A HUNGRY SOUND

My father died of cirrhosis at the age of 44. My brother died of the same at 33.

My alcohol intake is limited to an annual St. Patrick’s Day Guinness that I buy and occasionally neglect to drink.

This is just to say that my love of The Pogues was never fueled by a misguided romanticization of auld sod drunk blarney. Mostly it was the words.

I bought Rum, Sodomy and the Lash on cassette when it came out in 1985. The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn started out the album all stately and slow, and then suddenly shifted into this torrent of words, each bound to the next by phlegm and piss and wisdom and genius…

It took weeks for me to believe that Shane MacGowan had actually written the likes of Sally MacLennane. I was convinced that it had to have been drawn from some deep well, where it had steeped for ages, periodically bucketed out and improved by a generation’s poets:

“Well Jimmy played harmonica in the pub where I was born
He played it from the night time to the peaceful early morn
He soothed the souls of psychos and the men who had the horn
And they all looked very happy in the morning

“But Jimmy didn't like his place in this world of ours
Where the elephant man broke strong men's necks
When he'd had too many Powers
So sad to see the grieving of the people that he's leaving
And he took the road for God knows in the morning”

Billy’s Bones was the other MacGowan original that stood out, partly for its humor (I especially like that Billy knew an “Arsenal from Tottenham blue” and to start the Solomon Grundy-esque ending with “Have a Billy holiday” was pretty inspired), and partly for the way it manages to encapsulate The Pogues’ sense of hard-edged pathos:

“Now Billy's out there in the desert sun
And his mother cries when the morning comes
And there's mothers crying all over this world
For their poor dead darling boys and girls”

It helps to know that the last line there is spit out with a smirk.

This then was the stuff of life…