As you’ll read in this new magazine, which is out tomorrow, an encounter with The Pogues was not easily forgotten. They might be wryly recounting their impressions of Bono. They could be bearing down on you with a bottle and a toilet roll wrapped around their foot. They might equally be listening to opera, or being sick into your luggage.
The stuff of excellent rock music features, for sure – read on! – and all behaviour which helps to illustrate the cocktail of high art and rough lifestyle which is a huge part of the Pogues reputation. As much as music writers of the 1980s might have returned home with tall tales of misadventure, though, there is also a sense that more subtle impressions of the group might remain after the headache had abated.
For sure, The Pogues were a legendarily good time band, and immersed themselves heroically in the part, but their embrace of vibrant Irish musical culture was one aspect of a wider quest for adventurous music. Today we know, for example, “Fairytale Of New York” as a (now heavily-redacted) Christmas classic. To arrive there, as the band explain to Uncut in the magazine, required a sustained compositional effort, a fusion of ideas and a willingness (urged on by Elvis Costello, a kind of hero/villain of the Pogues tale) to push things forward.
This they did, by expanding their personnel and taking influences from jazz, middle-eastern music and beyond, building a group whose world-hungry musicality found important fellow travellers in the shape of Joe Strummer, then on a similar journey: a fusion of his punk era aggression with a more open-ended music. Were you watching closely, though, it could occasionally seem as if The Pogues were covering for their struggling frontman.
When the band split, some might have noted Shane MacGowan’s lifestyle and suggested that here was the root cause for the band’s decline and his own subsequent sketchy productivity. In truth, the main battle he was fighting was with his own high standards. Having created a tough and romantic new pop diction, and taken it into the charts, he was simply unwilling to settle for second best. Anyone waiting for an inspiring comeback was sadly, like Shane himself, waiting in vain.
Better then to remember the impassioned, talented, young man we find at the beginning of this magazine. He’s being interviewed, sort of, in his squat off the Euston Road in 1979. He’s drunk, but that doesn’t mean he’s not on a mission.
“The way I see it,” he says, “is that we’re coming up to the 80s and somebody’s got to save rock’n’roll from all those prats with synthesisers and a university education. And it might as well be me!”
