Harp - Rum, Sodomy and the Crash

[MacRua]

The Pogues: Rum, Sodomy and the Crash
Spider Stacy still recalls the first time he spotted Shane MacGowan.
Harp magazine
December 2006
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“It was at a Ramones show in 1977, at the Roundhouse in London, and he was standing in the urinal talking to some guys—actually standing in the urinal, in the trough, if you will. I knew who he was because he was a real sort of ‘face’ on the scene. I talked to him later on when I went outside to get some fresh air. He goes [raspy, slurred voice], ‘Are yew enjoyin’ yerself?’”

Yes I am, Stacy thought, hugely taken by MacGowan’s inebriated but undeniable charisma. Within a few short years, he’d form a band with MacGowan and embark upon one of rock’s most storied rollercoaster rides.

* * *

The Pogues began life in late ’82 as Pogue Mahone, the product of long afternoons spent drinking cider and poring over MacGowan’s extensive collection of Irish records.

“I’m not Irish like Shane,” explains Stacy, “but I had a nodding acquaintance with some of the music. I think in his mind something had already started to get worked out, and one day he picked up an acoustic guitar and started messing around with [traditional song] ‘Paddy on the Railway’—really fast, with a punk attitude. We just went, ‘Hang on—we could be onto something here!’”

Indeed they were. Both MacGowan and Stacy had played in punk bands (MacGowan in the Nips; Stacy in the Millwall Chainsaws), so applying punk’s loud/fast aesthetic to classic Irish jigs, reels and drinking songs was no huge leap for them. MacGowan in particular proved a riveting frontman, a swaggering cross between Sinatra, Van Morrison and Johnny Rotten, alternately puffing on his cigarette and swigging from his pint as he belted out colorful tales of boozing and brawling, of maidens and scoundrels, of violent uprisings and bloody retribution.

To folk purists the fledgling combo seemed intent upon “desecrating this holy temple” of traditional music, as Stacy puts it; more than one reviewer noted the parallels between the Pogues and Dylan’s electrification at Newport. The youngsters, though, embraced the band

“We were obviously fulfilling a need, and there were all these second-, third-generation Irish kids who took to it,” Stacy says. “We weren’t out to shock anyone, but there was something in us that quite enjoyed walking onstage in a punk club with our banjos, our tin whistles, our accordions, and clocking the looks on the faces of the people who are expecting some sort of ‘ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!’ [makes buzzsaw/fuzz guitar sound] thing. Well, they would get the ‘ONE-TWO-THREE-FOUR!’—but without the fuzz!”

Foreshortening their name to the Pogues (the BBC took exception with “Pogue Mahone,” realizing it was an Anglicized version of the Gaelic insult “kiss my arse”), the group signed with Stiff Records for their 1984 debut Red Roses for Me. Critical hosannas like “the Sex Pistols setting fire to the Chieftains” and “the Clash roaring along beside the Dubliners” didn’t hurt the Pogues’ case. Nor did having a celebrity fan in the form of Elvis Costello, who invited them to open for him on a tour of Ireland.

Costello’s patronage extended into the studio when he offered to produce their second album, in later years famously telling journalists, “I saw my task was to capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up.” With MacGowan’s gifts as a lyricist blossoming and Costello enthused over the material the band was bringing in, the sessions crackled with excitement.

Issued in August of ’85, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash was an unqualified masterpiece. The original material in particular shone, including riotous opening track “The Sickbed of Cuchulainn” and MacGowan’s gorgeous, drunkenly tragic “A Pair of Brown Eyes” (“One of Shane’s great ones,” reckons Stacy.) Rum’s covers were deftly chosen too, among them a country version of beloved Anglo-Scot songwriter/playwright Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town” and Pogues arrangements of traditional numbers “I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” (sweetly warbled by then-bassist Cait O’Riordan, later Mrs. Costello) and “Jesse James” (cranked up to maximum velocity and dotted by gunshot sound effects).

“You know, Shane had a whole storeroom of these obscure and not-so-obscure songs,” observes Stacy. “Something we discovered with some of these old traditionals is that all you need to do is rev ’em up a bit and they work fantastically. Others, obviously, you need a bit more subtlety and control. Some you shouldn’t approach at 900 miles an hour.”

Rum took its title from a mordant Winston Churchill quote on British navy life, and the album cover was a variation upon the famous Gericault painting “The Raft of the Medusa.” To tie into these nautical themes, the Pogues’ record label decided to hold the album release party on the battleship H.M.S. Belfast, moored on the River Thames.

“Oh, that was great!” Stacy says, chortling at the memory. “There were two guys dressed up as sailors handing out shots of rum to everyone who came onboard. We played a few songs dressed up in period naval costumes. Then the journalists from the NME and Melody Maker had a drunken brawl and one of them fell overboard!”

The album cemented the group’s growing reputation as iconoclasts and tenders of the traditional flame; in America, import copies quickly became college radio mainstays. After touring behind Rum the band took a vacation—part of it in Spain with Costello, Joe Strummer and Courtney Love filming Alex Cox’s punk-spaghetti western Straight to Hell—then reconvened to record their third record, 1988’s Steve Lillywhite-produced If I Should Fall From Grace with God, which spawned the sublime international hit “Fairytale of New York.” Peace and Love and Hell’s Ditch followed in 1989 and 1990, respectively.

But by ’89 cracks in the Pogues’ firmament were showing. MacGowan had always relished his hard-guzzling mad-Irish-poet image, but now, thanks to almost-daily consumption of LSD by the fistful, “mad” had become “erratic” and “volatile.” He began turning up late for gigs or missing them entirely, including one notorious incident when he collapsed at London’s Heathrow Airport prior to the band’s departure to America, where the Pogues had been invited to open for Bob Dylan (they went without MacGowan). Similar behavior plagued the Hell’s Ditch sessions, and though the producer, longtime friend—and occasional honorary Pogue—Joe Strummer, patiently coaxed some memorable performances from MacGowan, the singer’s musical interests were diverging from the rest of the band and the writing was on the wall. On tour in Japan in ’91 the Pogues made the painful decision to fire their founder.

Recalls Stacy, “We were never quite clear what it was that was disenchanting him, but just the way he was behaving made it clear he was not very happy. At first I think the idea was that we would go on the road and he would just take time off and write, although I think we knew that wouldn’t really work. But let me sort of correct any false impressions that may have arisen over the years. The relationships in the band were always good, fundamentally. There were times when, like with anyone, it’s not all plain sailing all the time. But really there was never any big falling out. When Shane kind of had to go, it was only because we really couldn’t see any way out of that situation at that particular time. With the benefit of hindsight, it might have been better just to take a year off.”

A MacGowan-less Pogues continued on with Stacy assuming de facto frontman duties for 1993’s Waiting for Herb and 1996’s Pogue Mahone, after which the group decided to disband. MacGowan, meanwhile, issued a pair of solo albums and fronted his own band he dubbed the Popes.

In late 2004 the Pogues’ back catalog was overhauled and reissued in the UK. (Expanded/remastered versions of the first five albums came out in the U.S. in September 2006.) Overseeing the project were the erstwhile Pogues themselves, and to mark the occasion the band, MacGowan included, got back together for a series of reunion concerts. Since then the “classic” 1987-91 lineup—MacGowan (vocals), Stacy (tin whistle and vocals), Jem Finer (banjo), Philip Chevron (guitar), Andrew Ranken (drums), James Fearnley (accordion), Darryl Hunt (bass), Terry Woods (various instruments)—has continued to tour successfully. One key Pogues stronghold is America, where the likes of Flogging Molly and the Dropkick Murphys proudly hoist the Celt-punk torch and view the Pogues as elder statesmen.

Speaking of which…in 2005 the Pogues received a Lifetime Achievement award at the Meteors, Ireland’s equivalent of the Grammies. Stacy agrees that such an honorarium seems ironic given his band’s reputation as unreconstructed boozehounds and hell raisers.

“But,” he says, “what can you do? We are ‘elder statesmen’! And anyway, I think it’s better to just stick around rather than to burn out or fade away.”

The Pogues Selected Discography

Red Roses for Me (Rhino, 2006)
Original Stiff LP (1984) plus six bonus tracks.
Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (Rhino, 2006)
Orig. Stiff LP (1985) plus six bonus tracks, including the Elvis Costello-produced Poguetry In Motion EP.
If I Should Fall From Grace with God (Rhino, 2006)
Orig. Stiff LP (1988) plus six bonus tracks.
Peace and Love (Rhino, 2006)
Orig. Island LP (1989) plus six bonus tracks.
Hell’s Ditch (Rhino, 2006)
Orig. Island LP (1990) plus seven bonus tracks. (All CDs remastered from original analog tapes. New liner notes by Gavin Martin, David Quantick, Jim Jarmusch, Tom Waits, Steve Earle and Patrick McCabe.)
The Rest of the Best of the Pogues (WEA Europe, 1992)
Waiting for Herb (Chameleon/Elektra, 1993)
Pogue Mahone (Mesa-Blue Moon, 1996)
The Ultimate Collection (WEA Europe, 2005)
w/bonus live disc.