In The Pogues’ breakthrough 1988 single “Fairytale of New York” (download), songwriter Shane MacGowan and guest vocalist Kirsty MacColl portray a codependent couple. He’s an aging alcoholic, gone beyond repentance, no longer even able to summon up an insincere promise to change. Her devotion to him has destroyed her patience, ruined her health; his devotion to the bottle has left him full of resentment and self-pity.

But they’ll get back together, as they always do, and the dance of love and hate will go on. They’ll remember the good times, before it all went south, and cling to each other in mutual self-delusion. MacGowan’s genius is in showing us how willing these people are to let themselves be deluded. It’s a brilliant, harrowing bit of songwriting. And, whether MacGowan intended it so or not, it’s a brutally honest summation of the group dynamic of the Pogues.

Origins

What you think you know about The Pogues is mostly right. Irish by ethnicity if not by birth, the name from the Gaelic pogue mahone (”kiss my ass”). Folky tunes played at punk velocity, by turns sentimental and profane. Lots of heavy drinking. Lead singer possessed of the most heinous set of gnashers in all Christendom. All correct — but missing a little context.

In Julien Temple’s Sex Pistols doc The Filth and the Fury, you can see Shane MacGowan hamming it up in the archival footage; and, like seemingly everybody else who saw the Pistols in their heyday, he went out and started his own band straightaway. After a stab at fame with his punkabilly outfit the Nipple Erectors, MacGowan hit upon an idea as simple as it was audacious — to apply punk’s DIY, anyone-can-do-it aesthetic to Anglo-Irish folksong, a musical form that valued scholarship and tradition.

MacGowan quickly recruited his sometimes housemates Jem Finer (banjo and guitar) and Peter “Spider” Stacy (vocals, tin whistle) into his new, folk-informed project. James Fearnley, briefly guitarist for the Nipple Erectors, was drafted to play accordion — an instrument he’d never touched — on the grounds that he’d taken piano lessons when he was young. Bassist Cait O’Riordan, only 17 at the time, had met MacGowan when the latter was working at a record shop. Drummer Andrew Ranken, who’d been fronting an R&B big band, was last to join the line-up. The new band, Pogue Mahone, played their first gig in late 1982, and spent the next year or two playing shows, pissing off folk purists and punks alike, and slowly building a following. (more…)