It's Really Pogue, Man

It's Really Pogue, Man

FEATURES

Richard Grabel

Talking to Shane MacGowan, singer and lyricist with a spirited bunch of North London Irish lunatics called the Pogues—trying to decipher the words buried in the stream of mumbling and riotous laughter that pours from his mouth—is a bit of an experience.

Shane, you see, has the worst set of rotted, woebegone teeth I’ve ever had the misfortune to encounter. Such miserable teeth inevitably stand in the way of clear enunciation.

Add to this a tendency to mumble. Add to that the frequent explosions of the Shane MacGowan laugh.

The Shane MacGowan laugh bubbles up from his throat like a faulty geyser, splattering and sputtering in spastic delight. It goes “cccchhhhhh,” or something like that.

Add to that the fact—I’m sure he’d be the last to deny it—that Shane likes a wee drop now and again. And again and again. In fact, Shane has something like a romantic infatuation with booze. Something about boozing being the regular and proper behavior for all self-respecting visionary Irish bards, of which Shane is one.

Cap it all off with a thick North London accent and you’ve got a person whom you’ve really got to bend an ear to in order to make out a word. But it’s worth it, because you ve also got in front of you one of the most amazing lyricists working any angle of the pop continuum at this moment, and the driving force behind a group who are both invigorating an old tradition and inventing something quite all their own. And who are a damn lot of fun to boot.

The Pogues play a music drawn in form from traditional Irish music, the kind of thing you might associate with the Clancy Brothers or the Dubliners. They play banjo, accordion and tin whistle, as well as the usual “rock band” bass, drums and guitar. But the Pogues (the name derives from “pogue mahone,” which Shane claims is Gaelic for “kiss my ass”) infuse this traditional music with punkish energy and abandon, an anarchic spirit, and a hard, aggressive, stomping instrumental approach. Then they hook it up with MacGowan’s lyrics—tales of universal soldiers and wayward London boys and revolutionary dreamers and ordinary people full of life and hopeextraordinary lyrics that turn these wild jigs into resonant epics.

You can best sample the Pogues’ sweet and bitter brew on two records. Rum Sodomy & The Lash is their second album, released in England on Stiff and on MCA in America. Poguetry In Motion is a more recent, four-song EP. Both records were produced by Elvis Costello. There is a strong connection—Pogues bassist Cait O’Riordan is Costello’s girlfriend. But Costello doesn’t seem to put much of a personal stamp on the Pogues’ sound, beyond getting a clean recording. The personality on these records comes from the band, and there’s plenty of it.

Though two of the Pogues are originally from Dublin, and though traditional Irish music is obviously, at this point at least, their main influence, the Pogues insist that they are not an Irish band but a North London band, and their records bear out this assertion. Songs like “The Old Main Drag,” “Dirty Old Town” and “London Girl” evoke London people, places and moods. And though some of their instrumentation is folk, the mood of the music is definitely urban.

And luckily, Shane on record is a lot easier to make out than Shane in the flesh. So when you buy Rum Sodomy & The Lash you won’t need the lyric sheet to find out what he’s saying, though you may find yourself reading it just for the pleasure of it.

A commentator in the NME once noted that the Pogues “appear to have assembled solely for the purpose of robbing a bank,” and this remains quite so today, as they lounge around a room in their publicist’s office. They look more like a gang than a band, and onstage, with their assortment of tin whistles and banjos and whatnot, you’d think them an apparition risen from the grave of some Irish folk junkyard But they do know how to get a crowd up on its feet.

The lyrics of bard Shane MacGowan often deal with dark topics. Death, war, loss, estrangement, failed dreams, blood, battle, sickness, and more death—these things recur frequently. At the same time, the Pogues’ tunes are usually sunny, sprightly things, played with a spirit that says, we haven’t a care in the world. So, I wonder of the Pogues, how is it that they so readily mix the sounds of spring on the

wind with the images of doom and death.

“That’s the way life is, isn’t it?” says Shane MacGowan. “One minute you’re up, the next minute you’re down. Ccccchhhh...”

But one usually doesn’t have such extremes of up and down occuring together.

“Well I don’t know about you. I do. Cccchhhhh...”

Shane MacGowan has long lived a passionate life in public. In the early days of London punk he was known as a follower of the Sex Pistols and was famed for an incident in which the girl who was to become Jane Modette bit off a part of his ear while pogoing at a Pistols gig. Shane’s bloody ear was in all the papers.

Later he started a band called the Nipple Erectors, then shortened to the Nips. The Nips played punk, R&B, all sorts of things. But how did this transition from Nips to the Pogues happen?

“It wasn’t a transition,” Shane rejoins. “After the Nips broke up, I was just a helpless drunk lying around in the gutters of London, and I got together with a lot of other helpless drunks who were lying around the gutters of London, and we formed a band.”

Do you consider what you do traditional Irish music, or something different?

“We just started out to play music with no bullshit in it, with melody, and which is based on songs which had life and soul and rhythm. A music based on a mixture of Irish music and country music and

punk and rock ’n’ roll. But with the emphasis on the Irish. In other words, instead of starting out by playing a lot of old R&B or whatever, we started out playing old Irish songs, and took it from there.”

The Pogues’ raucous twist on traditional Irish music is great fun. But to my mind it’s Shane’s lyrics, and the lyrics of the gut-wrenching epics the Pogues choose to cover, that make the Pogues such a special proposition.

Shane’s writing has the tripping-off-thetongue quality associated with Irish poetry, and a dramatic sense of personal history. His song-stories always seem to be about real people, even if it’s just because his fictional characters are so vivid.

To what, I asked him, did he attribute the fact that the Irish make such great writers?

“My personal opinion is that it’s because of the story-telling tradition. Because back through what is beyond history, pre-history, they are a nation of story-tellers. So it stands to reason that they use words well.”

“Also,” adds guitarist Phil Chevron, “perhaps because English isn’t their original language, they speak English more interestingly.”

Shane: “There’s a love for the act of using the language. They use words for the sound, the sound of words. It’s a sensual pleasure in the use of words.

“Irish writing in English always tried to reproduce the poetry of the Irish language itself. One language can’t actually reproduce another, but you can use words that have the same alliteration, the same forms, the same depth. The same poetic rhythms to them.”

Now, lest all this talk of poetic rhythms makes MacGowan sound like that Eng. Lit. professor you hate(d), let me hasten to point out that the subjects of MacGowan’s poesy are not your run-ofthe-mill Bardic daydreaming. “The Old Main Drag,” for example, tells the tale of a lad who comes to London at the age of 16 and soon ends up a prostitute. “Billy’s Bones” tells of a young man who goes off to the Middle East and gets killed, a new variation on an old story. The protagonist of “A Pair Of Brown Eyes” first sees those brown eyes looking down at him as he lays on a battlefield where “the arms and legs of other men were scattered all around.’’ Only “Dirty Old Town,” written by Ewan MacColl, provides a lighter note, with a breezy, very catchy tune about love and hope.

One of MacGowan’s most impressive songs is “The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn,” the story of a man who has been in all manner of battles and ends up raving in a seedy London tavern.

“It’s about a bloke who’s dying,” Shane explains. “He’s in delirium. He’s been in the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, perhaps in the IRA. Cccchhhh. Although that isn’t actually specified. It’s a man who’s fought for what he believes in, but as an individual rather than as a member of some army. And how he ends up as a drunken bum on the street, getting beaten up.”

It’s a very universal story.

“Yeah, it is very universal. All people

“I got together with a lot of other helpless drunks who were lying around the gutters of London, and we formed a band.” —Shane MacGowan

get treated like shit. But, it isn’t making that point. It’s just a story.”

Now, again, lest all this talk of war and death give you the wrong idea, let me hasten to assure you that the Pogues’ music is the farthest thing from gloom and doom. And you don’t have to be Irish to love it.

The instrumentation, the folk instruments meshing with the rock band trappings of electric bass and acoustic guitar, the buoyant backing of Andrew Ranken’s spare but vigorously banged drums, create a synthesis so improbable it just has to work.

In the hands of lesser talents, what the Pogues are doing could easily turn into a novelty act. But the Pogues have too much spirit to allow themselves to become any such thing.

They are already developing in new directions. “A Rainy Night In Soho,” on the Poguetry In Motion EP, owes a lot to the jazzy barroom orchestral sound Tom Waits has pioneered. I think we’ll see the Pogues giving their music even more room to breathe in the future, allowing more of their varied influences to seep in.

And I think that Shane MacGowan, if he doesn’t drink himself to an early death, is going to prove to be one of pop music’s most powerful lyricists.

You never know what flowers can bloom in a dirty old town.