By Gordon Hull
I first listened to the Pogues late in high school. I had started moving beyond the music I could hear on the radio – basically top 40 and classic rock – and I discovered the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash at about the same time I discovered Midnight Oil’s Diesel and Dust. I didn’t know music could be like “Sally MacLennane” or “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” or “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” and I was hooked. I listened more and more, and even had a chance to see them perform in London at the Academy Brixton.
I say all of this of course because the Pogues’ lead singer and primary songwriter, Shane MacGowan, died yesterday. The Pogues managed to sound a little Irish and a little Punk without exactly being either, and their work is central to a lot of the contemporary Irish music community. A 60th birthday tribute gala for MacGowan drew artists like Bono and Sinead O’Connor. The Cranberries’ Dolores O’Riordan praised the music (she also died hours before MacGowan’s gala; the entire who’s-who of Irish music paid tribute to her before switching to him). O’Connor and MacGowan were very close, and he credited her with getting him off of heroin. I remember that when she died, some reports were worried about what telling him would do to his very fragile health. The Pogues also spawned an entire genre of bands like the Dropkick Murphys, The Dreadnoughts and Flogging Molly.
MacGowan was an astonishingly gifted lyricist. His songs tended to narrate from the point of view of the almost-down-and-out. This is perfectly exemplified in band’s most well-known song, the “Fairy Tale of New York” and its chronicle of a collapsing relationship. If you know that song and like it at all (even if you only appreciate how refreshing it is when it comes on in December, in between all the dross that fills every public and semi-public space in the country for the entire month), you owe it to yourself to listen to some of his other songs. There’s the beautiful, haunting “Misty Morning, Albert Bridge” that starts:
“I dreamt we were standing
By the banks of the Thames
Where the cold grey waters ripple
in the misty morning light
Held a match to your cigarette
Watched the smoke curl in the mist
Your eyes, blue as the ocean between us, smiling at me”
The specificity of his lyrics always stood out to me, often marked by landmarks in London and interwoven with literary and folklore references. “The Old Main Drag” chronicles the narrator’s descent into poverty and sex work, starting in Piccadilly Circus and moving the short distance to Leicester Square. “White City” centers dog betting, evoking the ubiquitous Ladbrokes in its account of the decline of the White City neighborhood. I admit I don’t fully understand the references in “Turkish Song of the Damned” (the story it invokes feels like it belongs to the same genre as the Rime of the Ancient Mariner):
"Did you keep a watch for a dead man’s wind?
Did you see the woman with a comb in her hand?
Wailing away on the wall on the Strand
You dance to the Turkish song of the damned.”
But you don’t always need to understand all of the references to appreciate them – or to note, again the specificity of London: The Strand as a place of glamor is also in “Rain Street.” After starting out with what are meant to be quotidian details of life in a downtrodden neighborhood (“down the alley the ice wagon flew, picked up a stiff that was turning blue / the local kids are sniffing glue, there ain’t much else for kids to do”), the song closes with:
“I took my Eileen by the hand
Walk with me was her command
I dreamt we were walking on the Strand, down on Rain Street.
That night Rain Street went on for miles
That night on Rain Street, somebody smiled.”
In the middle of the almost-down-and-out there was often such a moment of beauty or hope.
Articles about MacGowan often mentioned how well-read he was, and that emerged in his music too. “Night Train to Lorca” doesn’t just invoke Garcia Lorca. Lorca’s “Ballad of the Spanish Civil Guard” memorializes the destruction and slaughter of an entire town of gypsies; MacGowan commemorates Lorca’s own murder during the Spanish Civil War in imagery that is clearly both reference and homage. “Hell’s Ditch” evokes Genet’s prison writings. A BBC tribute, which basically argues that MacGowan’s difficult personality got in the way of a better appreciation of just how good a writer he was, goes into some of the more Irish-specific references.
Of course, MacGowan’s death wasn’t exactly a surprise. He was well-known to have consumed prodigious amounts of alcohol and pretty much every other substance negatively correlated with life expectancy, and had been in poor health for some time. The Pogues had kicked him out by the time I saw them. The NPR obituary quotes his former bandmate, the late Phil Chevron, to the effect that people had been giving MacGowan six months to live ever since he was 19. MacGowan himself said in a documentary about him that “I'm just following the Irish way of life. Cram as much pleasure as you can in your life and rile against the pain that you have to suffer as a result and then wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure.”
He wrote in “Sunnyside of the Street:”
“Been in a palace, I've been in a jail
I just don't want to be reborn a snail
I just want to spend eternity
Right where I am, on the sunnyside of the street”
Shane MacGowan was 65.
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