Category: Pogues

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

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

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

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.