The Ninth Life
Of The
Pogues
The word goes out in Tipperary, in County Meath, in Los Angeles, in Nottingham, in North London: the pogues have reformed to play live and, maybe this time, claim their rightful inheritance. CRAIG MACLEAN goes among the wounded.
Copyright: Word Magazine.
THE END WHEN IT CAME, was a blessed relief. For everyone. The Pogues were on tour in Japan. They had just come from or were on their way to Australia. It's hard to tell now; The Pogues were always on tour somewhere. The previous year they had released Hell's Ditch, produced by Joe Strummer. It had a couple of fine moments - Lorca's Novena, Summer In Siam. of the making of that fifth album, Terry Woods (banjo, mandolin) remebers sunny summer days at Rockfield studios in Wales, the World Cup being on good fun being had with Strummer. "Everybody was in great nick, apart from Mac..."
Shane MacGowan recalls guitarist Philip Chevron, was clearly not enjoying himself Midway through recording he had done one of his disappearing acts. It wasn't too much of a worry. "We needed him for vocals but we didn't necessarily need him for anything else. And he came back to do them. I was in the studio when he came in. I had my head down, 'cause I was listening to a track. So I saw his feet first. His shoes looked nice - he tended to his shoes, generally. Then there was a nice pair of light grey slacks, and I got all hopeful. But as my eyes travelled up and I saw his body and his face I thought, 'oh fuck'. He really wasn't in a good way."
The Pogues were on their uppers. On tour things got worsee, as they had to. By the time they reached Japan, things had reached crisis point. "Shane was unhappy being in the group," says bass player Darryl hunt, "but he couldn't just stand up and say, I'm quitting'. His behaviour became his way of quitting."
MacGowan was getting more trashed than usual. He was taking the stage but being next to useless when he got there. "he can perform when he's wasted if he wants to perform," says drummer Andrew Ranken. "But he didn't want to perform."
Spider Stacey (tin whistle, beer tray): "It was kinda obvious that he really, really didn't want to do it any more. it was jsut to difficult." A meeting of all The Pogues, bar MacGowan, was called in a Jpanese hotel room. He had to go. According to MacGowan, Hunt was the only one who had the "guts" to confront him. According to Hunt, he volunteered because he felt he had the least to los - having only graduated from roadie/driver to the rank of bass player following Cait O'Riordan's departure in 1986, he hadn't known and worked with macGowan as long as most of the rest of the band. According to accordion player james Fearnley, they drew straws to see who would talk to MacGowan.
However it happened quickly. Hunt told MacGowan the rest of the band had decided it was doing none of them any favours to carry on working together. "Then Jem [Finer, banjo and guitar] said, 'You're not enjoying it any more are you?" is MacGowan's recollection. "And I said, 'no' And I said is that it? And people shrugged and said 'yeah whatever...' And I said, 'Great! See you later!!"
Stacey: "Then all went out for dinner."
MacGowan: "i'm glad they let me finish the Japanese tour because I love Japan. They give you far more days off there, you're on stage at six o'clock you're off at fucking eight, and the rest of the time..."
They flew out of Japan together. What was Shane thinking on the plane? Freedom?
"Yeah!"
Happiness?
"Yeah. Everybody was happy!"
Spider: Cause it had been resolved."
That was November 1991. The original, proper Pogues - that eight-strong bunch of London-hish hellions who had blazed a boozy worldwide trail for almost a decade - were no more. "I was quite relieved when we asked Shane to leave," reflects Hunt, "because I was worried that he was very ill. I thought he shouldn't be doing it any more because it was actually a danger to his health. As the years rolled on, it turned out that that the group was quite a danger to a few people's health."
The rump of the Pogues would continue for another few years and two albums, briefly recruiting Joe Strummer on vocals but steadily shedding members. They would finally peter out at a gig in the Boston Arms pub in north London in summer 1996. The last song they played, Darryl Hunt thinks, was The Boys From County Hell. Shane MacGowan was there that night, and joined them for a song. When it was announced from the stage that this was the last Pogues gig, the dearly departed former singer
shouted: "About time too!"
SHANE MACGOWAN is unwell. In fact, he looks dead. His body is sitting on a sofa, an array of drinks set out before him - a tumbler of wine, a half-full bottle of Pinot Grigio, a Bloody Mary, some brown liquid in a glass, a scummy mug of stuff - along with three cigarette lighters, a pair of sunglasses, a cheese and tomato baguette that has seemingly been gnawed at by a passing woodland animal, and a hefty clay ashtray that has somehow come a cropper and now lies in bits on the table and the floor. It must have been some party.
MacGowan is oblivious to this tableau, as he has passed out halfway into the shoulderbag that is positioned next to him. As if the effort of rummaging for, say, a fourth Clipper has exhausted his body's final reserves. Heslumps there, immobile. Then, with a jolt of the shoulders and a shake of the head, his hands resume their excavation of the bag's shallow interiors. But oh no, it's all too much. He conks out again.
It was a scratch after 1pm on Wednesday, 6th October 2004. The Boogaloo Bar in Highgate, north London was deserted save for the sound of a workman fixing the lavs and the sound of me shifting uneasily on my feet. I was standing behind the (in every sense) oblivious MacGowan. Pub landlord and sometime MacGowan "handler" Gerry O'Boyle - erst- while proprietor of muso hang-out Filthy McNastys Whiskey Cafe in Islington, promoter of pub,-based literary evenings, and early sponsor of the Libertines -was here a minute ago. Whenever Shane's in town from his home near Tipperary in Ireland, Boyle lets him kip upstairs. But for an uncomfortable few minutes it was just me, looking at the back of Shane MacGowan's big, hairy head.
Wearing what looks like the only clothes he'd brought with him - black shirt, black coat, black trousers - Shane MacGowan was unconscious and dishevelled, not ready to be interviewed. Presently Spider Stacey would show up. A thinner, almost gaunt and teetotal version, certainly, but it was him ahight. Stacey had beaten his alcohol addiction in the eight years since that pub gig swansong, a final act he had little say in due to booze-induced incapacity. Now he sat, upright and twinkly and compactly proportioned, next to the hulking, waicy-faced figure of MacGowan. He would chip in with his own comments, and occasion- ally try to steer his old mucker back onto the anecdotal straight and narrow. Sometimes Stacey and MacGowan would talk at the same time, each ignoring the other. Other times, Stacey would gently distance himself from one of MacGowans more lurid recollections.
The reason for this sitdown is that The Pogues are back. Yes, sure, in late 2001, 10 years after that fateful night in Tokyo, Shane MacGowan rejoined The Pogues for a short series of shows (followed by two big concerts in London and Dublin the following summer). Yes, they went well, save for a sticky first show at their spiritual home, Glasgow Barrowlands. Well enough to record one of the three Brixton Academy nights with a view to making an as-yet-unreleased live album. And well enough to spur them all to try to do it all again last year, before logistical issues got in the way.
But in late 2004, 22 years since their debut gig as Pogue Mahone, The Pogues are properly back-back-back. For the first time since Elvis Costello carried her off in 1986, original bass player Cait O'Riordan has rejoined, too. The Pogues'most famous song, Fairytate Of New York, was written with her in mind; the original demo of the song has her and MacGowan duetting and singing different lyrics. Given the painful absence of Kirsty MacColl, who died in a motorboat accident in Cuba in 2000 ("murdered," spits MacGowan), who better than O'Riordan to sing it now? This "full original line-up" have reconvened for eight shows over the course of their traditional Yuletide stomping ground. This is the reunion for which the faithful have been waiting.
A few miles across north London and a few days later, Darryl Hunt and Andrew Ranken would also sit down and talk about burying old grievances. They were the only two original Pogues who had been fully there at the bitter end in summer 1996. They would tell how the road to reunion started three years ago when Jem Finer had, Blues Brothers-style, gone over to visit MacGowan in Ireland to discuss Putting The Band Back Together. It had been his 1996 announcement that he'd had enough that had signalled the beginning of the end. Terry Woods, reached by telephone at home in Navan, County Meath, would explain why he too was all for another get-together, 11 years after he had followed MacGowan out the door. In the typically short gap between a tour of Germany and a tour of America, he had realised he was working his socks off for no money. He had already managed to knock his drinking on the head, but for his general wellbeing, he had had to escape The Pogues. So shell-shocked was he by his time in the band that Woods, a veteran musician whose career stretched back to Steeleye Span, would- not play in bands for eight years after leaving.
Guitarist Philip Chevron had shipped out shortly after Woods on account of his own battles with drink. Speaking at home in Nottingham, he also pronounced himself eager to let sleeping dogs lie. He offered that Cait O'Riordan, with whom he occasionally plays in The Radiators, was certainly up for performing again with the band she left in 1986, "but she feels it might be a little presumptuous to speak after 18 years". She wasn't asked to the last reunion, it seems, because then she was still married to Costello.
Finally there was accordion player James Fearnley, who had left The Pogues at Christmas 1993. Then, he'd married an American actress, had a child and set up home in California. Travelling the world on the never-ending Pogues tour had become incompatible with his situation. But chatting on the steps of the Los Angeles Public Library, he was chipper at the prospect of hooking up with the crew he hadn't seen in a long time.
The Pogues were a band who were always so much more than the sum of their misshaped parts. Their return is undoubtedly a cause for celebration. The fact that they're all happily talking to each other, too, is cause for a minor miracle. Heck, as more than one member will opine, the fact that they're all alive is astonishing.