The Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash is an album that I had when I only owned a handful of records. It was one of those LPs that I played over and over, from beginning to end, and learned every word. It was where I fell for songs with a narrative, that told a story, and poetry that celebrated the downtrodden. The band’s lyricist, Shane MacGowan, saw a strength in those striving for some sort of grace, while lost in ghettos, slums, and gutters. Searched for beauty, above the drudgery of a dead-end existence. This was way, way before I discovered Charles Bukowski, or even Tom Waits. Sang in the first person, in the protagonist’s voice, Shane’s were studies steeped in a working-class language of violence, a brutal, unforgiving, honesty, where the pen doesn’t stand a chance against a brass-knuckled sucker punch. Songs like The Old Main Drag chronicled corners that most never wanted to see, and, at best, ignored.*

The album, and Shane, also sang to me of the oblivion I was seeking. I’d been drinking til I dropped since I was fifteen… and it sang to me of adventure. The roving, the roaming, I longed to do. The escape I wanted to make, and the world that I wanted to see. I dreamt that dream of taking a big sharp axe to my Dirty Old Town, but it was far easier to run away. 

Yeah, sure, The Pogues kinda glamourised it, the boozing, if you were of a self-destructive, self-mythologising bent. Sick Bed Of CúChulainn was abandon banged out on a banjo and tin whistle. In our indestructible youth, we screamed and shouted along. “Ghosts are rattling at the door, and the Devil’s in the chair!” Filling our brains with poison. Down it, neck it, smoke it, snort it, and be damned. Full of fearless bravado as we leapt, jigged, toward the void. “Lend me ten pounds, and I’ll buy you a drink…”, Sally MacLennane span, and we span, me and my mate Dave. Arms linked in indie club mosh-pits. Knocked senseless by strangers, and into the arms of tanked-up trysts beneath tables, and in shuttered shop doorways. The boasts of the ballad, I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day, in my head at least, had an air of demonic menace and threat. “Be easy and free, when you’re drinking with me…” and be wary of the trouble I’ve seen and the lengths that I’ll go to. 

Shane, though, more than anything he gave off this huge sense of empathy. His cracked voice, his sometimes slurred, sozzled, smashed drawl, couldn’t hide his compassion. He really cared about the characters he created, those whose tragedies he recounted. Much of what he wrote and sang had, at its root, love. The boozing was perhaps an attempt to hide, numb, the pain he saw. The suffering, inequality, and injustice, all around him. Powerless to put a stop to it, kicking himself instead. Cursed with a doomed, romantic heart, too large to be hardened. Blessed with the gift of painting pictures with stanza, short lines of rhyme, rather than paragraphs and pages. 

The music Shane made with The Pogues honoured tradition, while his words told of woes the world would have you forget. Cruel and wicked histories that the victors have rewritten. Much of Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash is concerned with the fate of cannon-fodder, fallen and crippled veterans. The plight of the poor forced to fight the rich’s wars. A Pair Of Brown Eyes’, and the breakneck, frantically fiddled Billy’s Bones, while The Gentleman Soldier, details just how an occupying force might radicalise the occupied’s young. Shane’s lyrics were often at odds with the band, which danced like a drunken dervish at a country fair. The subject matter, certainly at odds with anything else in the pop charts. And The Band Played Waltzing Matlida is an incredible, unsentimental reading of Eric Bogle’s unflinching account of The Battle Of Gallipoli. The nearly year long conflict, fought in the trenches of Anzac Cove, where close to 200, 000 men were slain or maimed. Tracks like Navigator, raised pints, rivers of whiskey, for the common man exploited by empires, and betrayed not only Shane’s passion for preserving tales handed down in taverns, but also his erudition, education and reading. It was your man MacGowan who introduced me to the work of Federico Garcia Lorca, when he cited the murdered Spaniard as an influence. With Shane’s passing, this quote, from Federico, felt apt: 

“I want to sleep just a moment,
A moment, a minute, a century,
But all should know that I am not dead,
That there is a stable of gold in my lips,
That I am the West Wind’s little friend,
That I am the enormous shadow of my tears.”**

As did the lines of the 16th Century “stirrup cup” salute, The Parting Glass, a song frequently covered by Shane and The Pogues: 

“Of all the money that e’er I had
I spent it in good company
And all the harm I’ve ever done
Alas it was to none but me
And all I’ve done for want of wit
To mem’ry now I can’t recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be to you all.”

Shane MacGowan, Rest In Peace.

*The Old Main Drag closes Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho. A truly strange Shakespearian shambles focused on rent-boys and hustlers, that features an absolutely incredible performance from River Phoenix.

**Gacela de la Muerte Oscura / Ghazal of Dark Death by Federico García Lorca