Music
Plus One
The 11 best songs by The Pogues
The folk-punk legends will be bringing fairytales and fiestas to your dirty old town this winter – here are 11 reasons why The Pogues throw the ultimate Christmas party
If you thought all the fabled folk-punks had in their setlist was the world’s most abusive Christmas song, strap in for the highlights of a seven-album catalogue that spans from lovelorn WWII ballads (‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’) to brass-crazed anarchy that could soundtrack a bull-running festival (‘Fiesta’).
And while dentally challenged pub-genius Shane MacGowan left us in 2023, the frontman’s spirit and songbook lives on through co-founders Spider Stacy (vocals/tin whistle), Jem Finer (banjo) and James Fearnley (accordion). These are the 11 moments on The Pogues’ November/December UK tour when you really don’t want to be at the bar.
11. ‘Fiesta’
(If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)
While the band filmed cowboy parody Straight To Hell in Southern Spain – an experience every bit as booze-sodden as you’re imagining – banjo player Jem Finer couldn’t escape the nagging jingle played by the fairground outside their hotel. “The choice was to inflict it on the rest of the world or go mad,” he recalled of co-opting the melody for this breakneck hedonist classic from If I Should Fall From Grace With God. Watch the pints fly when they pull it out live.
10. ‘Sally MacLennane’
(Rum Sodomy & The Lash, 1985)
Pogues drummer Andrew Ranken suggested album title Rum Sodomy & The Lash because “it seemed to sum up life in our band”, and the heartiest drinking song is this riotous tankard-thumper (it’s literally named after a brand of Irish dry stout). MacGowan didn’t need much research to paint this thumbnail sketch of a pub packed with ‘psychos and the men who had the horn’: it was a pint-by-pint account of a night at his uncle’s Dagenham boozer, serving the Irish immigrants who worked at the nearby Ford plant.
9. ‘Dirty Old Town’
(Rum Sodomy & The Lash, 1985)
Nobody comes to a Pogues gig for glossy, airbrushed, unblemished love songs, and this definitive cover of Ewan MacColl’s 1949 folk standard paints a smoke-blackened romance against the backdrop of industrial Salford. While the lyrics are a clash of the poetic and mundane (‘I met my love by the gasworks wall/Dreamed a dream by the old canal’), the instrumentation is a stunning tug of war, with MacGowan’s nicotine-stained croak borne aloft by heavenly swells of fiddle and tin whistle. It’s the sound of lying in the gutter, but looking at the stars.
8. ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God’
(If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)
The Pogues never walked the tightrope between punk and traditional Irish folk more deftly than on this opening title track from their best-selling album. The charging drums and MacGowan’s gap-toothed roars bristle with attitude, offset by the cascade of vocal harmonies and Finer’s virtuoso banjo break. With U2 producer Steve Lillywhite catching the band’s anarchic live punch, it’s the sound of swaggering down Dublin’s Grafton Street with your best mates on St Patrick’s Day, fuelled by rivers of black gold.
7. ‘Tuesday Morning’
(Waiting For Herb, 1993)
If you want MacGowan’s genius, you’ve gotta put up with his rough edges – but during a 1991 tour of Japan, the singer’s bottomless thirst and lurching performances finally forced his bandmembers to drop the axe. Miraculously – now fronted by tin whistle player Spider Stacy – The Pogues not only endured but flourished on 1993’s Waiting For Herb, hitting the UK No.20 with an anthem that glistens and aches with hope and pain.
6. ‘The Irish Rover’
(If I Should Fall From Grace With God reissue, 1988)
A mutual respect had long passed between The Pogues and their more traditionally minded folk forebears The Dubliners, but it took a backstage meeting at a Vienna festival to hatch the plan to cover a standard whose DNA can be traced back to the 1880s. You wouldn’t want to charter the titular cargo ship – it’s loaded with scoundrels and sinks in the final verse – but the rampaging pace and traded vocals between MacGowan and Ronnie Drew make ‘The Irish Rover’ irresistible.
5. ‘Love You ’Till The End’
(Pogue Mahone, 1996)
The title of The Pogues’ final studio album – at least for now – might translate as ‘kiss my arse’, but these late-period songs are some of their loveliest and most open-hearted. It’s unthinkable that the upcoming UK tour won’t see an airing of the Spider-sung ‘Love You ’Till The End’: a trilling sunbeam of an acoustic ballad that gives further evidence there’s no song that can’t be improved by hosing it with twelve-string guitar.
4. ‘Thousands Are Sailing’
(If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)
Such was MacGowan’s songwriting hot-streak and control over the band in the late-’80s, guitarist Philip Chevron held back ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ from the …Grace With God sessions until Steve Lillywhite convinced him of its merit. Even then, the band wasn’t sure – with MacGowan refusing to sing a lyric he considered “blasphemous” – until mandolin player Terry Woods massaged the chord sequence (“That kicked off the magic,” recalled Chevron). So was born a wistful minor-key travelogue of the great 1980s Irish immigration, capturing “that sense of not belonging anywhere”.
3. ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’
(Rum Sodomy & The Lash, 1985)
MacGowan tapped the great folk songbook for this Rum Sodomy & The Lash ballad (cinephiles might spot the melody from ‘Will Ye Go Lassie Go’, as sung by the vampires in Sinners). But the lyric is all his own, telling of an injured soldier whose memory of the girl back home kept him clinging on in the hell of the trenches, but who returns to find “no pair of brown eyes waiting for me”. Born in peacetime, the singer might not have faced ‘blood and death ’neath a screaming sky’, but this was war poetry all the same.
2. ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’
(Poguetry In Motion EP, 1986)
Now and again, MacGowan reined in his lyrical snark and wrote a drop-to-your-knees ballad. If you go searching for it, there’s a bitter-sweet heart to ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’, as the narrator pounds the London streets of his youth, reflecting on good times long gone and old friends turned to dust. Yet the gorgeous orchestral arrangement does wonders to soothe the pain, and MacGowan arguably never wrote a more beautiful closing line (‘You’re the measure of my dreams’).
1. ‘Fairytale Of New York’
![The Pogues - Fairytale Of New York (Official Video) [HD Upgrade]](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/j9jbdgZidu8/0.jpg)
(If I Should Fall From Grace With God, 1988)
Most Christmas songs are goonish throwaways about turkey and tinsel. The Pogues’ masterpiece dares to acknowledge the wrench of the festive season, when old wounds sting afresh and the ghosts of the past come knocking. Beautiful but barbed, it opens in a steaming jail cell on Christmas Eve, before MacGowan’s narrator rewinds his life’s reels to a youthful romance with a fellow Irish émigré (sung by Kirsty MacColl), their doomed dreams of Broadway stardom and slide into addiction and mutual contempt. By the closing swoop of strings, you’ll be dabbing your eyes with a paper crown.
The Pogues’ UK tour starts 28 November. Find tickets here
