CHOONED IN: The holy trinity…

The Pogues released their debut album, ‘Red Roses for Me’, in 1984, leaving this weird, violent, lyrical, punk/folk band sitting, half-drunk, on the banks of mainstream music. 

The following year, they released their masterpiece: ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’. I wish I had been alive to feel it.

Music, especially commercially successful music, always craves a breath of fresh air (or, in The Pogue’s case, a breath of stale drink), whether it knows it or not. Something to challenge, renew, advance, redefine.

The best examples of this usually come out of nowhere; blind-siding everyone. As far as I can tell, few saw The Pogues coming.

The Pogue’s weren’t the tenth band of their kind to come along and knock politely upon the door of commercial success and critical acclaim. No.

They landed in the middle of the night, unannounced, full, armed – and they booted the door off its hinges.

In ‘Red Roses’, The Pogues set out their intentions and influences with a complexity that belied their just-pulled-from-the-pub aesthetic, and they did so with conviction.

We are Irish. We are London. We are punk. We are trad. We are emigrants. We are natives. We are the inheritors of legend and lore. We are the streets on which we lay. We are hard, brutal, ignorant, loud. We are caring, watchful, thoughtful, loving.

Once you’ve paid a tiny bit of attention to the music, and seen past MacGowan as the ‘drunken Irishman’, the Pogues defied stereotype and genre. They couldn’t be forced to fit into any preexisting package.

At the time, there was no easy reference to make sense of what they were. I suppose the word I’m looking for is one which artists hunger to be described as above all others. The Pogues were original.

If ‘Red Roses’ set out their anarchic manifesto of romance, and, often, revenge, then in ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’ they took to the streets, whiskey bottle in one hand, pitchfork in the other.

‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’ included a mix of reckless, primal, high-energy traditional Irish tunes, such as ‘The Wildcats of Kilkenny’, old folk ballads like, ‘A Man You Don’t Meet Everyday’, and a heap of songs that MacGowan penned himself.

As much as MacGowan was a magnetic frontman, chaotic and piratical, with that slurred, strained voice that seemed the perfectly broken instrument for delivering his songs, it was the songs themselves that set him and The Pogues apart.

The album starts with ‘The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn’, a wild, nightmarish trip through the de犀利士
bauched life of an Irish Republican and anti-facist. Bits and pieces of Irish mythology permeate the story as unromantic fragments of the protagonists life are thrown before him.

The second song on the album is ‘The Old Main Drag’. It is both a portrait and a landscape, and presents an unrelentingly literal depiction of a hopeful young boy as he quickly, and without much resistance, becomes a slave of the streets, dependant on drugs and sex work. It’s depressing and grizzly, but great.

I could go on and on, but there isn’t the space (or, probably, the demand), so I’ll leave you with a quick list of other reasons to listen: ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, ‘Body of an American’, ‘Navigator’, ‘I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Everyday’, ‘London Girl’ (on 2005 reissue), ‘Billy’s Bones’, ‘Sally MacLennane’… I could go on.