Category: Pogues

Pogues

FOUR TRACK MIND : A RANDOM SERIES OF EXTENDED PLAY SINGLES

A guest series by Fraser Pettigrew (aka our New Zealand correspondent)

#5: Poguetry in Motion – The Pogues (1986)

In the mid to late 1980s, as I’ve mentioned before, my taste in music took a folky turn as I drifted away from a rock and pop scene that for me had lost its post-punk vibrancy. Through listening to John Peel since the late 70s I had come to share his enjoyment of traditional Irish folk music like The Chieftains, whom he played regularly, alongside occasional outbursts of Shetland fiddle orchestras, and I was also drawn to folk-influenced acts like The Proclaimers.

The Pogues had erupted on the scene in 1984, puncturing the façade of New Romanticism, an irrepressible pimple forcing its ruddy irritation through pop’s inch-thick mask of foundation and blusher. Punk’s spirit of anarchy was tossed into a barrel with the elemental appeal of traditional Irish music, given a good shake and poured onto the stage like a farmer’s protest on the town hall steps. ‘Genuine’ folk fans were appalled and revolted, rebels looking for a cause mobbed the mosh pit and drank it down by the pint.

Frontman Shane MacGowan snarled his songs from a mouth like a vandalised graveyard. An unlikely looking pop star, his features were already familiar to punk fans from a series of infamous photos taken at a Clash concert in 1976 where he was seen splattered in blood (from his own ripped earlobe, it turned out, rudely relieved of its safety-pin earring by the bass player of The Modettes).

Not just a pretty face, however, MacGowan rapidly gathered accolades for his songwriting after The Pogues’ second album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash provoked positive reviews in August 1985. Their first album, Red Roses for Me, had also been greeted as welcome refreshment, but it had passed me by, I confess. The second album slightly dialled down the frantic, showing that The Pogues weren’t just cracking a joke by playing folk tunes at Ramones tempo. Songs like The Old Main Drag and A Pair of Brown Eyes were an authentically original take on the Irish exile experience, and to close the album The Pogues wrung every last drop of bitter pathos out of Eric Bogle’s classic And the Band Played Waltzing Mathilda.

The Poguetry in Motion EP was released in late February 1986 on Stiff Records, the first new material after Rum, Sodomy and the Lash. Three singles from that album, the aforementioned Pair of Brown Eyes, Sally MacLennane and a cover of Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town, had all failed to reach the UK top 40, but Poguetry finally cracked it, peaking at 29. If this was on the merits of the opening track London Girl I’d be surprised as it’s not especially good. It feels like rather a conventional pop song draped in Pogue-like stylings, but it’s neither a ripping Irish tune nor a winning pop hit. MacGowan’s lyrics are fine, with some characteristic poetic touches, but the arrangement races through them with hardly time to breathe.

The second song, Rainy Night In Soho, however, is undoubtedly the lead track on the EP (there’s a video for it), an all-time Pogues classic, and one of MacGowan’s most poignant ballads, confirming him as rock’s most romantic, sentimental old drunk. Lines that might sound hopelessly cliched on anyone else’s lips become scenes from a lover’s tender dream in his gruffly slurred melancholic reverie. Strings and brass elevate the song to a stirring conclusion, the repetitive refrain anchoring it in a century-old Irish popular tradition.

The string and brass conclusion, however, ultimately proved the catalyst for The Pogues and their producer Elvis Costello to part ways. Two versions were recorded, one with a flugelhorn solo over the finale, one with an oboe. Costello insisted on the oboe, but MacGowan was prepared to die in a ditch for the flugelhorn. MacGowan got his way on this, the UK version, the oboe had its day on the Canadian and US releases.

Fans of David Simon’s HBO police series The Wire will be well familiar with the first track on the flip side, The Body of an American, which features at several wakes for deceased officers in the Sidebar Tavern, the Irish bar near the Baltimore police HQ. Even without this immortalisation, it’s another Pogues classic, formed in the mould that made The Sick Bed of Cuchullain.

A slow intro in 3/4 time sets the scene of small boys hanging around the wake for big Jim Dwyer, a ‘Yank’ deceased in some Irish location. Then suddenly the tempo doubles into a rollicking jig with the memorable verse: “But 15 minutes later we had our first taste of whiskey / There was uncles giving lectures on ancient Irish history / The men all started telling jokes and the women, they got frisky / By five o’clock in the evening every bastard there was piskey”. The chorus refrain of “I’m a free-born man of the USA” ensured the song’s instant appeal to the Irish-American diaspora, fictionally in The Wire, for real in every St Paddy’s Day party ever since. The final chorus gives way to a long and delicious fade-out led by guest musician Tommy Keane’s irresistible uileann pipes.

I always took the final track, Planxty Noel Hill, as some sort of tribute to the folk group of that name, assuming Hill to have been one of its members. He was, very briefly, as a stand-in, but the gesture to him is of the two-fingered variety as it turns out. ‘Planxty’ apparently means something like ‘cheers’ in Irish, so has nothing directly to do with the group, and Hill made a bit of a tit of himself by very publicly denouncing The Pogues’ music as a “terrible abortion” on Irish radio. In an Irish context you can imagine how language like that went down. Jem Finer’s lively, cheeky instrumental was The Pogues’ musical flick of the Vs in Hill’s general direction.

My copy of Poguetry in Motion is the 7” 33rpm version. The 12” version has exactly the same tracks but plays at 45, of course.

London Girl

Rainy Night in Soho

The Body of an American

Planxty Noel Hill

 

Fraser

Butcher Boy, Camera Obscura, Jam, Pipettes, Pogues, Primitives, R.E.M., Ride, Ronettes, Smiths

AN IMAGINARY COMPILATION ALBUM : #386: TEN LOVELY TRACKS

A GUEST POSTING from STRANGEWAYS

Ten Lovely Tracks : An Imaginary Compilation Album

Welcome to a lovely Imaginary Compilation Album. That’s not me bigging-up this mix, but rather offering a literal description, for this is an ICA of songs deemed to be ‘lovely’ in nature. Immediately this business of a song being lovely is subjective of course. But the closest I got to a criterion was including tracks that, when you hear them, kind of wrap their arms around you.

It should be stated that this list is very, very far from exhaustive; the mountain of should-have-rans continues growing.

Side 1

1. The Ronettes: Walking in the Rain (single A-side, 1964, Philles)

I won’t attempt to add too much to the weight of words that must have been written about this song since The Ronettes released it in October 1964. I’m really not qualified, so to do so would be like writing about lofty cultural fixtures like the Mona Lisa or Ant & Dec’s Saturday Night Takeaway.

That said, a thunderclap kicks the track off and immediately we’re in a dreamland co-created of course by an ace Phil Spector production. With its references to shyness, its grown-up assertion that ‘sometimes we’ll fight’, its fondness for wishing on stars and of course its championing of rain over sun you could say that thematically Walking in the Rain gifted a bit of a blueprint to the indiepop genre that would emerge fifteen or so years later.

The track is just super, and so far as its inclusion here is concerned, its sheer loveliness fought off the likes of Past, Present and Future by the Shangri-Las, Thinkin’ ‘Bout You Baby by Sharon Marie and A Lover’s Concerto by The Toys.

Loveliest line: ‘Walking in the rain and wishing on the stars up above, and being so in love… ’

2. The Jam: Wasteland (Setting Sons LP track, 1979, Polydor)

I am really no Jam expert whatsoever. It’s daft, of course, that I haven’t explored beyond the singles and a couple of LPs. Moron. But the album I know best is Setting Sons. And the track I love most is Wasteland.

That Paul Weller was only, what, 21 max when he wrote the elegant words of Wasteland is astonishing to me. Listing the wasteland’s decorations – including punctured footballs, ragged dolls and rusting bicycles – he conjures up the grimy props of a world in which ‘to be caught smiling’s to acknowledge life’ as two lovers? Ex-lovers? Never-were lovers? Just friends? sit amid the trash and stoke over the past. Certainly if the theory that Setting Sons was intended – but not realised – as a concept album concerned with the lives of three childhood friends, the relationship could well be platonic. The reference to hand-holding though perhaps hints at something else.

Adding to the overall loveliness of this track are notes from a recorder – an instrument, in the UK at least, recalling tuneless school music classes. Here though, sounding not unlike the calls from a bird on high, it puffs out an innocent intro and pops up again at a key line.

Finally, that Weller gets so much detail of his wasteland – ‘meet me on the wastelands, the ones behind the old houses, the ones left standing pre-war, the ones overshadowed by the monolith monstrosities councils call homes’ – to even scan properly is remarkable.

Loveliest line: ‘Meet me later – but we’ll have to hold hands… ’

3. R.E.M.: At My Most Beautiful (Up LP track, 1998, Warner Bros.)

Of all the bands selected to populate this ICA, R.E.M. gave me the most trouble. In surveying the songs I know of them – and to be fair that although it’s not 100% knowledge it’s not by any stretch horrendous either – it rapidly became apparent that you could, before breakfast, create an ICA of ‘Lovely Songs Just by R.E.M.’.

So what to do?

That’s easy – choose a total slushfest, and from an unfancied LP, that will annoy the readers of this blog. So apologies to the exalted likes of Perfect Circle, Wendell Gee and The Flowers of Guatemala, plus Half A World Away, Nightswimming and Electrolite. Here instead is At My Most Beautiful, from 1998 album Up.

I seem to remember that at the time a common brickbat chucked at this song was that it was ‘R.E.M. trying to sound like The Beach Boys’. It is. And I further remember thinking ‘great’.

Sure, it’s kind of saccharine and soppy, but the overall result is lovely – which is of course what we’re after here. Added to this, the words of this big value track also provide…

The Grand Indie Boy or Girl’s Guide to Snagging a Partner

Three sure-fire ways to reverse the joy of solitude:

1. Read bad poetry into their machine (or, for the less ancient, their mobile phone)

2. Save their messages just to hear their voice – (perhaps keep this one to yourself)

3. Count their eyelashes, secretly (and for bonus points, with every one whisper ‘I love you’)

Loveliest line: ‘You always listen carefully to awkward rhymes, you always say your name like I wouldn’t know it’s you, at your most beautiful.. ’

4. The Pogues: Lullaby of London (If I Should Fall From Grace With God LP track, 1987, WEA)

The Pogues are probably at their best when they’re rocking the furious likes of Boys From The County Hell and Sally MacLenanne, or Turkish Song of the Damned and Bottle of Smoke. But grand as these are, you could hardly call any of these breathless beauties lovely. That’s a job instead for Lullaby of London, from the revered 1987 album If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

Here, Shane MacGowan takes us on a kind of stroll located by a river and in the springtime. On this jaunt, in the main, his words are mystical and supernatural (ghosts and haunted graves and angels are present). But he ambles also in the urban: and despite noting the absence of a cry from a lonesome corncrake – any twitcher will tell you i) that’s a bird and ii) its binomial nomenclature is Crex crex – he seems satisfied enough with the sounds of cars and bars and laughter and fights.

This is a song that feels older than it is or, to put it more delicately, could be of another age. Were it not for that reference to motor cars, the whole expedition could be taking place a century-and-a-half ago. Remove the pubs and you spool back even further. Laughter and fights though have surely been with us since the first caveman cracked an off-colour joke and instigated a brawl.

Enough. All that’s left to say is that if the words to Lullaby of London are remarkable, the band is totally on point too, especially via the lilting mandolin that quietly matches the lyrics for sheer emotional punch.

It’s odd, but a speck of dust always lands in my eye whenever I hear this track.

Loveliest line: ‘May the wind that blows from haunted graves never bring you misery, may the angels bright watch you tonight and keep you while you sleep… ’

5. The Primitives: We Found a Way to the Sun (Really Stupid 7” single B-side, 1986, Lazy Recordings)

Somewhat inevitably the band with the LP titled Lovely was always going to make it onto this ICA. And, also somewhat inevitably, the song selected here does not in fact feature on that album. Instead, it’s We Found a Way to the Sun – curiously styled, on the subsequent Lazy 86-88 compilation, and other anthologies that followed, as (We’ve) Found a Way (to the Sun).

Bracketed or not, it is just one of several absolutely killer formative Primitives B-sides. Delivered inside yet another early Prims sleeve to die for,

this smasher popped up in 1986 on the Really Stupid 7” single and, on 12”, alongside Where the Wind Blows. That gem of a fellow B-side, set at the witching hour and chockful of associated imagery, is the one I’d actually started writing about for this post. But that was before the handbrake turn you’re now reading.

Why the switch?

The truth is that either track could have made it, but the distorted, beautiful intro and subsequent melody of We Found a Way to the Sun just pipped Where the Wind Blows to the post. Add to these Tracy Tracy’s wide-eyed and hurt-sounding vocal, and we really do achieve Primitives perfection. Also, there’s a curiosity to celebrate: no chorus is offered – just one bewitching verse followed by repetition of the song’s title.

Loveliest line: ‘But it’s all too good to be true, I don’t know just what I should do, I love everything about you… ’

Side 2

1. Camera Obscura: My Maudlin Career (My Maudlin Career LP track, 2009, 4AD)

This title track to Camera Obscura’s fourth LP is both eminently huggable and a real bruiser. Its opening twenty-five seconds could be mistaken for a Wall of Sound production as keys and strings and brass add layer after layer of sock-knocking assault. And as the late Carey Lander’s incessant, trebly keys heroically wrangle it all into a followable structure, Tracyanne Campbell’s words speak of a relationship – the maudlin career of the title – going wrong (perhaps best distilled in the lines ‘we were love at first sight, now this crush is crushing’).

Despite the tale of a partnership on the skids, this is yet another lovely song from a band that specialises in them.

Loveliest line: ‘I’ll brace myself for the loneliness, say hello to feelings that I despise… ’

2. The Pipettes: A Winter’s Sky (We Are the Pipettes LP track, 2006, Memphis Industries)

Oh crumbs, not again. Look, I know I included this track on the Pipettes ICA I scribbled several years ago, but it’s just too lovely a fit not to revisit it. And what I wrote then remains, so I won’t deviate from it. The harmonies. The shimmer. The warm pootle of brass before the little Smithsy sound effect that chills the closing line ‘the last we saw of her, it came too soon’.

This is only ever played in our – that’s me and the furniture – house during winter (official three/four-month winter, I mean, not the Scottish one).

Loveliest line: ‘Underneath a winter’s sky, her eyes were bright, tonight he finds her underneath a winter’s moon… ’

3. Butcher Boy: I Could Be in Love With Anyone (Profit in Your Poetry LP track, 2007, How Does It Feel To Be Loved?)

A bit like R.E.M., there are loads of Butcher Boy songs you could tag as lovely. ‘Poetic’ is kind of a lazy descriptor for John Blain Hunt’s lyrics, but that doesn’t stop it being any less accurate. He’s a master of fastidious and forensic observation, and an expert in uplifting and championing the ordinary: pebbledash and paper chains, chimes and chewing gum.

Despite, or perhaps because of, the sheer quality that threads through Butcher Boy’s three LPs so far, this is a band that adheres stoically to a less-is-more philosophy. Releases are sporadic – bookended by years that meanwhile continue their business of totting up births and marriages and deaths. Gigs, at best, the same. World Cups occur more regularly. Plus, in spite of heavyweight patronage from names including Stuart Murdoch and John Niven, Ian Rankin and Peter Paphides (whose Needle Mythology label released the 2021 BB compilation You Had a Kind Face), there remains a Sundays-like reticence to seek the limelight. As listeners, we’re the losers in these arrangements of course. But you kind of wouldn’t really have it any other way.

To the song though. Winning out for this compilation is I Could Be in Love With Anyone, the fourth track on the first Butcher Boy LP Profit in Your Poetry.

Lyrically there’s a little of the celestial in this tale of a character who visits in dreams and flies around the walls of a room. Amid some good intentions there seems to be selfishness too, characterised by a title that could be delivered with a shrug, and also by the delight taken in ‘breaking hearts for fun’. From hearing this treasure years ago I quickly, and surely wrongly, settled on the idea that the words are describing my own favourite antihero Peter Pan.

Loveliest line: I’m actually going to reproduce the song entire for this entry, and hope you agree that choosing just one lovely line would be something of a disservice.

Listen, please don’t close your eyes
I don’t know how I know what you’re thinking but I

I’ve never felt so far away
Blood is chiming bells through you

But listen, that’s OK ‘cos I’m frightened too

And tenderly I write today

That I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun


Listen, tell me what’s gone wrong

And I will come in dreams and I’ll bleed into songs

So you can sing them back to me.
Sun suspends my days in dust

If my love made you lonely I’m sorry but

The feeling flowed so easily

But I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun

Glass reflects my eyes and skin

But still my lips will crumble like ash when we kiss

So cynically I shift the blame
I could fall upon this house

Or fly across these walls with your heart in my mouth

But honey I would rather stay


Where I could be in love with anyone

I’ve been breaking hearts for fun

4. Ride: Vapour Trail (Nowhere LP track, 1990, Creation)

This is probably the song that inspired the whole ICA. I’ve always struggled to find a better word than ‘lovely’ to summarise the romantic Vapour Trail, the track that closes Ride’s debut LP Nowhere.

Vapour Trail is dreamy and delicate and from its wispy intro to its choppy string-laden exit lifts you into a whole other place. Best of all, the words – describing total adoration and beguilement – feel like they were scratched onto a jotter during double geography, a carefully crooked arm shielding them from the ridicule of the class bully.

Loveliest line: ‘You are a vapour trail in a deep blue sky… ‘

5. The Smiths: I Won’t Share You (Strangeways, Here We Come LP track, 1987, Rough Trade)

After – literally – decades of internal debate and agony I concluded some years ago that My Favourite Smiths Song is this: I Won’t Share You, the very last track on the very last LP.

I mention its placement on Strangeways, Here We Come deliberately as it is crucial to its victory. That’s thanks really to Simon Goddard’s 2002 book Songs That Saved Your Life (Reynolds & Hearn Ltd.) – a painstaking track-by-track analysis of the band’s discography (and so dippable it should be sold with a lollypop and inside a poke of sherbet). There, Goddard notes that I Won’t Share You melts out with the subtlest little breath of faded-out harmonica. It’s an addition so brief and gentle in fact that it’s essentially drowned at birth. But, and here’s the kicker, Goddard – who beautifully and correctly describes the song as ‘a deeply affecting lullaby’ – cleverly connects this sigh of a coda with the band’s first offering, the Hand in Glove single, which begins with, amazingly, a faded-in harmonica.

This, the writer states, returns The Smiths full circle, pinging them from 1987 back to 1983, and all without a DeLorean and flux capacitor in sight.

You can call this proposed loop a reach of course, and it’s an unashamedly romantic way to view the band’s birth and death (and perpetual rebirth-by-harmonica). Amid these gymnastics after all is the troubling and inconvenient fact that The Smiths’ actual last recordings occurred in May 1987, a month after Strangeways had wrapped. These were created at a B-side session whose content and atmosphere so browned-off the already irritated Johnny Marr that it’s not dramatic to state it contributed significantly to the band’s ending.

So for fans of Cluedo, you could say it was the Cilla Black cover, in the studio, with the microphone wot did it.

Even so, the harmonica yarn is a notion I utterly subscribe to and, throughout that years-long agitation across which any helpful criteria was welcome, it earned I Won’t Share You my top spot.

Prettifying the number even further there is of course the debate regarding its lyrics. Specifically, this is concerned with whether or not they constitute Morrissey’s farewell to Johnny Marr. The song would have been completed just a few months before the group dissolved, then released just weeks after the split. It’s widely thought the singer disliked the idea of the guitarist collaborating with others, or even getting close to essential associates like managers and producers. Against those assumptions it’s easy to make a case for the disputed possibility that I Won’t Share You is the sonic equivalent of a note left upon the kitchen table (or, for Smiths trainspotters, perhaps pinned beneath a windscreen wiper).

Whatever the truth, and whether or not you buy the Magic Harmonica Theory and/or the potential Dear Johnny nature of the lines, it’s a song that’s a worthy last word on both The Smiths – it was surely the only serious track ten candidate – and on this collection of lovely songs, which I hope you’ve enjoyed reading about and maybe visiting/revisiting.

Loveliest line: ‘I’ll see you somewhere, I’ll see you sometime, darling… ’

Thanks as ever to Jim for the space and opportunity, and to you for reading.

 

STRANGEWAYS

Pogues

FROM THE ARCHIVES (3)

clusc_8_1_00328428a_j-thumb-450x324

It’s time to partially close down the blog for the period over Christmas and New Year.  This time around I’m going to put up a re-posting from times gone by, and I’ll try my best to have all of them feature musicians whose appearances have been infrequent.

This dates from 24 December 2014

IT WAS CHRISTMAS EVE BABE, IN THE…..

mp3 : Tindersticks – Drunk Tank

Don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m well fed-up with hearing the same old festive-related songs in every single shop I go into as I search for the perfect last-minute gift for Mrs Villain. Consider this my equivalent of the dirty protest.

But tune in tomorrow for what has become the regular 25th December posting on TVV (and no looking back to previous years to spoil it….)

Hope Santa is good to you all.

JC

Pogues

A RANDOM A-Z OF SINGLES : FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK

The traffic to the blog slows up over the Festive period, and it’s therefore something of an opportunity to take a bit of a breather.

Over a period of 26 days, I’ll be posting a single never previously featured on its own before – it might have sneaked in as part of an ICA or within a piece looking at various tracks – with the idea of an edited cut’n’paste from somewhere (most likely wiki) and then all the songs from either the vinyl or CD.

F is for Fairytale of New York, released by The Pogues as a single in November 1987.

Fairytale of New York is a song written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and featuring Kirsty MacColl on vocals. The song is an Irish folk-style ballad and was written as a duet, with the Pogues‘ singer MacGowan taking the role of the male character and MacColl the female character. It was originally released as a single on 23 November 1987 and later featured on the Pogues’ 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God.

Originally begun in 1985, the song had a troubled two-year development history, undergoing rewrites and aborted attempts at recording, and losing its original female vocalist along the way, before finally being completed in August 1987. Although the single has never been the UK Christmas number one, being kept at number two on its original release in 1987 by the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Always on My Mind, it has proved enduringly popular with both music critics and the public: to date the song has reached the UK Top 20 on 17 separate occasions since its original release in 1987, including every year at Christmas since 2005. As of September 2017 it had sold 1,217,112 copies in the UK, with an additional 249,626 streaming equivalent sales, for a total of 1,466,738 combined sales. In December 2020, the song was certified quadruple platinum in the UK for 2,400,000 combined sales.

mp3: The Pogues – Fairytale of New York
mp3: The Pogues – The Battle March Medley
mp3: The Pogues – Shanne Bradley

These were the songs included on the 1987 12″ single.

Merry Christmas Everyone.

JC

Pogues

ALL OUR YESTERDAYS : (2/15) : IF I SHOULD FALL FROM GRACE WITH GOD

Album: If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Review: Rolling Stone, 25 February 1988
Author: Kurt Loder

The Pogues‘ basic stance – wild Irish boozehounds with a passion for traditional Celtic reels and squeals revved up to punk velocity – would be enough to arrest anyone’s attention on the current sappy pop scene. That there’s more to the group than simple stylistic gimmickry – a lot more – is the happy news delivered with its long-delayed third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God.

The Pogues were never quite what their image suggested, of course: their electrifying ensemble cohesion betrays a musical rigor beyond the reach of the merely besotted, and their leader, Shane MacGowan, is too artful and emotionally complex a songwriter to quite fit the role of head souse. With this – their first LP since 1985’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash – the group stands revealed as the most inspiring trad-fusion band since Fairport Convention.

All of the Pogues’ considerable art is apparent here in tracks like the lilting “Fairytale of New York” and the corrosive “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six.” The former sketches the transience of romantic love against the evergreen joys of yuletide. Duetting with singer Kirsty MacColl (the wife of producer Steve Lillywhite – who has imbued his LP with sonic kicks galore – and the daughter of the celebrated songwriter Ewan MacColl), MacGowan tells the tale of an expatriate love affair, which began in delight one long-ago Christmas Eve, when “the boys of the NYPD choir were singin’ ‘Galway Bay,'” but which has since hit the skids (“You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap, lousy faggot,” MacColl sings, “Happy Christmas, your ass/I pray God it’s our last”). The combination of seasonal buoyancy (conveyed by the arrangement’s Gaelic pipes and lush strings) and personal disillusionment is unlike anything else in recent pop – as is MacGowan’s voice, which, as always, sounds as if it had been marinated since birth in a mixture of gin and nicotine.

The two-part “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six,” on the other hand, is the Pogues’ most overtly political statement to date, a cry of outrage over the allegedly unjust incarceration of six Irishmen for an English bombing. The track starts out as a wistful, muted ballad, then explodes into a raging assault, with MacGowan decrying the fate of the six men “picked up and tortured and framed by the law … for bein’ Irish at the wrong place and at the wrong time.” The anger here seems very real, and the music puts it across like a punch in the face.

The rest of the album takes Celtic trad (fifes, accordions, bodhráns and all) into similarly uncharted stylistic waters, from the crazy cornball Orientalia of “Turkish Song of the Damned” and the effervescent pop of “The Broad Majestic Shannon” to the almost-out-of-control “Fiesta” (a sort of Spanish beer-hall raveup) and the bittersweet going-to-America anthem “Thousands Are Sailing.” There are also straight trad snippets (most memorably the woozy “Worms”), a tumultuous big-band excursion (“Metropolis”) and even a sod’s lullaby (the gorgeous “Lullaby of London”). Obviously, the Pogues can do it all. And it sounds as if they’ve only just begun.

JC adds…….

Merry Christmas one and all.

mp3: The Pogues – Fairytale of New York (feat. Kirsty MacColl)
mp3: The Pogues – Streets of Sorrow/ The Birmingham Six
mp3: The Pogues – Turkish Song of The Damned
mp3: The Pogues – Thousands Are Sailing

 

Pogues

I RECKON THIS IS THE HAPPIEST SONG IN MY ENTIRE COLLECTION

The Pogues felt pretty untouchable back in the late 80s. They had emerged out of the London punk movement – indeed a number of the members first hooking up while attending a Ramones gig in 1977. They fused Celtic connections to the energy of the new wave scene, finding ways to include banjo, mandolin, tin whistle and accordion alongside the traditional vocal/guitar/bass/drums make-up of punk bands. They also found fame and fortune via the then traditional route of extensive gigging, particularly around the pubs and venues of London gaining a reputation for ridiculously energetic and chaotic live shows. They found themselves being quoted by The Clash and Elvis Costello, touring and working with them from an early stage.

I was initially suspicious of them, thinking that it was all a bit gimmicky and was London’s way of trying to somehow feel important in the music scene at a time when the provincial cities were very much to the fore. And then The Pogues played the Students Union at Strathclyde University in June 1985, just a matter of days before I graduated – the gig was in many ways my planned farewell to the building that had been such a big part of my life over the previous four years and without which my knowledge of, and love for, alternative music of the era would not be what it is today.

It was memorable from start to finish…a look at the set list available on-line will give an idea of just how hard, fast, frantic and sweaty it all was, albeit the audience wasn’t familiar with the tracks played from the as yet unreleased Rum, Sodomy & The Lash. I bought the album a few months later and loved it, but felt that something was lacking in terms of what I’d experienced watching them live.

Fast forward three years. And to a song which was the third and final 45 taken from the album If I Should Fall From Grace With God, following on from Xmas perennial Fairytale of New York and the title track.

It reached #11 in 1988, and again it’s a scary thing to realise it is now more than 30 years of age and millions of folk across the UK, never mind the world, will be unaware of it. I reckon this is the happiest song I have in my collection. There are great tunes such as Up, Up and Away by The Beloved which make me smile. But that was and is a hymn to the age of the E and pharmaceutically supported happiness isn’t real euphoria. For that, you need a piece of music that is just plain bonkers and whose instantly recognisable opening notes bring a wry smile with the realisation that the true joys is a matter of seconds away after the comedy whistle.

mp3 : The Pogues – Fiesta

Wiki advises that it was written by the band’s Jem Finer and Shane McGowan, but with additional credits now given to Edmund Kotscher and Rudi Lindt as the refrain seemingly is similar to one of their compositions, and a hit in the USA back in 1957 :-

mp3 : Will Glahe and His Orchestra – Liechensteiner Polka

Just ever so slightly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Polka on TVV….who’d ever have thought it????

JC

Paul Weller, Pogues

HAD IT. LOST IT (Parts 3 & 4)

I’ve been blown away by the rich and varied responses to the request for suggestions for inclusion in this series looking at those who had it and then inexplicably lost it. Thank you so much!

I think I can make five categories up from the suggestions:-

1. STICK-ONS FOR INCLUSION

This category is for those I had either already been mulling over or whose suggestion provided a light-bulb above the head moment:-

Rod Stewart
Simple Minds
UB40
Paul Heaton/Beautiful South
Mansun
The Kinks
Rolling Stones
The Strokes

2. YUP, BUT DID THEY EVER HAVE IT IN THE FIRST PLACE

These are those singers or bands who, on the face of it, should be included but there’s a debate to be had on whether they ever had it:-

Spandau Ballet (I think they did have it, and indeed have already drafted something for future posting)
U2 (who, if they did ever have it, actually managed to find it again and then carelessly lose it a second time)

3. GREAT SUGGESTIONS…..JUST A PITY I DON’T KNOW ENOUGH TO BACK IT UP…..SO HOW ABOUT BACKING UP THE CLAIM WITH A GUEST CONTRIBUTION???

Thomas Dolby
Depeche Mode
Dwight Yoakam
Yello
Midge Ure (solo)
Ultravox
Paul McCartney
The Who
Roxy Music
Lou Reed
Aerosmith
Ringo Starr
Robert Plant
Grace Slick (and thank you Moz for such a brilliant comment that made me laugh out loud!!)
Roy Wood
John Lennon
Erasure
AC/DC
ELO
Bob Dylan

4. NOT QUITE SURE WHERE TO PUT THEM…….

Wet Wet Wet

This was a very interesting suggestion from Mopyfop – I concur with his view that initially they had it with having caught the band live on a number of occasions in 1985 and 1986 thanks to a flatmate, who was from their home town of Clydebank, being very friendly with a number of the band. But outwith the excellent debut single, which has featured before on the blog, there’s nothing other than personal memories to back up the claim that that they ever had it….

Adam Ant

On the face of things, should be a stick-on; but I can’t quite find the words to back it up….maybe this should be a Cat 3 and over to postpunkmonk to tell us why.

Kate Bush

It’s a brave man or woman who suggests she lost it……I’m not up to that task!

Neil Young

It’s probably true that his recent material is nowhere near the quality of his 70s output, but could it be argued that he’s another who having lost it did manage to find it again for the MTV generation to pick up on him only to get careless in the 21st century? Probably best that someone offers up an ICA before condemning him to this particular series

Primal Scream

The C86 version of the band is so different from the Screamadelica era and beyond that there’s a question to be posed as to them taking their time to have it before losing it

5. DISQUALFIED SUGGESTIONS

New Order –their most recent album was a return to form

The Fall – may have shown signs of losing it on a few occasions over the decades but MES always seems to pull things back from the brink when you least expect it

The Clash – yes, they did lose it with ‘Cut the Crap’ but was it really The Clash without Mick Jones? And besides, they broke up once they realised it was a turkey

Echo & The Bunnymen – totally lost it in late 80s and did the decent thing by breaking-up; the majesty of comeback single Nothing Lasts Forever gives them a lucky free pass

Arcade Fire – only on the basis that I haven’t had time to listen to the new LP yet….the may move to a different category in due course

The Beta Band – agree that they never bettered the debut material, but that’s not to say they lost it. If the series was to look at singers/bands whose debut was their best ever effort, it would never end. See also De La Soul

You’ll therefore see that this is a series with huge potential, but in the same way that the ICAs took off and then endured, it will rely heavily on guest contributions. No words and sounds will ever be rejected!!!

I was surprised nobody mentioned Morrissey, but I reckon he’s another I’d need to disqualify on the basis that, like MES, he has an uncanny ability to release a great album when you least expect it, although he is currently sitting on two strikes right now as a result of his last album being a turkey and his offensive outburst in recent times.

I’ll offer up a controversial one today….and really this one is all down to personal taste and I’m not confident that too many of you will agree with me. It’s a short summary too rather than any well-argued case.

He had it big time with The Jam; held it together initially with The Style Council but lost it towards the end with the prosecution relying on the evidence that was led in 19-part singles series back in 2105/16; and in this one time fan’s opinion, he never ever got it back with his solo career that was just far too dad-rock for my liking (exception being the Wild Wood 45); oh and he was also responsible for the heinous crime of inflicting Ocean Colour Scene upon us.

The Good : The Jam – When You’re Young
The Bad : The Style Council – How She Threw It All Away
The Ugly : Paul Weller – Peacock Suit

Just after completing all of the above, an e-mail dropped in, courtesy of Walter of A Few Good Times In My Life fame: –

Hi Jim,

Many months ago I started an ICA about The Pogues but I couldn’t finish it. I always asked myself about the reasons and now I know it: they had it and they lost it. So I think it is the right time to write about them in your new series.

From the first time I saw them in a small club at my place back in 1982 I got a huge fan of their music and I liked the way they combined traditional Irish music with the punk influence of various band members. While Red Roses For Me was a rough gem where they tried to find their style the subsequent two albums were milestones in new music in the mid 80’s. Elvis Costello led them on Rum Sodomy & The Lash to the height of their career. Brilliant songs were also on the following record If I Should Fall From Grace With God and marked the end for me. The following records weren’t too bad but never reached the quality of the first ones. Probably because the leading figure of the band, Shane MacGowan got more and more problems with the booze they were no more able to make great songs again and playing live with the verve they had in their early days. Even Joe Strummer couldn’t bring them back to what they were once had.

I remember their last concert I saw, when Shane walked up the stage with a bottle of red wine in his hand, singing two songs and than falling on the floor. I felt sorry for him and Strummer had to sing the songs till the end of the concert. So here are some songs that had the magic that I listened to often:

The Sick Bed of Cuchuliann
Bottle of Smoke
Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six
Haunted

Hope everything is well in Glasgow. Have a good time

Walter

JC adds….a perfect example of what I’m looking for in guest contributions!!

Pogues

MEMORIES FROM A BYGONE AGE

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One of the finest and most drunken gigs I’ve ever attended was in June 1985. It was at the old Level 8 in the Student’s Union of Strathclyde University and the band on stage was The Pogues.

It was, now that I look back, more than likely my last ever gig in the Union as an actual student with my NUS card. I would graduate a couple of weeks later and very soon move to live and work in Edinburgh. I would go back to the Union a couple of times in 85/86 but that would have been as a signed-in guest.

The Pogues at that point in time, were becoming increasingly well-known thanks to very positive write-ups in the music press as well as being featured very heavily on TV shows such as The Tube. They had a fearsome reputation as a live act, not least for the fact that the bloke on the tin whistle, Spider Stacy, would frequently add his own manic style of percussion which consisted of repeatedly banging a metal beer tray over his head in time with the music. It was a hot ticket – the fact they were playing the Student Union on a Saturday night would be as much to do with a lack of similarly sized venues in the city being available as they were always strictly reserved at weekends for the stilettos and handbags disco dollies and the beery, leery blokes who lusted after them.

I’m sure this was one of the occasions that my brother SC came along to the Union. He was just beginning, at the age of 18, to really get into his music and appreciate the thrill of a live gig – these were the days when you had to be 18 years old to get into gigs such was the mature of the licensing laws – and he, like me, fancied the idea of something different and exciting. I’m also sure his mate Gary came along that night.

It was one of those occasions where the memories are probably greater than the reality. The band were every bit as loud, boisterous and crazy as we’d been led to believe. It was a gig played either full-on at 180 mph with the sound cranked up to 11 or else it was impossible to hear the quieter numbers as the crowd excitedly tried to calm down from what had just happened. That or rush to the bar to take in some liquids as it was blisteringly hot. It looked and felt like the crowd number was well in excess of that allowed by the fire regulations….

The great thing about the internet is that you can often find set-lists from gigs that happened more than 30 years ago. There is such a list for the Level 8 gig and it shows The Pogues played 22 songs which means they’d have been onstage for something approaching 90 minutes which was a heckuva long time at a Student Union. The songs were a mix of traditional Irish folk numbers (played in a frantic punk style) along with many of their own which had appeared on their debut LP Red Roses For Me or would come out on the soon to be released Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, produced by Elvis Costello, and reckoned (quite rightly) to be one of the finest albums of the 80s.

And as I get misty-eyed with nostalgia (and in the knowledge that I’ll on this very day be making my annual visit to my late brother’s memorial just outside Westport in County Mayo) I’m going to turn to that album for today’s songs:-

mp3 : The Pogues – The Sick Bed of Cuchculiann
mp3 : The Pogues – A Pair Of Brown Eyes
mp3 : The Pogues – Sally MacLennane
mp3 : The Pogues – Dirty Old Town
mp3 : The Pogues – I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Everyday

Enjoy.

Pogues, Skids

WAR, WHAT IS GOOD FOR?

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The Jam reminded us yesterday, courtesy of Edwin Starr, that the answer is ‘absolutely nothing’.

And today, of all days, these seem the right songs to post:-

mp3 : The Skids – And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda
mp3 : The Pogues – And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda

I can forgive Richard Jobson for all his pretentions simply for the fact that his inclusion of this song on Joy, the final LP by The Skids in 1981 was the first time I ever heard it. And it made me realise that folk music was nothing to be afraid of.

Elsewhere, the unique delivery of Shane McGowan over the gorgeous playing of his band, perfectly produced by Elvis Costello, brings a lump to my throat every single time.