring.
They played nonstop for 90 minutes, and left to thundering applause. An encore followed. More cheers. For the second encore, they returned to stage with a young woman who'd been waiting all night in the wings to sing Kirsty MacColl's part on "Fairytale of New York," which brought the house down. The song's long instrumental finish included a flurry of artificial snow and the poor girl half-dancing, half-propping Shane up on stage. It was sweet. We all swayed to the music because our shoes were stuck to the floor. The show ended with Fiesta and tin flute player Spider Stacey braining himself repeatedly with a pizza tin. It couldn't have been better.
MacRua wrote:Jane wrote:... and tin flute player Spider Stacey braining himself repeatedly with a pizza tin.
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