I’ve been thinking about The Pogues quite a lot since Shane MacGowan’s death last week. Though I listen to them more rarely now, I was a huge fan in the 1980s and 1990s. They were a gateway drug to Irish folk music – Christy Moore, the Chieftans, the Dubliners – and a guttering light by which I started to explore my Irish heritage and adolescent rebel politics (I relished the rage of one schoolteacher who seethed that I was “the sort of person who probably thinks the Birmingham Six are innocent”).
Some MacGowan obituaries have inevitably focused on his lifestyle, which certainly threw out some meaty anecdotes, but most have also acknowledged the sheer quality of his songwriting at the Pogues’ peak. His literary and hellraising sensibilities slug it out in songs like Streams of Whiskey and the Sickbed of Cuchulainn; his sympathy for the oppressed shines through in The Old Main Drag, and his woosy romanticism gleams in Rainy Night in Soho and Fairytale of New York. He shifts perspective and tone – the estranged lovers in Fairytale, the old and young man in Pair of Brown Eyes, memories and narrative in The Broad Majestic Shannon – smoothly and artfully.
His is a London-Irish perspective. His view of the UK capital is brutally and raucously realist (staggering in Transmetropolitan “from a 5 pound bet in William Hills to a Soho sex-shop dream, From a fried egg in Valtaro’s to a Tottenham Court Road ice cream”). But his Ireland is romantic, pre-lapsarian, the land that his mother’s family talked of in his early years in Tipperary. The images in the Broad Majestic Shannon – “the cards being dealt and the rosary called, and the fiddle playing Sean Dun Na Ngall” – are out of time, and intentionally so. MacGowan’s Ireland has its own ghosts – “the best place on earth, but it’s dark and it’s old”, as Sit Down by The Fire has it – but its devils are all imported, mainly from Britain (the soldiers in Gentleman Soldier and The Recruiting Sergeant; the accursed “judges, coppers and screws who tortured the innocent” in Birmingham Six).
It may seem churlish so soon after MacGowan’s death, but it’s interesting to contrast his perspective with Philip Chevron’s. Chevron, the Pogues’ lead guitarist who died ten years ago, was Irish-born and -raised. His songs have a more ambivalent attitude to his country, its priest-ridden past and its underachieving present. In Thousands are Sailing, he observes the irony of the Irish diaspora: “wherever we go we celebrate the land that made us refugees, from fear of priests with empty plates, from guilt and weeping effigies.”
You can hear the disappointment in what the Republic had let itself become in the tumbling imagery of Faithful Departed (which gives this blog post its punning title), written by Chevron for his punk band The Radiators from Space but perhaps less dated-sounding in this version by Christy Moore. Like Thousands are Sailing, the song starts in dialogue with ghosts, but this time they are literary heroes (Yeats, Joyce, Brecht, Behan) rather than nameless Famine victims, as the song picks apart the “made to measure history” of the “grey, post-DeValera Ireland of the 1970s”, to quote Chevron’s own exposition of the song (allegedly from a Pogues blog, though I can’t find the original).
When I first heard the Pogues, I had never been to Ireland (just as, incidentally, MacGowan had never been to New York when he wrote The Pogues’ biggest hit). If the Ireland I imagined was MacGowan’s, the Ireland I found when I did start visiting in the 1990s was more like Chevron’s (though rapidly becoming less so). The magic of the Pogues is the way these perspectives played off each other, in a band blessed with two extraordinarly gifted singwriters.
Richard Brown 