THE POGUES, BY THE GRACE OF GOD

THE POGUES, BY THE GRACE OF GOD

FEATURES

by Harold DeMuir

“I was in London talking to a friend of mine,” recounts Joe Strummer, clutching a bottle of beer, “and I decided that it would be good to give up drinking for a few months. Then I went home and the phone rang, and it was (Pogues manager) Frank Murray asking me if I wanted to go on tour with the Pogues on Saturday.”

The former Clash frontman’s sobriety effort is on hold for the time being, as he’s here in the States performing with his pals the Pogues, filling in for ailing rhythm guitarist Philip Chevron. The spectre of the demon alcohol looms large in the Pogues pantheon, both as lyrical subject matter and recreational activity. But we’ll save that for later.

More significant is the fact that The Pogues’ new album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, is the most compelling vinyl distillation of the London-based octet’s quirky English punk/Irish folk hybrid to date. Alongside righteous acoustic rave-ups like the title track and “Bottle Of Smoke” are such richly emotional pieces as “Fairytale Of New York,” a touching Christmas-themed lament for lost dreams; “Thousands Are Sailing,” a moving account of Irish immigrants in the U.S.; and “Streets Of Sorrow”/“Birmingham Six,” a double-edged view of the troubles in Northern Ireland. Simply put, If I Should Fall From Grace With God encapsulates, as beautifully as any record you’re likely to hear this year, the delicate balance of joy and tragedy that’s at the heart of the best folk and the best rock ’n’ roll.

“It’s just reality,” mumbles chief Pogue Shane MacGowan through his trademarked tattered choppers. “There’s bad and there’s good, and quite often there’s both at the same time. There’s love and there’s death; there always has been and there always will be. But just because the lyrics are about reality, that’s no reason to make the music boring and depressing. Music is about uplifting people, y’know?”

MacGowan spent much of his childhood in Ireland, before moving with his family to London, where he grew up under the influence of that city’s close-knit Irish community. After flirtations with punk (he led the dimly-remembered punk outfit the Nipple Erectors, aka the Nips), traditional folk and retro-soul, the singer/guitarist formed the Pogues (originally, called Pogue Mahone, until someone at the BBC figured out that the name was Gaelic for “kiss my ass”) with tin whistle player Spider Stacey, with whom he’d performed Irish rebel songs at London’s Cabaret Futura; and banjoist Jem Finer, with whom MacGowan had busked in subway stations. The three then recruited accordionist James Fearnley (previously guitarist in the Nips), drummer Andrew Ranken and bassist Cait O’Riordan.

The combo’s 1984 debut album, Red Roses For Me, showed lots of promise, but got lost in a flood of similarly-inclined London bands like The Men They Couldn’t Hang (who nicked their moniker from MacGowan) and the Boothill Foot Tappers. Philip Chevron (author of the much-covered folk standard “Faithful Departed”) joined for the Elvis Costelloproduced Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, which marked MacGowan’s continued maturation as a songwriter and the band’s graduation from enjoyable novelty to satisfying artistic entity. For the subsequent four-song EP, Poguetry In Motion, the young upstarts were joined by Terry Woods, a 25-year veteran of the British folk scene and a member of such seminal groups as Sweeney’s Men, Steeleye Span and Doctor Strangely Strange.

The addition of Woods, who sings lead on “Streets Of Sorrow” and the traditional “Medley” on If I Should Fall, is somewhat ironic in light of the mixed reaction the Pogues have received from Britain’s insular folk-music establishment, certain elements of which have condemned the band for bastardizing trad folk. “The folk music world in England and Ireland is very cliquey and close-knit, and it’s become a bit of a sacred-cow situation,” says Woods. “They’re afraid that a band like the Pogues could knock them off their little pedestals. But what’s really happening is that we’re reaching people that they’d never be able to reach.” The view of the Pogues as desecrators isn’t shared by venerable Irish group the Dubliners, who last year collaborated with the Pogues on a single, “The Irish Rover,” which proved to be the biggest U.K. hit of either band’s career.

If I Should Fall From Grace With God— which marks the recording debut of former road manager Darryl Hunt, who stepped in as fulltime bassist when O’Riordan left to marry Elvis Costello— benefits immensely from the sympathetic production of Steve Lillywhite, whose wife Kirsty MacColl (daughter of Irish folk deity Ewan MacColl, whose song “Dirty Old Town” the Pogues covered on Rum, Sodomy & The Lash) duets with MacGowan on “Fairytale Of New York.”

“He was very sensitive to the band,” says Hunt of Lillywhite. “A lot of it was played live, with as little overdubbing as possible, and I think you can feel that in the music. It’s much more natural, more alive.”

The new LP also finds the Pogues unexpectedly and successfully integrating Middle-Eastern (“Turkish Song Of The Damned”) and Spanish (“Fiesta”) influences. “We’re sort of tripping into things that we wouldn’t let ourselves trip into before,” says Fearnley. “It’s still the same basic attitude, but we’ve got a broader template to work from now. It just comes from living, really—like going on holiday and hearing Moroccan music, or staying in a hotel in Spain and having this fiesta blaring in your ears all night, or waking up in a hotel in New York to a fanfare of car horns.”

“We’ll do anything that works out,” says MacGowan. “We’re trying to write an aria at the moment.”

The Pogues’ new deal with Island closes off a trying period, during which the group’s efforts to gain their release from their last label, Stiff (MCA in the U.S.), temporarily stalled their recording career, forcing the band to tour incessantly just to keep afloat financially.

“It’s been a very frustrating year,” admits Fearnley. “We didn’t do any recording work at all, apart from some film music here and there. It was hard, but some interesting things came out in the film music, just because we had the opportunity to bugger around in the studio toward a different purpose than recording a Pogues album.”

A sidelight of the time off from recordmaking was an association with gonzo filmmaker Alex Cox, who tapped the band to provide music for his Sid & Nancy and Straight To Hell. The latter flick, an elaborate spaghetti-western in-joke filmed in Spain, also co-starred the musicians as a demented outlaw clan. Although Straight To Hell led to subsequent roles for Stacey in Cox’s Nicaraguan epic, Walker, and for several Pogues in the British comedy Eat The Rich, Finer makes little effort to conceal his disdain for the band’s acting debut.

“The fact that people will spend a million dollars for an in-joke just shows how stupid some people can be,” he says. “The people who made it thought it was hilarious, but the public, thank God, didn’t. What’s sad is that it could have been brilliant if they’d bothered to give it a plot.

“I think it’s arrogant for musicians to think they can just branch out into any art form,” Finer continues. “But if another film came up and we were all into it, we would probably do it. There’s a person we know who’s written a brilliant script called A Tale Told By An Idiot, and he wants us to be involved if he can get the money to film it. It’s this very surreal story set in 18th century Scotland about these two rival clans. He wants Shane to play this character who keeps jumping onto a horse and falling off.”

Now, what about that nasty alcohol question? Do the Pogues irresponsibly encourage excessive imbibement, or is the band’s image as a bunch of drunken rabble an exaggeration perpetuated by the angle-hungry British music press?

“It’s irritating,” says Ranken. “There’s plenty of bands that do as much drinking as we do, and you wonder why we’ve been singled out for it to be made an issue of. To an extent, I think there’s an anti-Irish thing involved, which is actually quite ridiculous because half of the band aren’t Irish anyway. The sort of image we’ve gotten in England is that we’re a bunch of paddies and that we’re always completely pissed, and in some way I think that’s being put forward as a racial stereotype of Irish people.”

MacGowan, characteristically, takes a less measured attitude. “I’m sorry, but I don’t see anything wrong with drinking. I shouldn’t think there’s anybody left in the Western world who doesn’t know the consequences. Human beings instinctively know that if you drink two bottles of whiskey you’re gonna be in a lot of trouble, but if you drink half a bottle of whiskey you’re gonna be in a pretty good mood. I’m not saying you should drink half a bottle of whiskey... The image isn’t a burden because I don’t feel ashamed of liking a drink. It’s legal, innit?” 0