The Pogues Rereleases.

Warner Press Release
Reviews

Rerelease of the Pogues albums.

The albums can be ordered at Play.com for £8.99 including shipping.
Norwegians: Order this album at www.cdon.com for NOK 89.

The Pogues albums have  been rerelased . The albums are relesed with the tracks in the original vinyl order. The original bonus tracks will be after the album. Live B-sides and 12" mixes has been excluded. The Jem Finer songs "Sound Of The City Night" and "Who Said Romance Is Dead" has been left out.

I have just spent the last two days listening to the reissues. They are awsome. I really like the sound of the remastered Red Roses For Me. The inserts contain a biography of the band written by Gavin Martin and David Quantick , comments by people like Steve Earle and Tom Waits. Sadly the inserts only have the lyrics for the original album, not the bonus tracks. Red Roses For Me doesn't have any lyrics at all in the insert. Anyway these albums would make a great christmas gift for any Pogues fan, so get them for yourself.

Philip Chevrons comment on the errors in the booklets.

I have apologized here at some earlier point for inconsistencies in the resissue packages. We did provide all the correct information to Warners but at some point, a gremlin got in the system. Ordinarily, this would be remedied at a proof-reading stage, but it seems that Warners came under massive pressure at their printers, which is not uncommon at that time of year. This, combined with the fact that all of us who could still insist on the corrections were busy rehearsing for our tour all day, meant that the first batch went out with several errors in the booklets.

Warners assure me that the corrections will be in the NEXT pressings of all the CDs. I imagine you would be within your rights to ask for a replacement from the record company (NOT the record store) at that point.

However, it was never our intention to provide discographical information on the booklets: as our releases varied so much thoughout the world, especially from 1984 to 1989, this would have been a massive and space-consuming task. As we realised many people (not hardcore fans) would be buying these CDs for the first time, it seemed shrewder to provide some chronological context, hence the Gavin Martin and David Quantick essays and the "guest" sleeve notes. We felt that using photos (many unseen) from our archive would provide an added visual punch.

It is not either, I think, within the remit of this site to provide exhaustive discographical information, but there certainly ARE independent Pogues sites that cover our releases in freat detail. Try googling "Pogues" and "discography". and see what you get.

Elvis Costello produced all the tracks on the "Rum Sodomy" expanded CD except "Paddy Garcia" and "Parting Glass" which were produced by myself. On the "Red Roses" CD, Elvis produced "Wild Rover" and "Leaving of Liverpool" and I produced "Muirshin Durkin" and "Whiskey You're The Devil". The rest was produced by Stan Brennan.

Some known errors:

Rum, Sodomy:
"Dirty Old Town' has a running time of 0:00 on the back cover

Peace and Love:
A whole verse is missing from the lyrics to "Boat Train"

Hell's Ditch
"The Wake Of The Medusa" is listed as "The Wake Of The Mudusa"
The opening bass line on The Ghost of a Smile has a sound glitch. 
The same happens on Curse of Love when Shane sings "someone's put a spell on me".

The list of new bonus tracks are the following.

Thanks to Phillip Chevron for Posting this info on the Forum on www.shanemacgowan.com

WARNER BROTHERS PRESS RELEASE.

Warner Strategic Marketing in association with The Pogues will be releasing re-mastered and expanded versions of all seven of The Pogues’ studio albums on November 15th: ‘Red Roses For Me’ (1984), ‘Rum, Sodomy & The Lash’ (1985), ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ (1988), ‘Peace And Love’ (1989), ‘Hell's Ditch’ (1990), ‘Waiting For Herb’ (1993) and ‘Pogue Mahone’ (1995).

The Pogues themselves have overseen this project, supervising the re-mastering process, the artwork and the booklets, commissioning special original sleeve notes from friends and fans Tom Waits, Steve Earle, Jim Jarmusch, Patrick McCabe, Matt Dillon, Bob Geldof and Stuart Pearce. The booklets will also contain some unseen photographs from the different phases of the band's career.

All CDs have been re-mastered from primary tape sources by Nick Robbins. In a distinguished career as an engineer, producer and re-mastering virtuoso, Nick has worked with The Pogues right from the beginning, when he engineered the ‘Red Roses For Me’ and ‘Rum, Sodomy & The Lash’ recordings. Robbins is at present hard at work mixing The Pogues forthcoming live album, recorded at the band's last London concerts at Brixton Academy in December 2001.

Each CD contains up to seven additional songs, comprising contemporaneous tracks which were not previously released on The Pogues albums. Many of these rare sides make their ever first appearance on CD, others for the first time in 20 years.

‘Red Roses For Me’ was The Pogues’ debut LP on signing to Stiff Records, the extra tracks rounding up six b-sides including ‘Repeal Of the Licensing Laws’ and ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Mathilda’ plus four typically fiery re-workings of traditional songs, such a revelation at the time to audiences reared on the London punk scene. The ‘Rum, Sodomy & The Lash’ CD contains the entire ‘Poguetry In Motion’ EP (1986) produced, as was the LP itself, by Elvis Costello. Both sides of the band’s first Top Ten hit ‘The Irish Rover’ (with The Dubliners, 1987) are added to ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’ (1988), the Platinum-selling album which contained the perennial Christmas classic ‘Fairytale Of New York’ (featuring the late Kirsty MacColl, 1987).

Fans will appreciate the appearance of hard-to-get titles like ‘Star Of The County Down’ (1989) and ‘The Limerick Rake’ (1989) on ‘Peace And Love’ (1989) and some great work from the prolific Joe Strummer-produced ‘Hell’s Ditch’ sessions (1990). A further collaboration with The Dubliners adds the single ‘Whiskey In The Jar’/‘Jack’s Heroes’, The Pogues’ own unofficial Irish World Cup song.

Joe Strummer briefly joined The Pogues the following year after Shane MacGowan’s departure in September 1991. By 1993’s ‘Waiting For Herb’, Spider Stacy had become the lead singer and ‘Tuesday Morning’ gave the band its first Top Twenty hit since ‘Fairytale Of New York’.

In total, 36 bonus tracks are spread over the seven sets. Only one of these is completely new - the new CD of the ‘Pogue Mahone’ album (1995) contains the previously-unreleased Stephen Hague single remix of ‘Love You Till The End’. This is included as a tantalising foretaste of a projected box-set of further rarities, demos and unreleased material which will be released in 2005.

The Pogues will be touring the UK and Ireland in December. This is the classic 1987-1993 line-up of Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Jem Finer, Philip Chevron, Terry Woods, Andrew Ranken, James Fearnley and Darryl Hunt which last toured the UK in 2001.

This time, fans will be delighted to know that the band will be joined on vocals by Cait O'Riordan! Cait was The Pogues’ original bass player from 1982-1986 and sang ‘I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Everyday’ on the ‘Rum, Sodomy & The Lash’ album. Recently, she has been playing and singing with Philip Chevron in a reformed line-up of The Radiators (Plan 9).

Source www.pogues.com

Reviews

Review of Reissues Uncut December 2004.

Review of Reissues Mojo December 2004.