Celtic Soul Rebels

Written by: Ann Scanlon
Source & copyright:  MOJO Magazine September 2004

September 5, 1985: AN OLD-FASHIONED PRESS conference is taking place live on one of Ireland's hottest radio shows, the BPFO. On one side are The Pogues, who have just released their second album, Rum Sodomy & The Lash, on the other is a mixed panel of journalists, musicians and fans. In the chair is host B.P Fallon. The debate takes a sudden downturn when a well known concertina player called Noel Hill, who has recorded with Planxty and Christy Moore, describes The Pogues as "a terrible abortion" of Irish music. The whole thing deteriorates into a slanging match, becoming The Pogues' equivalent of the Sex Pistols' Bill Grundy affair, with drummer Andrew Ranken bringing things to a head. "I think it just comes down to sex. I mean are you a better fucker than me?" he asks. Bassist Cait O'Riordan (the future Mrs Elvis Costello) adds to the chaos by responding to the accusation that she is "a pig" by snorting for a full five seconds.
      It is an incident that The Pogues' frontman Shane MacGowan, still recalls today in colourful detail. "Noel Hill told me that I was rubbishing Irish folk music by writing obscene, filthy lyrics, so I said, I'm just writing in the tradition, which is raunchy and dirty and ballsy and humourous and sad and funny and horrifically realistic - life is not a little music box., or alittle Irish concertina, like the one you play. And basically that was that. We won the argument."
    It's difficult to imagine how shocking The Pogues sounded to some people at that time. In a world where the Irish theme pub had yet to be dreamt up and Gerry Adams was still being given an actoræs voiceover on the TV news, The Pogues were a revolutionary concept.
    They looked like the last gang in town and sounded like the Sex Pistols hijacking a top-class Irish jukebox: getting drunk with The Dubliners, taking speed with the Tulla Ceili Band and coming down with Johnny McEvoy; raw and aggressive, but also literate, melodic and deeply romantic. "People had never heard Irish music getting that type of treatment before," says Frank Murray, who managed the band between November 1984 and February 1991. "The Pogues got Irish music by the scruff of the neck and just ripped it up. They weren't confined by any law and they didn't belong to any county or to any hierarchy, so they were really shocking to some of the traditional Irish musicians. They reacted to The Pogues the way people had originally reacted to the Sex Pistols."

THE POGUES MAY HAVE HAD A FEW DETRACTORS IN the early autumn of 1985, but thousands of people were falling in love with them. "Have you heard of The Pogues?" Tom Waits had asked a journalist that summer. "They're like the Dead End Kids on a leaky boat. That Treasure Island kind of decadence. There's something really nice about them."
   Almost two decades later, Waits is still sufficiently enamoure with The Pogues to have penned sleevenotes for the reissue of the five albums that the band released between 1984 and 1990. He is not the only contemporary songwriter who is a fan of Shane MacGowan's work - it is also adrnired and respected by everyone from Nick Cave and Bobby Gillespie to Bono and Christy Moore. "Shane's lyrics bring me to a place that I know," says Moore, who's made several of MacGowan's songs his own. "I know his country, I've been through his meadow, across his bog, down his street and I love his work dearly. He is a man of words and raw emotion and understated pain that comes crawling out of the lyrics like the madness crawling out of the mountain."
   "Shane's one of the best songwriters in the world and I've always believed that," concurs Steve Earle, who played live and recorded the track Johnny Come Lately with The Pogues in March 1988. Following the success of their Christmas 1987 single, Fairytale Of New York, The Pogues released their third album, If I Should Fafl From Grace With God, in January, and then finished off a sold-out UK tour with an epic six-night run at London's Town & Country club during St Patrick's week (such was the demand for tickets that a seventh night at Brixton Academy had to be added).
   It was a blinding set that also featured Kirsty MacColl, some Specials and Joe Strummer singing Clash classics London Calling and I Fought The Law. There was simply nowhere else to be in London that week. "The Pogues were at their absolute peak and it was wild," recalls Steve Earle. "The drink of choice at the time was pints of vodka and orange juice, and it was amazing that the whole thing didn't collapse under its own weight, but somehow it didn't. Being on-stage with The Pogues convinced me that acousfic instruments could be effective when played extremely loud. They really affected the way that I perform and there's a lot of attitude and sticking to my guns that I've done over the years that is a direct result of knowing The Pogues at that point in history.

"LIKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE WHO ENCOUNTERED THE Pogues in the mid-'80s, Steve Earle's enduring memory is of MacGowan and Spider acting out a scene from Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. So closely did they rnirror each other as they relived the "This guy is a fuckin' mook" brawl over and over again that it was impossible to tell where one Johnny Boy ended and the other began. They were a highly entertaining, razor-witted double act, also capable of delivering Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Walter Hill's The Long Riders and - Spider's speciality - the Sergio Leone epic, Once Upon A Time America.
Sitting with the two of them in a Japanese restaurant in the centre of Dublin all these years later, the chemistry that existed between them is still evident as they try to pinpoint exactly how The Pogues evolved.
   MacGowan: "After punk, nobody was interested in listening to Iots of swear words unless it was done really well, and that's one thing that Irish music has always excelled at..."
   Spider: "Swearing eloquently."
   MacGowan: "In a long line, you know what I mean? I just happened to write a couple of songs about drinking with a few swear words in them and literally there you go. "
    But they're getting ahead of us. Although The Pogues took shape in a north London squat in 1981/82, their story - like so many others from PiL and Dexys to The Sniiths and Oasis - begins in Ireland.
   Born on Christmas Day, 1957, Shane MacGowan spent the first sixyears of his life at his maternal grandparents' home in north-west Tipperary. "It was an open house, so there were hundreds of people coming in and out of it all the time," he says, "lots of gambling, drinking, music, dancing, singing and storytelling. All those things went together and made Ireland a better place to be than England."
   When he finally moved to central London, MacGowan grieved for the loss of Ireland and the company of his elder relatives, and went back to Tipperary at every opportunity. At the age of 13, an essay dissecting the work of T S. Eliot won him a scholarship to the top public school, Westninster, but he was expelled, following a drugs bust, after just one year. "Being in London did have its compensations," he says "Jesus loves a sinner and there's no point in having a confessional if you're not going to do something you have to confess. So London offered a beautiful opportunity for me to become a disgrace (laughs)."