The Pogues: Boys from the County Hell

1,503 words

Cram as much pleasure as you can into your life and rail against the pain that you have to suffer as a result.
-Shane MacGowan.

Stay on the other side of the road
Because you can never tell.
We’ve the thirst of a gang of devils,
We’re the boys from the County Hell.
-The Pogues, Boys from the County Hell

British punk rock didn’t have much to do with ethnic music, The Clash’s forays into reggae aside. After punk and new wave had subsided, though, a band emerged that would take traditional Irish music and hybridize it with the rawness of punk and the lyricism of the Emerald Isle’s literary tradition before going on to become one of the most creative and acclaimed British bands of the last quarter of the 20th century, The Pogues.

Singer Shane MacGowan had already formed a punk band, The Nips (toned down from the original Nipple Erectors) and produced a decent piece of rockabilly as a single, King of the Bop. But, together with like-minded friends from the famed London Irish community, it would be The Pogues who made MacGowan famous. The name of MacGowan’s second band was truncated in much the same way – and for the same reason – as the first, the original name having been Pogue Mahone, Irish for “Kiss my arse”.

The London Irish are noted for their love of drinking, fighting, and Rugby Union, so presumably a drunken game of the latter would kill all three birds with one stone. If you like the sport, then enjoy this London Irish try. It seems to sum up both the Irish in general and The Pogues specifically, with a dreadful defensive mistake being turned into a spectacular score. Technically, I am London Irish myself, having been born in the capital to the grandson of a Dublin master-carpenter, but I don’t want to sound like one of the many people who claim, every St. Patrick’s Day, to be “a bit Irish”.

The band’s first album, Red Roses for Me (the title being taken from Irish playwright Brendan Behan, who is credited with a song on the album) was released in 1984, and established the band as more than just public-house roustabouts. A fierce Irish stew of traditional balladeering, punk energy, and the clattering beat of rockabilly, the album made a modest number 89 in the UK charts. Five of the 13 songs were traditional, with the band credited as arrangers.

Although the band’s greatest albums were ahead of them, Roses showed not just the band’s re-energizing of Irish music, but also showcased McGowan’s growing lyrical mastery. The album cover was also typical Pogues, with the band’s photo featuring McGowan on crutches with his leg in plaster, and drummer Andrew Ranken notably absent, his place in the line-up taken by a portrait of JFK.

From the gritty ballad of Dirty Old Town to the crazed pub knees-up of Waxie’s Dargle, the jolt and charge of Transmetropolitan to the maudlin lament of The Auld Triangle, two things were apparent from The Pogues’ debut: McGowan’s lyrical skill and its roots in Irish traditional bar-room music, and the fact that this was a rattling good band who would go on to provide an antidote to a coming decade of synthesizers and absurd haircuts. There was also McGowan’s lasting fascination with low life and the demi monde:

And now it’s the most charming of verandas.
I sit and watch the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores…
My daddy was a blueshirt, my mother a madam.
My brother earned his medals at Mai Lai in Vietnam.
And it’s lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink.
And mother wake me early in the morning.

The album would also run with what would often prove to be McGowan’s – and therefore the band’s – ongoing problem: booze.

The following year’s second album, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, stole a line Churchill supposedly used to describe the Royal Navy, and used Géricault’s famous painting The Raft of the Medusa for the cover art, on which the band are portrayed as clinging to the sinking raft. In my view, this is the best of the band’s four albums, and its rapid rise to number 13 in the UK charts was the announcement that the band had arrived. It was produced by Elvis Costello, already married to Pogues bassist Kate O’Riordan.

The opening song, The Sickbed of Cúchullain, merges the legendary Irish warrior with an old and dying alcoholic:

Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior
And shove you in the ground
But you’ll stick your head back out and shout,
We’ll have another round.

Sally MacLananne recounts the tale of a bartender trying to get back to his old pub and his favorite girl, while A Pair of Brown Eyes brilliantly tells of an old Irish soldier remembering the horrors of the trenches in World War I. The cover of Eric Bogle’s And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda, about the massacre of Australian troops by Turks at Gallipolli, is heartbreaking and a brilliant finale. There aren’t many sadder songs. This was peak Pogues, brilliantly produced and with the traditional Irish tin whistle to the fore amid the accordions and banjos.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God saw the band become favorites of the music press MacGowan had read as a boy, and the album featured what would become The Pogues’ best-known song. Fairytale of New York, as well as becoming one of the UK and Ireland’s ’s best-loved Christmas singles, was also one of the first to be dropped from playlists for early “woke” reasons due to the line, “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot”. Dire Straits would suffer the same censorship for the same word in their mega-hit Money for Nothing. The fourth and final album to feature MacGowan, Hell’s Ditch, was more of the same, but as MacGowan’s alcoholism took over, the best days were behind the band. MacGowan would get hepatitis, be run over, and simply fail to turn up for recording sessions. It was too much even for his old crew, who increasingly toured with The Clash’s Joe Stummer. MacGowan was arrested for heroin possession after Sinéad O’Connor found him comatose on her floor and called the police. He later forgave the Irish singer.

Live, The Pogues were nothing sort of sensational, an anarchic, drunken beggar’s opera, soused with booze and ringing with traditional Irish instrumentation not necessarily played the way the makers intended it to be played. Drummer Andrew Ranken only used a snare drum and a floor-tom which he played standing up, battering both like a crazed drummer-boy on a battlefield. On one instrumental, for emphasis, he’d smash a metal dinner-plate against his forehead, right on the beat. When I saw them at Brixton Academy, I lost the toe of one of my boots and was found after the gig asleep under a Brixton bridge by a friend, about a hundred yards from where we lived.

To say Shane McGowan was a drinker is an understatement no true Irishman would ever make. And MacGowan was a true Irishman, despite having been born in Kent, England, on Christmas Day, 1957, while his Irish parents were visiting relatives. The family’s economic circumstances are reflected by MacGowan’s spending his first weeks sleeping in a drawer because the family cot was in use. His father let the boy drink Guinness aged five. That said, he was reading James Joyce and Dostoevsky aged 13. At 17, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital for drug and drink-related problems.

Alcoholism became a gateway to heroin, and the inevitable fractured relations with his bandmates – and old friends – led to the band firing him in 1991. They carried on with little commercial success, and the singer formed the short-lived Shane MacGowan and the Popes. But drink and drugs never let go of MacGowan, and he died after a series of illnesses last year. Friends from across the entertainment world, including Bruce Springsteen and Johnny Depp, mourned his passing.

Alcoholism is not exactly a condition alien either to Ireland or the world of music, and the fact that the medical establishment has viewed it as a disease rather than a result of personal agency and weakness for years does not ultimately help the alcoholic. So it is glib to say that booze was a muse for MacGowan, although undoubtedly not far from the truth. His countrymen honored him with an award for his contribution to Irish culture, and he brought Irish music to an audience who would otherwise have viewed it as twiddly-dee music played in smoky pubs.

From the little boy drinking beer on his daddy’s lap in Tipperary to duetting with legendary Irish band The Dubliners, and from the front pages of the music papers he read religiously to a broken, self-defeated alcoholic, MacGowan was a mass of contradictions mixed with a talent which always remained rooted in the men and the myths of the country he loved. Perhaps The Pogues were the last gasp of British nationalist music.