The music scene had shifted considerably since The Nipple Erectors first popped up. Energy, strength, power, all the things that used to make going out of an evening and finding a gig to go to seem worthwhile, had gone right out of the window. Now everyone was into futurism, dancing around with a dishcloth wrapped around their heads and saying "It's not what you wear, it's the way that you wear it." They all found poncey names which might have been okay for making anagrams out of - Orchestral Manouveres In The Dark - but were hardly the kind of thing you'd want emblazoned across your lapel. But Shane wasn't dispirited. In October 1982 "Me and this geezer, we used to go down to Cabaret Futura. It was alright for a poser's club, but it was still a poser's club. We used to go down there and ponce drinks. And we thought 'Fuck This' so we went up to Richard Strange and said we wanted to do a set of Irish rebel songs and he said, 'Oh wonderful, darling, that sounds really avant-garde.'
"And the point of it was to shock these ponces out of this smug little synthesized heaven and when we went on they didn't know what the fuck was going on. But of course, with our luck there happened to be about twenty British Army squaddies there and they didn't like it. The manager went apeshit and we got pelted with chips. Luckily they had plastic glasses, and the plugs were pulled on us.
"But we caused a real reaction and then I thought I enjoyed this a hundred times more than The Nips. So then we started and made it a going concern." They busked in tube stations, stood up singing in pubs, brought in a few friends to share in the plaudits.
Manager Frank explained to Sounds what happened next. "They played around pubs and didn't give a shit. They didn't take themselves that seriously, just had a laugh and a few drinks. A lot of spontaneous stuff went ' down and everybody sort of said 'They're pissed, they're pissed..."
The sound that Shane wanted to create, that he wove as he pieced together the band which was to become Pogue Mo Chone, was that of a culture caught midway between two posts, the Irish emigrees who arrived in Britain during the "boom years" immediately after the Second World War, only to find themselves at the lowest end of a social register which was propped up by its own bigotry alone. Come to England, there's jobs for you all ... provided you don't mind doing the ones that the Brits don't fancy. "Most Irish families," wrote Hot Press' Bill Graham, "have at least one relative who emigrated to Britain during the dismal 15 years after the War. But we forget their children. They haven't all been assimilated so completely as to blot out their parent's culture ... it was never rubbed out. Particularly in London. That a madcap mutation like The Pogues should happen there is neither surprising or "objectionable."
He continued, "Certain purists might object to the area of Irish music that The Pogues redevelop. Shane doesn't rescue rural ballads from the era of the Penal Laws. Instead he's definitely a 20th century man, concentrating on the urban and often unashamedly commereial ballad tradition, the music of The Fureys, The Dubliners and the man who straddles all traditions, Christy Moore." Shane told the NME, "I like Tom Waits, The Velvet Underground, The Dubliners and Brendan Shine," while Spider, "the donkey-jacketed demon of the tin whistle", added, "[My influences] are pretty much the same as his really. My introduction to Irish music really came from sitting in his room, getting drunk and listening to his dad's Dubliners'records.
Although they were swiftly picked up by the British music press, Pogue Mo Chone never looked - or sounded - like a traditional rock band. Even their instrumental line-up strayed well away from those well- beaten paths; Shane (vocals and guitar), Jem Finer (banjo), Caitlin O'Riordan (bass), Spider Stacey, Andrew Ranken (minimal drums) and James Fearnley (accordion). Their sound was that of an Irish showband, but with a shade of dementia which Spider admitted would cearcely pass muster in the dance halls of Eire "Because they couldn't dance to it. They like a good dance." Shane added, "Our versions are so fucked up because you are more fucked up if you live in London than, say, Tipperary." London he opined, was a shit-hole. "But it's our shit-hole."
That said, Melody Maker's Barry McIlheney took some pleasure in revealing that "None of them, with the exception of the exceptional Mr MacGowan, have actually spent more than a few days residing in that fair country," only for Shane himself to hit back, "To us, none of that really matters. lf you don't live in Ireland, then the next best thing is to live in North London or Hammersmith where you hear the same sort of Country and Irish music in all the bars. Anyway, nobody says that UB40 can't play reggae just because they weren't born in Jamaica. There's a lot of snobbery in that sort of attitude and it doesn't really bother us too much."
However, "If anybody thinks that we are trying to do ... pure Irish music, then they are way out of line. We've all got far too much respeet for that form of music to even try and get close to it in terms of playing. What we are doing is much closer to a group like the Dubliners, than to somebody like, say, the late Seamus Ennis. I mean, we are not even in the same ... universe as him. We can only play stuff that we really like and stuff we know we can play. And that tends to be drinking songs from the country and Irish pubs in North London."
Drink - now there was a common denominator. Almost before anyone had heard of their music, Pogue Mo Chone's capacity for alcohol was on its way to becoming legendary. And their audiences, as the band themselves gleefully admitted, were even worse! "It wouldn't do much good taking smack, then going to see us," Shane remarked, while Jem added, "Most of the groups I've seen or heard lately are profoundly depressing, and the atmosphere that surrounds them is quite dead. I think, if anything, we're live and spontaneous. Drink is obviously something people take to in such an atmosphere of excitement. They just come along and do it."
"The point is the sort of stuff we do," Shane continued in that same interview. "A bit of rockabilly, a mixture of Irish and Scottish folk stuff, country - obviously all those sorts of music are played in bars. It doesn't mean that everyone has got to get drunk, but it's played in places where the idea is the band are whooping it up and the people are whooping it up with them. As opposed to you sitting there going 'What do you mean by this I'm sharing your tortured spirit', or 'You're almost as smacked up as I am, so I can identify with you'- all that crap. I mean, alcohol is a social drug, but it also has an effect of inducing biligetic conviviality..." And finally, "We're into drinking, and occasinally you do get in a bad way, but we sort of enjoy it. I don't think being constantly pissed is a failing if you like drinking. Surely that's a success!"
The Pogues signed to Stiff Records, a label which in its earliest days, had itself gained a reputation for a certain anarchic disorderliness via the drinking talents of the legendary Wreckless Eric. Things had cleaned up a little since then, however, and according to Shane, "When we first signed to Stiff we had to pretend we'd stopped drinking. And in the photo sessions we had to hide our drinks behind our backs. If you see those photos, we look really miserable and uncomfortable because we're sitting on our beer cans."
"Dark Streets Of London" was the band's first single, a song written by Shane and released initially on the group's own label, It dealt, in no uncertain terms, with London's cardboard-city underbelly, "the sad victims of Gaelic hedonism who sit beneath railway bridges swigging from bottomless bottles of VP", according to Robert Elms of The Face, but comment, when it came, was reserved not for the song, but rather for the name on the label. Pogue Mo Chone - Kiss My Arse. Reported NME writer David Quantick. "They've just had their debut 45 banned by the BBC - except between the hours of 8 to 12pm when it is apparently permissable to say 'Kiss my arse' in a language that no-one understands."
"It's all a misunderstanding," Jem told him. "What's offensive? The -fact is, 'Pogue Mahone' is pretty inoffensive anyway, but who knew what it meant before they decided to ban it? Now lots of people know."
The deal with Stiff was finalised only shortly afterwards, the band signing for an undisclosed advance, and - allegedly - pledging that they would drink nothing more than half pints whilst on stage. They also agreed to do their bit towards alleviating national outrage by abbreviating the name of the group, to The Pogues.
The Kiss My Arse saga, Shane later admitted, "Really fucked us. Mike Read had been playing it (the single) and it was just after 'Relax' got banned so he was rather sensitive. But it got us a lot of publicity....
"But we've always had publicity, right from the start. I don't know why, but we 're definitely doing something in London that nobody else is doing. I don't know whether we're any good but right from the start we've attracted attention.