The boys from County Hell
The music of the Pogues sounds as vital and relevant today as when it was recorded almost four decades ago
IMAGINE it’s the early-1980s. You’ve just walked into the north London pub the Pindar of Wakefield.
After pushing open the door, you’ve almost been blasted back onto Gray’s Inn Road by the volume and intensity of the music coming from the six people on stage. The small audience are all blind drunk, thrashing their bodies to the cacophony, at first sounding like Punk but on closer inspection something far more layered.
Someone is playing banjo, another on piano accordion and a third on a tin whistle, all of them in worn suits and collared shirts looking like working class men from the 1950s. The drummer is standing behind a rudimentary stripped down kit consisting of just a bass drum and a couple of snares. At least the spiky haired woman playing the only electric instrument, a bass, looks slightly punkish.
And in front of them all, spitting and slurring his deranged poetry through rotten and mangled teeth is the lead singer, one Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan.
Pogue mahone. Kiss my arse.
Half a decade after Punk broke, English music was full of haircut bands, New Romantics crooning ballads, mock reggae, or synthesized Bowie imitations. The indie scene was mostly anorak wearing shoegazers. The Clash, Joy Division, and the Jam were on the last legs, and the saviours of the decade, The Smiths, the Jesus and Mary Chain, Stone Roses were yet to emerge.
But at least there was the Pogues.
The Pogues’ first three albums are as good as anything to have come out of Britain during that post-Punk period of the early-80s. Initially christened Pogue Mahone (an anglicisation of the Irish Gaelic pog mo thoin, or “kiss my arse”) they produced an unrivaled blend of traditional instrumentation and melody with a punk attitude, all infused with the spirit of Irish writing tradition through MacGowan, one of the all-time great lyricists, a poet who ranks alongside his literary forebears before drugs and booze addled his mind.
They sang of tragedy and romance, of the despair of the Irish diaspora and the republican struggle for independence, of pixies and workers, and getting shitfaced in a pub. Their music was timeless and their stories vital and relevant.
Their recordings captures the beauty of their music, but can’t come close to what it must have been like seeing them live. The closest I ever came to seeing any of them live was one night in Canberra in the early-2000s, when MacGowan was due to perform with his band The Popes. But the night before in Sydney, he fell of the stage and broke a leg — or so we were told — and the gig was cancelled. So instead we went back to my place and stayed up all night drinking vodka.
After discovering a Pogues box set on sale at my local record store, I have been delving into their back catalogue and rediscovering their brilliance. Here, in no particular order, are 10 of the Pogues’ greatest songs on record.
Pair of Brown Eyes
This is the one they’ll still be singing in 100 years time, along with ‘Danny Boy’ and other Irish laments. A young man who has lost the love of his life, a brown eyed girl, drinks himself into a stupor in a pub. As a jukebox plays Irish ballads, an old drunk in a corner starts up an unwanted conversation with the young man, describing how the only thing which sustained him though the horrors of war was the brown eyed woman waiting for him back home, only to find when he finally returned that she was gone. And the young man realised he too will be haunted for the rest of his life by a pair of brown eyes. Poignant, elegiac, unashamedly sentimental, was this song Shane Macgowan’s greatest achievement.
The Old Main Drag
It’s easy to forget that despite their Irishness, The Pogues were principally a London band. Shane Macgowan was born in Ireland but came of age in London. ‘The Old Main Drag’ describes, with journalistic detail, an all too common story of the Irish diaspora. A young rural Irishman arrives in London full of hope, but quickly falls on hard times, becoming a rent boy, then falling into drink and drugs, and ending his days a penniless beggar in a gutter. The dream of a better life remains unfulfilled. Simple and sparse, the music perfectly complements the words.
Body of an American
Included on the Poguetry In Motion EP, this is perhaps the most cinematic of all the Pogues’ songs. You could easily imagine Scorsese directing an epic based on the fictional story of big Jim Dwyer, an Irish immigrant who made his name as a professional boxer in America. He returns to his homeland in a coffin in the back of a Cadillac for a burial which quickly turns into a wild wake. The haunting pipes and whistles set the scene, conjuring up an atmosphere of a ghostly mist filled village, emerald green fields and an ancient church and cemetery. Then as the tempo picks up we are in a pub where the booze and blarney flow and the event becomes as much a celebration of the joy of being alive as it is a farewell to the deceased. The combination of words and music is breathtaking with some of the best lines Macgowan ever penned (‘But fifteen minutes later/We had our first taste of whiskey/There was uncles giving lectures/On ancient Irish history), and the haunting instrumental outro which could go on forever.
Fairytale of New York
Even if you know nothing else of The Pogues, you will recognise this song, which is now ubiquitous with Christmas. The first version was recorded as a duet between the band’s original bass player, Cait O’Riordan, but the one we all know appeared on If I Should Fall From Grace With God, with Kirsty MacColl (daughter of Ewan and wife of producer Steve Lillywhite) sharing the lead vocal. One of Macgowan’s greatest lyrics, the two protagonists trade insults about their failed relationship over a gorgeous melody and backing music. And Matt Dillon plays a New York cop in the video!
Thousands are Sailing
A stand out track from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, this is a bittersweet tale penned by guitarist Philip Chevron which covers hundreds of years of Irish migration to the USA. It opens with sparse pipes and banjo before a couple of wild instrumental breaks which recall a traditional Irish jig as the characters in the song dance their sadness and fears away. But it is Chevron’s lyrics which really stand out: ‘Thousands are sailing/Across the western ocean/Where the hand of opportunity/Draws tickets in a lottery/Where e’er we go, we celebrate/The land that makes us refugees/From fear of priests with empty plates/From guilt and weeping effigies’.
The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn
Incorporating ancient Irish mythology, modern drinking songs, 20th century political history, and a character straight out of a JP Donleavy novel, ‘The Sick Bed of Chuchulainn’ was the quintessential Pogues song. It opened their second, Elvis Costello-produced album, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash and is perfect from the first line which imagines the protagonist hallucinating in his death bed to the final instrumental wig out. Favourite line: ‘They took you up to midnight mass and left you in the lurch/So you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church’.
Streams of Whiskey
The setting is a dream in which Macgowan meets Brendan Behan, the Irish writer and rebel who died early from alcoholism. In many ways, Behan was the template for the heavy drinking Macgowan, but also a cliche of the drunken Irishman and the chorus is a great singalong with a pint in your hand: ‘I am going/any way the wind may be blowing/I am going/where stream of whiskey are flowing’. Like Behan, Macgowan was never able to shrug off his fans’ expectations of drinker shenanigans. When I was working in a pub in Shepherd’s Bush Road and the one night the band was playing up the road at the Hammersmith Palais (setting for The Clash’s ‘White Man in Hammersmith Palais’). The pub began filling up mid-afternoon with audience members getting themselves in the mood for the show and toasting Shane with each drink.
White City
By the time of their fourth album, Peace and Love, produced by Steve Lillywhite, who was best known for his work with U2, the Pogues had expanded their numbers and broadened their instrumentation, with electric guitar and a more conventional drum kit. The result was a bland rock album and Macgowan’s absence from about half of the songs was a foretaste of what was to come. Without him, even the instrumentals sounded half-hearted. One of the few highlights was ‘White City’, a romantic but unsentimental ode to a defunct greyhound racing venue in west London underpinned by banjo and piano accordion.
Rain Street
Joe Strummer and The Pogues was a match made in heaven. The former Clash front man produced the band’s fifth album, Hell’s Ditch, and would stand in as temporary lead singer once Macgowan’s alcohol and drug addictions forced him from the band soon after the record was released. Hell’s Ditch was a vast improvement on its predecessor with several memorable tunes, including ‘Rain Street’, which showcased Macgowan’s imagery and comedic brilliance with lines like ‘the church bell rings/an old drunk sings/a young girl hocks her wedding ring’ and ‘I gave my love a goodnight kiss/I tried to take a late night piss/but the toilet moved/so again I missed’.
The Irish Rover
The Dubliners were a legendary band who popularised Irish folk music in the 1960s and their sound and approach was in many ways a forebear of The Pogues. The two bands came together for this raucous version of the traditional Irish folk standard recorded in 1987. Although at least a century old by then, the tall tale of a fateful voyage by ship sounded as if it had been written by The Pogues, so convincing was their appropriation of traditional Irish music by this stage.
Boys From The County Hell
With its chorus of ‘lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink/and mother wake me early in the morning’, the breakneck speed of ‘Boys From County Hell’ from The Pogues’ debut album was in many ways an autobiographical nod to the band’s outlaw reputation: ‘stay on the other side of the road/’cause you can never tell/we’ve a thirst like a gang of devils/we’re the boys of the county hell’.
Dirty Old Town
Ironically written not about Dublin as many assume, but about Salford, south of Manchester, ‘Dirty Old Town’ was a popular English folk standard by the time the Pogues recorded their faithful cover version for their second album in 1985. Ewan MacColl, father of Kirsty, wrote the song in the 1950s, and it has also been covered by the aforementioned The Dubliners.
