When Shane MacGowan died last year, it felt like the passing of a head of state. In a sense it was: The Irish president attended the funeral; a pre-recorded Bono read from St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians; Nick Cave sang a moving “Rainy Night in Soho.” And by the time the assembly was laying into an unexpurgated reading of “Fairytale of New York”—a white-bearded Glen Hansard leading the congregation, with neo-trad ambassador Lisa O’Neill singing Kirsty MacColl’s parts, Spider Stacey and other Pogues accompanying them on instruments as MacGowan’s widow and others waltzed near the altar—it’s a fair bet many of those present, not to mention those watching the livestream, were blinking back tears. (I certainly was.) Even the pious outcries that followed this unconventional mass felt perfect—one imagined MacGowan’s jagged grin shining down from heaven.
Why such reverence? For one thing, MacGowan and the Pogues made Irish roots music cool. Sure, music nerds admired the native folk revivalists of the 1970s like Planxty and Clannad, the family band that briefly worked with kosmische legend Conny Plank and launched the career of sister Enya before finding their own crossover fame. Some American country artists appreciated the Irish influence on, and dialogue with, their own music. And Bob Dylan covered his share of Irish-rooted tunes; among others, a handsome take on “The Auld Triangle” turned up among the Basement Tapes.
As punk bubbled up at CBGB and Max’s in the Irish diaspora of New York City, you could still hear the ’60s folk-revival sounds of Ed Sullivan faves the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners in countless Irish bars. But these were better known as hangouts for pensioners and off-duty cops than destinations for live music. By the time the Pogues ramped up in the early ’80s, pre-Riverdance and Van Morrison’s LP with the Chieftains, Irish trad was squarely stuff for family gatherings, if it was in your bloodline, trotted out with the green beer and public drunkenness on St. Paddy’s Day.
But the Pogues went beyond revivalism. They built a canon of their own, much of it flowing from the golden pen and orthodontically imposing mouth of MacGowan, their frontman and main songwriter. You glimpsed his gift on their debut, Red Roses for Me. Roughly half standards, including “The Auld Triangle,” it also had MacGowan’s “Boys From the County Hell,” a rabid, myth-building anthem loaded with writerly turns:
The boys and me are drunk and looking for youWe’ll eat your frigging entrails and we won’t give a damnMe daddy was a blue shirt and my mother a madam**My brother earned his medals at My Lai in Vietnam
The boozing, the gang mentality, the black humor, the tangled and brutal history of occupation and emigration embedded in highly compressed storytelling are all there, laid over carousing beats suitable for jigs or pogo-ing. The Pogues were born of the first-wave British punk scene, where MacGowan became an accidental icon before he even had a band, first becoming a poster boy when he was photographed with a bloody ear at a Clash gig, then launching a single issue of a zine called Bondage. That the Pogues were a British band complicated things further. But being accepted in the world of Irish traditional music was beside the point—that music was the blood beneath the scab the Pogues were picking at, animating DNA within battered souls scattered across the culture’s diaspora. In some ways, the Pogues’ “Britishness” was the point.
All these factors produced the perfect storm of Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Producing was Elvis Costello, already established as a British punk-pop wunderkind, and who had some Irish blood himself. He’d signed on after inviting the Pogues to open shows on his Goodbye Cruel World tour, an invite issued at least in part because he was smitten with bassist Cait O’Riordan, with whom he’d have a 16-year relationship. To the studio Costello brought a technical knowledge greater than anyone in the band. According to accordion player James Fearnley, writing in his band memoir Here Comes Everybody, Costello kicked in acoustic guitar here (“Dirty Old Town”), mandolin there (“A Pair of Brown Eyes”), and suggested key modulations (“Old Main Drag”). Some session players came in for overdubs, among them uilleann piper Tommy Keane—a credentialed Irish folk musician—and the Tennessee-born fiddler Henry Benagh. Mostly, though, Costello stayed out of the way, intent on capturing the band’s scrappy energy with minimum studio intervention; his oft-quoted hindsight quip was, “I saw my task was to capture them in their dilapidated glory before some more professional producer fucked them up.”
Capture them he did. The sound of Rum Sodomy & the Lash is a fever-dream of a pub session, acoustic instruments tumbling forward with piercing attack alongside electric bass, singing, and hollering that indeed seemed to issue from the bowels of County Hell. Like a pub session, there were instrumentals, and various singers brought their individual game. O’Riordan delivers the Scottish traditional “I’m a Man You Don’t Meet Every Day” with canny casualness, like the barmaid who finally agrees, after locking up and downing a few, to sing one herself. Tin whistle player Spider Stacy serves up the American folk song “Jesse James” with gruff hootenanny respect, the sound of TV-Western gunfire in the distance adding comic punctuation.
But it’s MacGowan’s show, as “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” makes clear straight away, his arresting sneer pushed up so far in the mix you can smell his whiskey breath. Suddenly you’re at a wake, or a near-wake, with a character—some sort of war hero, or just a debauched rogue mercenary—stretched out at death’s door, while wild tableaus swirl around him. You don’t need to recognize the names of the Irish politicians and opera singers, or the references to Celtic mythology, to understand this was a song about life lived to a hallucinatory and hilariously frightening hilt: brawling and getting beat down, drinking and pissing yourself, buying sex and getting syphilis, vomiting in church and, finally, climbing out of your grave to shout, “We’ll have another round!” MacGowan spits his verses full-tilt as the band matches him, with Ramones-style “one-two-three-four”s punctuating each lurch into the fray.
MacGowan was well-read—legend has him consuming Dostoyevsky and Joyce as a kid—and was recognized as a remarkable writer before getting kicked out of London’s prestigious Westminster School for dealing drugs. And he admired literary songwriters, among them Lou Reed, who similarly spent time in a mental hospital as a teen (MacGowan nodded to his own experience in the Pogues’ first single, “Dark Streets of London,” and sang three words on the all-star 1997 BBC charity single release of Reed’s “Perfect Day”). MacGowan’s “The Old Main Drag” is an impressive bit of Reed-ian dirty realism: a buoyant semi-autobiographical waltz riding accordion and banjo, conjuring a hardscrabble teenage rent boy in London’s West End, turning tricks in alleys, hustling pills, and being beaten by cops.
As a songwriter, MacGowan’s greatest achievements were arguably, like Reed’s, his ballads. “A Pair of Brown Eyes” was his first masterpiece, and might be his most potent song—a nesting egg of stories within stories and songs within songs. The melody recalls “Wild Mountain Thyme,” a love song with Scottish and Irish roots extending hundreds of years, as the singer drowns his sorrows in a pub listening to 20th-century jukebox corn: Johnny Cash’s “A Thing Called Love,” Irish country duo Philomena Begley & Ray Lynam’s emigrant weeper “My Elusive Dreams.” An old man buttonholes the narrator with horrific war stories, attempting to commiserate, but their existential divide yawns, while the eyes of the title haunt them both. When MacGowan presented it to his bandmates, they were startled by its power. Spider Stacy, on hearing the line about limbs “labeled parts one to three,” exclaimed with admiration: “You sick fuck.” Fearnley was brought near tears.
MacGowan’s writing shines on the pub-life reverie “Sally MacLennane,” and he enlivens Phil Gaston’s words on “Navigator,” an irony-chiseled workers’ anthem for laborers who “shift a few tons of this earthly delight” and who “died in their hundreds with no sign to mark where.”But in the end, two standards define the album. Ewan MacColl may have written “Dirty Old Town,” and the Dubliners scored the first and biggest hit by chart position. But even if his delivery nods to the Dubliners’ Luke Kelly, the song became MacGowan’s from the moment he croaked the first chorus, transforming it from regional plaint to cosmic blues. The album ends with Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” one of the greatest anti-war songs ever written. There may be more striking versions of the Scottish/Australian folk lament (see June Tabor’s 1976 recording). But MacGowan’s sozzled, stoic, rueful depiction of a legless Australian soldier (“No more waltzing Matilda for me”) in the shadow of modern Britain’s fading empire, ghosted by somber Salvation Army brass, feels vivid and true—an Irish punk’s fittingly romantic, world-weary endnote.
With its title taken, in similar spirit, from Winston Churchill’s apocryphal diss of the Royal Navy, and its dada-classical cover image of an iconic French Romantic painting of a shipwreck (with band members’ faces artfully graffitied onto the battered bodies), Rum Sodomy & the Lash launched the Pogues internationally. They burned impossibly bright for a while. There was the brilliant Poguetry in Motion EP, the dazzlingly ambitious If I Should Fall From Grace With God, with “Fairytale of New York.” I saw the band twice in New York City around this time, and the revelry, onstage and off, was awesome and scary; Nirvana’s mosh pits were kindergarten recess by comparison. But the albums got weaker, and by 1991 things had fallen apart. MacGowan was kicked out of the band; his substance abuse issues were certainly a factor. And everyone muddled on.
MacGowan remains a songwriter’s songwriter. The late David Berman included Rum Sodomy & the Lash in a list of the 10 albums that would fill his ultimate imaginary bar jukebox. Cat Power covered “A Pair of Brown Eyes” as a prayer, Titus Andronicus as a punk anthem à la early Clash. In the booklet of the 2005 reissue of Rum Sodomy & the Lash, which added the excellent Poguetry in Motion EP and single B-sides, Tom Waits described the band’s music in a poem:
Rapscallion, angry, weepingPassed out songs, songsThat seem to be bornEffortlessly, orNot born but found**On top of an old wood stove
He concluded that these were “songs that we all should carry.” Many of us do, in pubs and cars and backyards. One night this summer, boozing in the light of an illegal campfire on a beach in Cape Cod among friends and family with a couple of guitars, our usual instigators led us in song. And as always, the heartiest singing was on “A Pair of Brown Eyes”—a song of boundless ache, written for the ages across the ocean lapping at our feet.
Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Shane MacGowan wrote “Navigator.” The track was written by Phil Gaston.
