You shebeen there!
Copyright: MOJO Magazine
Author: Pat Gilberty

A decade of Mahone, buffed up, with each CD enhanced with a handful of B-sides. By Pat Gilbert

The Pogues

Red Roses For Me
* * * *
Rum Sodomy & The Lash
* * * * * 
If I Should Fall From Grace With God
* * * * * 
Peace & Love
* * 
Hell's Ditch
*
Waiting For Herb
*
Pogue Mahone
*

THE WONDERFUL thing about the '80s is no one told The Pogues they'd happened. In 1983, the same year that New Order released Blue Monday, The Pogues emerged armed with nothing but battered acoustic guitars, an accordion and a tea tray for beating time on the tin whistle player's head. They soon unleashed three of the finest LPs of the decade.

   In the early'80s, Irish folk music was about as fashionable as country was in the 1960s before Gram Parsons hipped his pals to the glory of Hank Williams and George Jones. For all their punk spleen, The Pogues, like Gram, respectfully observed the folk tradition of presenting their originals alongside their time-served antecedents: 
thus, on the marvellous Roses For Me, MacGowan's rattling odes to drugs, death, "Camden Palace poofs" and gin-palace psychos merged with faithful covers of Poor Paddy, Waxie's Dargle and Behan's haunting The Auld Triangle. 

    That the two strands, old and new, seamlessly dovetailed together was, in part, testament to The Pogues' often underrated rnusicianship and intuitive gift for timeless folk arrangements - banjo, tin whistle, mandolin, 

 accordion, acoustic guitar, marching drums. But what elevated them into a truly great band was, of course, Shane. Within a year, he went from writing barbed, Bostik-driven knees-ups like Transmetropolitan and Streams Of Whiskey, to crafting peerless, poetic ballads such as A Pair Of Brown Eyes (written from the point of view of a pissed-up Great War mutilé) and The Old Main Drag (a dying Piccadilly rent boy reflecting on his life). At his very best, MacGowan trumped even his own heroes Behan, Bogle and MacColl for dewy-eyed sentiment, squalor and grit. 

    Rum, Sodomy& The Lash had the added allure of bassist Cait O'Riordan's sweet vocals; after she left, the addition of legendary Irish multi-instrumentalist Terry Woods took The Pogues' music to another level, and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1987) saw the add Piddle, pipes, brass, piano. The result was an amazingly original, democratically written and ethnically adventurous album, featuring the mad mariachi rumpus of Fiesta, the finest Xmas singalong ever, Fairytale Of New York, and MacGowan's rousing mature masterpiece, The Broad Majestic Shannon. 

    After that, it was downhill rapidly: Peace & Love saw gaping cracks appear in the now dissolute MacGowan's fag-stained burr and gift for classic melodies. By Hell's Ditch they'd lost the plot. Shane left, and The Pogues struggled on, a shadow of their former selves. Oddly, Gram's assimilation of country changed American music forever; The Pogues turned out to be a musical dead end, but remain the great anomalous geniuses of their time.

Hear tracks at www.mojo4music.com