Songs & Stories
(part 1)
Songs marked in dark yellow have a story to tell... Click on the song title (or just scroll down) to read it.
1. Transmetropolitan (MacGowan)
2. The Battle of Brisbane (MacGowan)
3. The Auld Triangle (Behan)
4. Waxie's Dargle (traditional)
5. Boys from the County Hell (MacGowan)
6. Sea Shanty (MacGowan)
7. Dark Streets of London (MacGowan)
8. Streams of Whiskey (MacGowan)
9. Poor Paddy (traditional)
10. Dingle Regatta (traditional)
11. Greenland Whale Fisheries (traditional)
12. Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go (MacGowan)
13. Kitty (traditional)
1. The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn (MacGowan)
2. The Old Main Drag (MacGowan)
3. Wild Cats of Kilkenny (MacGowan/Finer)
4. I'm a Man You Don't Meet Every Day (traditional)
5. A Pair of Brown Eyes (MacGowan)
6. Sally MacLennane (MacGowan)
7. A Pistol for Paddy Garcia (Finer)
8. Dirty Old Town (MacColl)
9. Jesse James (traditional)
10. Navigator (Gaston)
11. Billy's Bones (MacGowan)
12. The Gentleman Soldier (traditional)
13. And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda (Bogle)
1. If I Should Fall From Grace With God (MacGowan/Finer)
2. Turkish Song of the Damned (MacGowan/Finer)
3. Bottle of Smoke (MacGowan/Finer)
4. Fairytale of New York (MacGowan/Finer)
5. Metropolis (Pogues)
6. Thousands are Sailing (Chevron)
7. South Australia (traditional)
8. Fiesta (MacGowan/Finer)
9. Medley: The Recruiting Sergeant/The Rocky Road to Dublin/The Galway Races (traditional)
10. Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six (MacGowan/Woods)
11. Lullaby of London (MacGowan)
12. The Battle March Medley (Woods)
13. Sit Down by the Fire (MacGowan)
14. The Broad Majestic Shannon (MacGowan)
15. Worms (traditional)
PEACE & LOVE
1. Gridlock (Finer/Ranken)
2. White City (MacGowan)
3. Young Ned Of The Hill (Woods/Kavana)
4. Misty Morning, Albert Bridge (Finer)
5. Cotton Fields (MacGowan)
6. Blue Heaven (Chevron/Hunt)
7. Down All The Days (MacGowan)
8. USA (MacGowan)
9. Lorelei (Chevron)
10. Gartloney Rats (Woods)
11. Boat Train (MacGowan)
12. Tombstone (Finer)
13. Night Train to Lorca (Finer)
14. London You're A Lady (MacGowan)
HELL’S DITCH
1. The Sunnyside of the Street (MacGowan/Finer)
2. Sayonara (MacGowan)
3. The Ghost of a Smile (MacGowan)
4. Hell's Ditch (MacGowan/Finer)
5. Lorca's Novena (MacGowan)
6. Summer in Siam (MacGowan)
7. Rain Street (MacGowan)
8. Rainbow Man (Woods)
9. The Wake of the Medusa (Finer)
10. The House of Gods (MacGowan)
11. 5 Green Queens & Jean (MacGowan/Finer)
12. Maidrin Rua (traditional)
13. Six to Go (Woods)
WAITING FOR HERB
1. Tuesday Morning (Stacy)
2. Smell Of Petroleum (Finer)
3. Haunting (Woods)
4. Once Upon A Time (Finer)
5. Sitting On Top Of The World (Finer/Fearnley/Woods)
6. Drunken Boat (Fearnley)
7. Big City (Finer)
8. Girl From The Wadi Hammamat (Ranken/Finer)
9. Modern World (Hunt)
10. Pachinko (Finer)
11. My Baby's Gone (Ranken)
12. Small Hours (Finer)
POGUE MAHONE
1. How Come (Lane/Westlake)
2. Living in a World Without Her (Hunt/McNally)
3. When the Ship Comes In (Dylan)
4. Anniversary (Finer)
5. Amadie (Ranken)
6. Love You Till the End (Hunt)
7. Bright Lights (Finer)
8. Oretown (Finer)
9. Pont Mirabeau (Appolinaire/Finer)
10. Tosspint (Finer)
11. Four O'Clock in the Morning (Ranken)
12. Where that Love's Been Gone (Ranken/Skull)
13. The Sun and the Moon (Stacy/Clarke)
RED ROSES FOR ME
Boys From the County Hell
About the chorus ("Lend me ten pounds and I’ll buy you a drink"):
Philip Chevron:
In the early 80s I used to see quite a bit of Shane in the Devonshire Arms in Camden Town. I was working in "Rock On" and producing other peoples albums, he was at "Rocks Off" and starting this new band Pogue Mahone. Shane and I knew each other from 1977, his days with The Nips and mine with The Radiators - at one stage we were both on Chiswick Records.
In any event, we always had plenty of things to chatter about in the pub. Sooner or later, the following exchange would always take place:
Shane: "So......you havin' another drink?"
Me: "Cheers Shane, a pint of bitter thanks".
Shane: "Right. Can you loan me some money?"
Me: "Tenner?"
Shane: "Cheers. Bitter, yeah?"
Me: "Cheers"
(from Pogues.com forum)
Dingle Regatta
Jem Finer:
This instrumental is half a traditional tune, "Dingle Regatta," and half a tune I wrote. My writing career started with making up instrumental interludes, intros etc. This was the first tune I wrote that was too big to fit inside a song!
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Kitty
'Kitty' is my favourite track on the album," says Shane. "it's a song that I learnt from my mother and I've only ever met one person, who wasn't out of my family or from round our particular little area in Tipperary, who knows it.
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
About the lilting at the end of the song (which appears on the remastered CD):
Socrates:
The lilt on end of Kitty came from a crazy idea in the pub with Shane, I suggested a mad psyched out lilt at end of Transmetropolitan. I forgot all about until Shane said they wanted ME to do it. A few weeks later I found myself at Elephant but the day was running late an they decided to just have me say something in Irish ( F in inter cert ) with a wee lilt. Both Jame’s and Shane’s attempt to stop me speeding up were in vain and it was the wrong tempo so it didn’t work for intended purpose. Listening to it now it was the right tempo in parts but then again it’s the right tempo in parts for most any feckin song, so it twas stuck on end of album, something missed by most people incuding whoever recut it, Danny Kelly give it a mention in the NME review at the time as did Dave Quantick. The fact that Dingle Regatta came out was lost on me until the re-issue. I only had two regrets
1. false modesty when asked by Stan what I wanted as credit I said "nothing"
2. " nil aon...." was the first thing that came into my head and I wish straight away I had repeated Michael O'Hare’s famous Saturday afternoon phrase on RTE. "sin a bhfui ag coursai sport" - excuse spelling (F in inter cert).
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
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RUM,
SODOMY & THE LASH
The Sickbed Of Cuchulainn
Shane MacGowan:
That’s about similar kind of character [similar to Frank Ryan]. Except he’s an old dosser, and he’s dying. He lives longer than Frank Ryan. He lives to be an old man. It’s about how every old dosser you meet on the street has got a history. He’s got a history of probably fighting in a couple world wars, maybe the Spanish Civil War. The character in that is an Irish guy who’s fought in all the wars that Frank Ryan fought in. And that’s why it mentions Frank Ryan. (…) In the house my mum and dad have got at the moment, it used to be a safehouse for Frank Ryan. It used to be one of the places he stayed. But, I wrote ‘Sick Bed’ before they got that house.
(from A Drink With Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke)
Shane MacGowan:
…it's about Frank Ryan…..who was the leader of an Irish contingent in the Spanish civil war…..yeah…….do you know the lyrics?.....well it is about an old 'dosser' dying right?........you always get old dodgers dying on the street………but the people don't think that they lived through a whole century and was at war and all…….so like….well the first verse is self explanatory……then he gets on the death train…..he's in Germany……in Cologne……the second verse is more real life……me and my Dad were drinking in the Euston Tavern and a small wiry Irish guy walks in…..yeah……you know the kind……a really pissed up Irish guy….really small, you know what I mean, small but well built……black greasy hair…..right!…..very determined, very angry and very drunk……they wouldn't serve him……he was actually offering to buy the bar a round of drink………..yeah……then he jumped over into the bar and started smashing up all the bottles…………it took four big fat English bastards to drag him outside and kick him senseless……..we could hear the thumps from inside……….and then they came back in and sort of clapping their hands you know "a job well done" and then he comes banging through the door again and kicks the hell out of them…
(from 'A Rockin Roll Paddy On The Donegal Express', a 2003 interview with Shane)
The Old Main Drag
The songs are all based around fairly basic street level existence in London, which is the life that I've led most of my life," he [Shane] explains. "I used to stay at my uncle's pub which is where 'Sally MacLennane' comes from. I also spent a lot of time down the 'dilly when I was teenager, which is where 'The Old Main Drag' comes from. It isn't necessarily about me . . . it's what I saw. All the rest of it is just stuff that, if you spend a lot of time living the - I don't know the word for it - real life in central London, you see it or it happens to you. I've worked in pubs and done other shit jobs, it's just that I've observed and remembered it, or it affected me enough to write about it. Not affected me so that I wanted to say any great message about it, just that I like thinking about things and then writing about them. I don't like writing about my own personal hang ups which is what a lot of other populists do, I just like giving an impression of real life.
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
A Pair Of Brown Eyes
It's just about a guy getting pissed at a bar round here," says Shane nonchalantly. "He's getting pissed because he's broken up with this bird and... you know how it is when you just go into a pub on your own to drink and it's really quiet and you get this old nutter who comes over and starts rambling on you. So this old guy starts on about how he came back from the war, the First World War. Or the Second. One of them anyway. And he tells him about the ship he had out there and how he got out and came back and this girl had fucked off with someone else, a girl with a pair of brown eyes. Which is the same situation as the young guy sitting there listening to all this rubbish and the juke box playing Johnny Cash and Ray Lyman and Philomena Begley, classic London juke box tracks. And in the end he gets to the stage where he says fuck it, and he goes stumbling out of the pub and he walks along the canal and starts feeling really bad, on the verge of tears, and he starts realising that the old guy has had a whole fucking lifetime of that feeling, going through the war and everything, but his original reaction is to hate him and despise him. I'm not saying he goes back and starts talking to him but you know...
(from an interview with Shane, Pogueology, Folk Roots, August 1987; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Jem Finer:
It’s a brilliant song. I think it’s one of Shane’s real classics. It had another name originally. He wrote it about the time of the Falklands War [1982], and it was called ‘Me And Hanley’ or something like that. It had totally different lyrics. … Then he rewrote it. I found it a very exciting song, both lyrically and musically.
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk)
Sally MacLennane
Shane MacGowan:
Uncle Frank was a great historian. (...) knew a lot about Irish history, which my parents were good on and which I had been taught by the old folks on the farm. So he was a link with Ireland for me, he ran a great pub in Dagenham for the Irish Ford workers, which is what Sally MacLennane is based on. My dad helped out there sometimes. (...) Speaking of Sally MacLennane, the elephant man in that song was a real bloke, who used to come in the pub in Dagenham and he was a huge bloke and he used to get into terrible fights and he'd crunch people and one night he got into a fight with another huge bastard and he won the fight, but he got a broken neck in the process. And he went around with a cast around his neck for the next six months, which is why they called him the elephant man. The elephant man broke strong men's necks when he's had too many Powers. Powers whiskey obviously.
(from A Drink With Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke)
A Pistol For Paddy Garcia
Jem Finer:
I wrote this during the period in which I became obsessed with Sergio Leone!
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Billy's Bones
James Fearnley:
I remember talking to Shane about putting some hymn tune at the end of Billy's Bones - Abide With Me or something, but I couldn't be sure (I should listen to the end of it to see if I can remember what it was but all my records are downstairs and I'm just lazy). So, last day of recording or something, I put the hymn tune on, (on organ, actually, and not accordion) to have it removed in mastering by someone who knew better. It was dismaying, I remember, to have it swiped out right at the end and in a rather savage and unlovely sort of way too. Ho hum.
(from Pogues.com forum)
The Gentleman Soldier
Philip Chevron:
All the voices are by Shane, including the O'Casey-esque "Dublin woman" and the Behanesque "Cockney soldier".
(from Pogues.com forum)
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IF I
SHOULD FALL FROM GRACE WITH
GOD
If I Should Fall From Grace With God
Although The Pogues had started the Straight To Hell film score back home, it was in Almeria that Shane composed 'If I Should Fall From Grace With God' and finished his delirious rhapsody 'Rake At The Gates Of Hell'. "They're both cowboy death songs which I wrote for the film. 'If I Should Fall From Grace With God' is inspired, I suppose, by gospel/country songs where they have one verse about God and the rest of it is about killing all the others."
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
Turkish Song Of the Damned
The title had arisen in Berlin, when a fan had mentioned the B-side of a Damned single. "Did you ever, you know, hear the 'Turkish Song' of the Damned!'" the German had asked. "Aaaaghh! Fuck! What did he say!" shrieked Shane, "The Turkish Song Of The Damned!"
"Basically it's an historical number," says Shane, "that's more or less like 'Down In The Ground Where The Dead Men Go' or 'Sea Shanty'. It's a ghost story about a bloke who got off a ship and the rest of them went down. It doesn't specify what he did, but it was his fault. It's about being possessed but it's also a bit of a laugh."
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
Shane MacGowan:
It's about a guy on a Turkish island who deserted a sinking ship with all the money and all his mates went down. I'm not totally sure about this - he's haunted and he's dancing around with all this Turkish music playing endlessly in his brain - NYEAHH NYE NEE NEE HYEAHH NYEAHHH NIN NIN NYIN NEAHH... He just spends his time, haunted - dancing, drinking and fucking. Then his best mate comes back, and all the crew, to drag him down to hell or wherever they are. The thing is, he knew it was going to happen. So he's been waiting. Haunted, it's definitely about being haunted."
A metaphor for yourself?
"Fuck that. I don't live on a Turkish island. I'm not haunted either."
(from a NME interview; quoted at www.ktv.no/~oyl-ktv)
Fairytale Of New York
Question: Did you sit down and deliberately try and write a Christmas song for Fairytale of New York?
Shane MacGowan: Yeah. We decided that we wanted to do a male-female duet, a Christmas song. And I was told to go and write one. All I had was a little riff from Jem [Finer, the Pogues’ banjo player], right, which was ripped off from my own song The Broad Majestic Shannon anyway. And it just came in a blinding flash of inspiration.
Question: Was it a reaction against all the other crap Christmas songs?
Shane MacGowan: No. I did it to write a Christmas duet, Pogues-style. No-one was more surprised than me when it got to number two. It got to number one in Ireland.
(from 'Question And Answer', The Band, 1998, published at Shanemacgowan.com)
Jem Finer:
I'm indebted to Marcia Farquhar for the story line that spawned this song. I'd written a banal Christmas duet and she put me on the right track. I wrote a second song with her narrative. Shane took the melody from the first song, the lyrical thread of the second, added his own magic ... and after several years of attempts to record it we finally got it.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Question: How did the song come about?
Jem Finer: I decided to start writing a Christmas song. Marcia, my wife, said it was a load of rubbish, lyrically and narratively speaking, so she suggested a storyline about a couple who are down on their luck. The guy went out with what little money they had to buy a Christmas tree and presents but, on the way, he decided to go into the bookies and it all went horribly wrong - he came back and they had a row. The row was quite a crucial part of it. But then there was a redemptive quality - love took over from the more material aspects of Christmas. Shane [MacGowan] had been working on the same idea as well, a Christmas duet. He had written the first section and we kept the melody from my first song - the one with the really bad story - and basically the storyline from the second one, which Shane transposed to New York and rewrote in his own inimitable style.
(from 'The stories of the Christmas hits', BBC, 2008)
About the influence of Sergio Leone's film Once Upon a Time in America:
Philip Chevron:
It's not actually the opening piano sequence which echoes Once Upon A Time In America, but the first few notes of the vocal line - "It was Christmas Eve, babe". And yes, it was a deliberate quote. By aligning ourselves with so panoramic and poetic a film, an American tale told by a non-American (Leone/Morricone), we were signalling our own attempt to achieve something similar in 4.5 minutes.
(from Pogues.com forum)
Metropolis
Jem Finer:
To be honest I just wanted to write the Leonard Bernstein bit but I thought I'd never get away with it without a bit of Irish thrown in! The combination turned out to be quite interesting. (Later with Gridlock I was amazed no one complained ... 100% Pogues play hard bop. Probably the first jazz track with a hurdy gurdy on it!).
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Thousands Are Sailing
Philip Chevron:
I started writing "Thousands Are Sailing" on my first day in New York with The Pogues in March 1986. It took about a year to complete.
It is always a terrifying experience to play a new song to colleagues. But I think it's fair to say (and this was true of Shane's songs as much as mine or Jem's, Terry's etc) that the fascinating process by which the Pogues transformed a good song into a good Pogues song made it worthwhile.
I did record a solo version (produced by Donal Lunny) for a BBC TV show and album, but that was a couple of years after The Pogues version. The key change and lyric edits made at that point stayed in when I began to sing the number with the band. "Thousands" was written in C, lowered to A for Shane's range and hiked up again when I sang it.
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
Personally, I like Shane singing this song. I don't mind who sings it as long as someone gets it across. Most people grow up with a view of America gleamed from TV. From 'Starsky And Hutch' or from old Western movies or black and white Hollywood musicals on the Sunday afternoon. My view was very much that Sunday afternoon one. America is on of those places that you don't really connect with until you have been there. I think that is till true, although the media have brought America a lot closer to us. Certainly in the Eighties I never felt connected to it in anyway. I was fascinated with it and the Irish-American angle, particularly with respect to George M Cohen. He was a really interesting songwriter. Being the son of an Irish emigrant he encapsulated the spirit at the turn of the century in New York, a view that could only come from an immigrant. In American theatre at the time the musicals were kind of operates about The Prince Of Ruaratina meeting the gypsy girl who is actually the Princess of Romania and all is well at the final curtain. Cohen said 'fuck that' to all that shite 'let's put some real Americans on the stage'. He was actually the first person to say 'here is Joe Soap' and he was singing a song on how great it was to be an American. There was that great sense among the Irish and immigrant Jews of how much they appreciated the opportunities of America. I was very excited about all of that and of all the great work that had been done by Irish emigrants, and off course you connect with the heroes like JFK as well. I grew up in a time where I actually saw JFK. I saw him in the street when he came to Dublin. I was just a little boy and all I could think was that he had red hair like me. Somehow the assassination of Kennedy brought home to us the bigger picture of Irish America and the sadness and great struggle that went into making America the great country that it was and still is.
The first time we landed in New York, off course we were all a bit jarred on the plane; but it was all very exciting from the word go. We were picked up in a limousine and driven through New York in these fucking limos. What you see is this great site when you come over The Queensborough Bridge. That is when you see that skyline for the first time, my heart just burst. I thought 'this was unbelievable, this was America'. It felt like what it must have felt like for those people coming in on the ships years ago. Although the skyline wasn't necessarily there at the time, there was something drawing you. The first thing we did when we got to the hotel, jarred as we were, myself and James Fearnley went out of the hotel and I said 'I want to see Broadway, come on, we are going to go to Broadway'. When we got to the street and I realised that it was Broadway, I stopped James and I said 'hold my hand - we are going to walk down Broadway together'. Hence the line in the song 'we walked hand in hand down Broadway like the first men on the moon'.
So, the song was partly based on personal experience of what it felt for me to be in New York. I started writing the song that night. Admittedly, it took a little bit longer to record it. Over a period of time I had been back to America a few times and got more impressions.
What I wanted to do was to see the experience of going to America in 1986 against the historical background of going to America in 1847 and all the points in between. Off course, at the time the time the song came out emigration from Ireland was at the highest level it ever was since the famine. The main point of the song is that sense of how you belong someplace. You go somewhere else and you don't necessarily belong there and you can feel just as angrily there as you did in the place where you left. In other words you never find your home.
(from an interview at Shanemacgowan.com website)
Philip Chevron:
I really love Shane's version, but I also love singing the song, as it's never quite the same twice. Can't remember when I started singing the song - I suppose it must have been when Shane "missed" a few gigs - the Bob Dylan tour etc. For a period of time he was unreliable even when he was with us, and it seemed to make sense around then to relieve him of material that someone else could do, so he could apply all his resources to his own songs. Around 1990, I recorded a solo version of the song (produced by Donal Lunny) for BBC Records' "Bringing It All Back Home" and had previously sung it solo in the "Completely Pogued" movie, so it all made sense.
Shane did not like singing the final chorus "Wherever we go we celebrate/the Land that makes us refugees/From fear of priests with empty plates/From guilt/And weeping effigies" as I think it ran counter-intuitive to his own brand of Nationalism. In addition he wrongly believed Brendan Behan would never have "danced up and down the street" (the reference is based on fact) and made several attempts to improve on the verb "danced", none of which met with my approval.
As it happens, I never sing the final chorus myself with The Pogues because I know that audiences like singing the "thousands are sailing" bits. I sing instead the version I rewrote for Shane to sing. However, I ALWAYS include it when I sing it solo or when I'm working with Terry Woods, Ronnie Drew etc.
I was slightly aware of the traditional song "Thousands Are Sailing To Amerikay" but I really was interested only in the title.
(from Pogues.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
Thousands was intended to be a modern version of a turn-of-the-century Irish-American vaudeville song, the sort of thing De Danaan used to do so well in their Star Spangled Molly phase. I also knew it would be an emigration song, but I had a dilemma: 80s Irish migration to the USA, in an era of cheapish airfares and relative prosperity, could not be said to be as permanent, as life-altering as the post-Famine migrations, so I needed to find new metaphors for the migrant's sense of alienation and loneliness.
(from Pogues.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
Musically, and to some extent lyrically, I used the template of a typical Irish-American vaudeville song - of the type written by Ernest Ball or Chauncey Olcott. There is actually very little "folk" in it, except in as much as Irish-American theatre music drew, to a degree, on Irish balladry. Even the instrumental section is artifice/pastiche, its roots more in George M Cohan than Turlough O'Carolan. The rock beat and modal chording was, to a large extent, the influence of Terry Woods in the studio.
(from Pogues.com forum)
Fiesta
Philip Chevron:
Fiesta actually came out from our time in Spain. This song is about the time we were in Almeria filming 'Straight To Hell'. We had peculiar hours. We would get up at six in the morning and drive to the set, which was about twenty-five miles from the hotel. This meant that we had to get to bed relatively early, which was difficult enough for The Pogues. Joe Strummer got around the travelling by never leaving the set, he slept in a car. He only came into Almeria for the scenes that needed to be filmed there. The actual hotel in the film is the one we stayed in. Typically we would get back at eight o' clock have a bite to eat and a few drinks to unwind and then go to bed. We were filming at Fiesta time, and the Spanish take their Fiestas very seriously. The problem with the Fiesta is that they start at sun down and continue to sun up. That wouldn't be too bad except the noise of the fiesta is something else. All through the time we were in Almeria there was two tunes that kept playing, they came like Chinese water torture. It would stop for five minutes and then start again. The first tune was what we made the main tune in 'Fiesta' and the other one was the coming from the doll-selling stall. You know the line 'will you kindly kill a doll for me'!
The slogan coming over the PA was the guy on the stall shouting the Spanish for 'come and wine a Chochana'. So, these two songs were alternating in our heads like some horrendous and hellish nightmare. We were still in character when your trying to sleep with these noises and all the red wine that we drinking too didn't help. We started coming back from the set thinking we were real cowboys and Indians, it was like great method acting. Reality and fiction got very blurred. 'Fiesta' doesn't really mean anything, expect this colossal bad dream where everybody gets transformed and everybody's personalities are exaggerated. Shane caught this by making cartoon characters out of everyone. The Sumtuosa was Cait O' Riordain, who is a well-endowed lady. Jamie Fearnley was a play on the fact James was the only one who spoke any Spanish. We just burlesqued the whole experience into one song. Shane and Jem pretty much wrote it. It turned out later that we also had to pay the people who wrote that main tune. It turned out to be a Liechtenstein polka. We had no way of finding out so we decided 'lets just do it' and if anyway says 'you knicked that' we would pay them.
(from an interview at Shanemacgowan.com website)
Jem Finer:
Having spent a week in Almeria staying in a hotel next to the fiesta, the fairground cacophony got stuck in my head. The choice was to inflict it on the rest of the world or go mad.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.ktv.no/~oyl-ktv)
Lullaby Of London
It was in Andalucia, using a Spanish guitar, that MacGowan wrote the beautiful ballad 'Lullaby Of London'. "It's basically about a bloke being pissed, corning home and stumbling into his kid's bedroom," he explains. "The kid is freaking out, he's afraid of corncrakes and stuff like that, so the dad is just saying, 'Don't get fucked up; that hell and those demons have gone.' Obviously they haven't but you've got to say that to the kid or he'll be even more screwed up later on."
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
Shane MacGowan:
When we first moved to London my dad used to come up to my room when he came home from the boozer pissed, and sing a lullaby, well he wouldn't sing a lullaby he would be telling me things would be ok and work out ok, yeah?!
(from a 'A Man You Don't Meet Every Day', 2006 interview with Shane published at Shanemacgowan.com)
Philip Chevron:
There are times too when my world condenses to just a set of headphones, a CD deck, a copy of "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" and a head full of bewildering detritus, as though half in and half out of a hastily packed suitcase. I first had the feeling for real the day Shane clanked out "Lullaby Of London" on an optimistically-tuned acoustic guitar in a rehearsal room in Islinton. "So, it goes like that, right?.......roughly, yeah??............ SCCCSSSSHHHHH!!!!!!.... Right?". Right. It does Shane, it does. Thank God you wrote "Sit Down By The Fire" at about the same time or I'd still be on the floor. Songs of love and pain written by a 30-year old boy to his 5-year old self and, as it turns out, to his 50-year old self too.
Remorse so hard-won and tearfully-wrought is remorse still, for all that. "And the next step," as Elvis Presley sang, "is Love".
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
The Broad Majestic Shannon
To emphasize his increasing power as a word-smith, Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem asked MacGowan to write a song for them. The result was a very sentimental ballad, lovingly titled 'The Broad Majestic Shannon'. "I'm a sentimental person," he [Shane] admits, "so I just wrote a song about Tipperary when I was a kid. It's about meeting people, who are around the same age as you that you knew then and there and meeting them now in London, and the way that all the stuff that we loved when we were kids has gone. It's basically just about the good old days and they're gone, and we've got to accept it; I've got to accept it."
(from The Lost Decade by Ann Scanlon)
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PEACE & LOVE
Misty Morning, Albert Bridge
Jem Finer:
Sometimes I felt pretty damn lonely away for what seemed eternity on tour. I wrote this in some dump in New Zealand. I just wrote what I felt.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Jem Finer:
"The first draft of it I wrote in some dump in New Zealand when I was feeling particularly lonely, like I was at the end of the earth,“ he explains. "I woke up and I wrote a poem which became the basis for the lyrics of the song. It's just the poem rewritten so you can sing the words.
I can’t remember what the town was called. It was a peculiar place. It reminded me of a book I has as a child – The Ladybird Book Of A Town. The weird thing about New Zealand is that a lot of it looks like another planet, where someone has recreated 1950s England. A lot of the planning is exactly like English planning but in a slightly alien landscape. There’s a lot of melancholia about it. It reminded me of when I was a kid, probably subconsciously, and it made me feel further away, not just in terms of distance, but in terms of time as well. It was a very weird experience.
So that’s where that came from, and this idea of ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’ – Marcia [Jem's wife] grew up living next to that bridge. I can remember one of our early dates, walking very early in the morning past it. I guess that's something that stuck in my mind.“
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 308)
Blue Heaven
Philip Chevron:
"Blue Heaven" sounded really wonderful at a soundcheck in Birmingham, Alabama when Darryl, Andrew and I first played it. It was all downhill after that - we could never get the original vibe back!! In the studio we kept throwing instrumentation on top in an attempt to rescue it. But it was a lost cause.
It's a much darker song than it first appears. Darryl and I, as Nottingham Forest fans, were both at the Liverpool v Forest semi-final at Hillsborough in 1989, when we watched helplessly as 96 people lost their lives.
"Blue Heaven" is an attempt to describe/exorcise the weird survivor-guilt that follows such a trauma. We set it in New Orleans because I think that was the first time we were happy again after Hillsborough."
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
Believe it or not, Blue Heaven was a really great idea that went horribly wrong in the studio. I agree with Shane when he says it was rubbish.
(from an interview at Shanemacgowan.com website)
Philip Chevron:
I remember the moment I got the idea for ‘Blue Heaven’. It was in New Orleans. There’s something about the city. I suppose there’s some great sort of force there that really isn’t a part of America at all, although it’s geographically located within the United States. I thought that was very interesting and wanted to write a song that reflected that and how I myself was feeling – part of something but completely disconnected.
I got this riff for it, a Professor Longhair / Dr John dort of thing. I did it at a soundcheck one day in Birmingham, Alabama – an outdoor gig atthe Schloss Foundry. It was a converted iron foundry, all rusty and everything. The moon was behind us. It was so romatic, but in this strange, weird place with contradictory, complex history of racism and Ku Klux Klan. It happened in this soundcheck at that moment, wonderful stuff, in a glade of trees. We were so locked in a groove you couldn’t have sliced it with a cheesewire. Me, Darryl and Andrew got into a lot of that rhythm section stuff around that time – a unit within a unit. But it’s fair to say it’s the only time ‘Blue Heaven’ completely made sense It just refused to replicate itself in the studio, and I think I’d agree with the fans that it’s one of the worst songs the Pogues have ever recorded.
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 320)
Down All the Days
[Jem] Finer says: „We did a lot of playing round with new instruments, more than on previous records. ‘Down All the Days’ is a good track. It’s got this lovely floating feel, and then I put the hurdy-gurdy on it to make the drone space, and James played the hammered dulcimer. That track’s an example of where it really all worked.“
The melodically attractive ‘Down All the Days’ is a song about handicapped Irish writer Christy Brown, who is immortalised in the movie My Left Foot, and its effects include the clicking of typewriter keys tapped by the group’s old friend Kathy MacMillan.
Chevron adds: „‘Down All the Days’ was the song shane took the least care of. It ended up not even having a full lyric. Under pressure from Steve [Lillywhite, the album producer], I had to write the second verse for it. I don’t think Shane realised these weren’t even his words that he was singing.“
Jem Finer remembers it differently, suggesting that, „Both Phil and I contributed to the second verse which Shane then rejected, coming up with something of his own.“
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 342 and 344)
About the typewriter sound in the song:
Philip Chevron:
Christy Brown was not capable of many sounds on which his sheer exhuberant celebration of the life force was possible. Of these, the noisy slurps as the porter went down his neck or the clatter of those once uncontrollable keys as he sought to express himself in words, must be counted in the Top 3. The typewriter is Christy's "music". While the Pogues have never been the kind of band to add a drum roll to an orchestration simply because the lyrics mention a drum roll, there did seem to be a case here for the portable. It added links - the sound reminds CB of the horses' drays at the brewery - an especially accurate invocation, I always thought, as a coinneiuseur of Old Dublin Sounds - and to that "carnivalesque" quality it appears to have become germane to distinguish as a vital component of Poguetry in recent scholarship.
That said, the album probably WAS better off without the Irish dance steps I painstakingly overdubbed onto "The Gartloney Rats" but which never got past T Woods's approval (as composer) for the final master. Let's just say the Liverpants people may not have ended up with quite so much of the credit for The International Heavy Monster Sound of Those Rappity-Tappity Irish Dancin' Feet as they subsequently did!
(from Pogues.com forum)
Lorelei
Philip Chevron:
"Lorelei" (E but now D) is, partly, about the Rhineland legend. It was written for my late boyfriend, who was German and knew I loved hearing all the great old German myths and legends from him.
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
I wrote it about the despair of being away from someone you love so much of the time. I met my boyfriend, Joachim Kind from Hamburg, who came along like an oasis of calm and quiet strength, in a turbulent personal time for me. The song reflects that tension between tempest and safe-harbor, or tries to at least. Kirsty did a wonderful job of the co-vocal. Joachim sadly died about 12 years ago. [posted in 2005]
(from Pogues.com forum)
Philip Chevron:
"I had a boyfriend, Achim, who I couldn’t spend enough time with. He was living in Hamburg. I remember us being in Copenhagen and we had to fly down to Italy to do a week’s TV shows in Rome and I said, ‘I can’t do this unless I stop off in Hamburg.’ So I’d fly to Hamburg, get a message to him, he’d come out to the airport, we’d have a coffee and I’d be on the next plane out again.“
Achim inspired Chevron’s ‘Lorelei’. Says Philip: „We’d played at the Lorelei Festival [in July 1988] and he was telling me the legend as he knew it, about the temptress luring all these sailors on to the rocks. There was something about the way he told it that personalised it for me. I used the imagery in that to explain how it felt to be away from somebody as often as I was away from him.“
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 346)
Tombstone
Darryl Hunt:
'Tombstone' ... just came from him [Jem] sort of [reflecting] on Australia ... and the aborigine philosophy. The idea of the land belonging to not just people but to animals and plants. That's another thing, people were ... the socialist idea of land belonging to the people, when it actually belongs to the plants and animals as well...
Jem Finer:
And just being. It just being. Of every stone and pebble having its own place, its history. And of course, the English when they got over there they couldn't understand that...
(from an interview with Darryl and Jem, released on the 1989 "Picture Disc" 12 inch, published at Poguetry.com website)
Jem Finer:
"Arriving in Australia, I immediately had this feeling of it as this really old, old place. The land feels very old and, in a sense, the cities and towns can feel very alien, like they’ve just been landed on this wild place. There’s this place called Surfer’s Paradise, this horrible resort-y place in Queensland. I was looking at the sea thinking, ‘It’s amazing. It could be millions of years ago.’ And I turned round and these grey, high-rise things behind looked like they’d just landed. They literally looked like tombstones.“
This observation formed the basis for Finer’s composition, ‘Tombstone’, which would appear on the next Pogues album. He adds: „The lines ‘The night is dark, the moon is full / Across the blood red plain’ – that was my interpretation of the Aboriginal flag – that’s the black and the yellow and the red. I was just trying to write a song very simply about what happened when the people of this land, who considered themselves to be part of this land, were colonised. It’s a sort of ethnic cleansing situation. The white man comes along and wipes out the natives and covers everything with tarmac and concrete. I felt it quite strongly there.“
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 307-8)
Night Train To Lorca
Jem Finer:
I made several drives through the night to the town of Lorca in Andalucia. Years earlier I'd travelled throught Spain on a train ... the 2 memories merged.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
London You're a Lady
Philip Chevron:
If "London You're A Lady" is based upon anything, it's the work of the harper Turlough O'Carolan, but the title is a nod to the sentimental 1970s pop song "Limerick, You're A Lady".
(from Pogues.com forum)
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HELL’S DITCH
Summer In Siam
Shane MacGowan:
Yeah, it’s a good one, yeah. But I wouldn’t have put that out under the label of the Pogues, you know. I would have put that out as a solo single. It’s a good track, I mean it’s a lot better than the stuff they wrote. It’s a good track, but they fucked it up, you know. That was meant to be one verse, just one verse. (...) Yeah, like a musical haiku, yeah. Well, not really a haiku, cause a haiku has only got three lines, but I know what you’re getting at. Like ,Jonesburgh Illinois‘ by Tom Waits, just four lines, just four short lines. You only need to say it once. Everybody gets the message. You have the rippling piano at the beginning, and a rippling piano at the end. You set the mood, and then it’s over. But they fucking insisted on stringing it out and putting a saxophone solo in it, and all the rest of it. It’s like ,Five Green Queens And Jean‘ – it’s the same. That was meant to be just like, four verses. Sung dead straight. With just an acoustic guitar. But they insisted on putting on a mambo beat to it, or some kind of bloody beat to it. Musos, you know.
(from A Drink With Shane MacGowan by Victoria Mary Clarke)
5 Green Queens And Jean
Noel from Wexford:
I asked him [Shane] once about this song and he told me that the five green queens refer to a dice game. On the dice you have 6 "cards" (9, 10 Jack, Queen, King and Ace) and you throw them against a wall and they bounce back onto a black bag (or strip of carpet or whatever) and whatever would be face up would be your hand. The "cards" all have different colours King red, Ace black etc, and Queens green hence 5 Green Queens. I imagine Shane played this game somewhere in Thailand (but that's only a guess) and as for Jean, Shane never mentioned and I didn't pursue him on it.
(from Poguetry.com website)
Philip Chevron:
The card game was played on a bin bag in Shane's flat, Shane was being ministered TLC by Charlie and Jean. Various substances may have accompanied this episode, or not. And where were the other Pogues while this was going on? We are supposed to have been on the West Coast of America without our lead singer, opening for an increasingly perplexed Bob Dylan. But if this is true, Charlie can't have been in two places at once. Not EVEN Big Charlie, rest him.
So much is lost in the mists of time and Shane is the only one with enough long-term memory to be a half-reliable witness. Better make it up yourselves - I know I do!
However, "Five Green Queens and Jean" is about the most Dylanesque image Mr MacGowan has ever used, so there probably is some sort of connection.
(from Shanemacgowan.com forum)
Maidrin Rua
The instrumental ‘Maidrin Rua’ started out as a traditional jam in the studio, led by Terry Woods, which Strummer [the producer of the album] recorded and liked.
(from Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story Of The Pogues by Carol Clerk, p. 369)
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WAITING
FOR HERB
Once Upon a Time
Jem Finer:
This started off as an attempt to write a song for Rod Stewart! It retains that Faces swing...
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Drunken Boat
James Fearnley:
Spider and Louise ply me with questions about ‘Drunken Boat’, if the verse that has the lyrics ‘you wouldn’t expect that anyone would go and fucking die’ was about Paul Verner, our lighting man who died of alcoholism in October 1991. It is. The whole song’s about us and the people round us, I suppose, when we were doing what we were doing. The verse could also have been about Dave Jordan too, but I wrote it two years before his death. It could also have been about Charlie McLennan. Could have been about any one of us, I suppose.
(from Bloguemahone at Pogues.com website)
Girl from the Wadi Hammamat
Jem Finer:
In his book The Songlines, Bruce Chatwin mentions a Sudanese camel-man who 'as he walked, he sang: a song, usually, about a girl from the Wadi Hammamat who was lovely as a green parakeet.' Andrew (Ranken) and I often talked about writing the rest of the song. After a few years of speculating as to what exactly that might be, he gave me the lyrics.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Pachinko
Jem Finer:
The first time I went to Japan I wondered what Pachinko parlours were. The second time I went in one and tried to play ... but was hopelessly lost. The third time I bought a book on how to play but still made little headway. The fourth time an old Japanese man came and stood by me. He rested his hand on mine and subtly guided me to the jackpot .... 'uchi domi. Pachinko, lest you don't know, is a Japanese variation on pinball. Pachinko parlours are wonderful halls of noise and light with aisles and aisles of machines.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
My Baby’s Gone
The most emotionally wrought song on the new album is 'My Baby's Gone', penned by drummer Andy Ranken. Not long ago Andy lost his wife, who died giving birth to their first kid.
Spider Stacy: "We were rehearsing, and Andy walks in with a song. He gets up and yelled his head off, 'My baby's gone/She's never coming back to me', etc. We all just stared at him, stunned. It was like therapy. He sang it on the album, but I do it in concert. Which is difficult, me screaming those words and him behind, clobbering the drums."
(from Boston Irish Reporter article published at Pogues.com)
Small Hours
Jem Finer:
A hotel room song...
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.ktv.no/~oyl-ktv)
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POGUE MAHONE
How Come
Philip Chevron:
It was the record company's idea. As they had been with "Hony Tonk Women", Warners were totally gung-ho about "How Come", and saw it as a certain hit. Unfortunately, the only reliable way to prove your record company wrong is to see the farce through from start to finish. Which is not intended as a negative reflection on either Ronnie Lane's song or on the Pogues' version of it, it is merely a tribute to the cloth ears of the Brothers Warner.
(from Pogues.com forum)
Anniversary
Jem Finer:
Written in a snowbound Boston on my wedding anniversary. Looking out into the slushy gloom I imagined a rather different scenario.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Amadie
Question: I read that it was about a black Cajun singer who was famous in the South, but it wasn't anyone I had ever heard of.
Darryl Hunt: He used to sing in a club, I think it was in the '20s and '30s, and there was some story that one night he was in this whites only club and he was sort of like this token black musician that could play there. And he got a handkerchief off a white woman one night to wipe his brow and she got it back off him and all that but the load of rednecks in there thought that they were a bit too intimate over it and they followed him out after his show--this is all in the song but it's in French--and after the show they grabbed him and tied him down on the road and drove a car over his throat. So basically he could never sing again and that's what it's all about.
(from 'The Reformation of That Irish Band From England: The Pogues', an interview with Darryl Hunt)
Bright Lights
Jem Finer:
"Darryl Hunt wrote a song called Big City ... so I thought I'd write one called Bright Lights. Banal inspiration or what ... though come to think ot it titles have quite often been the seeds of my songs."
Jay McKierney's Bright Lights, Big City came out in 1984 and was subsequently adapted into a movie of the same title, starring Michael J. Fox and released in 1988. Both tell the story of a New York city yuppie who succumbs to the temptations of the netherworld of drugs and debauchery.
(from Poguetry.com website, using Jem's quote from Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler)
Oretown
Jem Finer:
Dystopia. A song for all the towns sold down the river by greed and stupidity.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
Pont Mirabeau
Jem Finer:
Among the things my father left me was a translation of Appolinaire's poem, Pont Mirabeau and a note saying that he'd love to hear it set to music. I adapted his translation to make it work as a lyric and wrote the tune in the romantic surroundings of a cheap Redcar hotel.
(from the Jem Finer (Of The Pogues) BMG Publishing Sampler; quoted at www.poguetry.com)
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zuzana(at)pogues.com
