The Pogues

Cafe Society
1

From the Dropkick Murphy’s thread:

One of the ‘other two’ is The Pogues. :eek: (Sorry, tr0psn4j. I’ve always thought of The Pogues as one of the bands you listen to before going to other bands in the genre.)

I have Red Roses For Me, Rum, Sodomy, & The Lash, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, Peace & Love, Hell’s Ditch, Waiting For Herb, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, a couple of 12" singles, a CD single, plus Shane MacGowan’s band The Nipple Erectors/The Nips Bops, Babes, Booze and Bovver and Shane MacGowan & The Popes The Snake.

I was first exposed to The Pogues back in the '80s when A Pair Of Brown Eyes was getting a lot of airplay on LMU’s station KXLU in L.A. Loved it. (The also played Shamrock Shore, which got me into Boiled in Lead.) I caught The Pogues a few times at The Coachhouse in San Juan Capistrano (once with Joe Strummer), at the Hollywood Apmphitheatre, and at The Wiltern (where Strummer replaced the missing MacGowan).

So what’s the best Pogues album? For me, I like Rum, Sodomy & The Lash since it was my first. Red Roses For Me was the next. It’s good, but it lacks… ‘something’… that RS&TL has. If I Should Fall From Grace With God and Peace & Love are both more polished than RS&TL. Great albums, both. Nobody seems to like Hell’s Ditch. Coming off the previous albums, I thought it was a bit weak. But it does have a great rendition of Sunny Side Of The Street, and I like 5 Green Queens & Jean. And of course there’s Lorca’s Novena. Waiting For Herb should have been called Waiting For Shane. The Voice of The Pogues was not present, and it showed. I was disappointed. Still, enough time has passed that I should load it onto iTunes and give it another chance.

Bops, Babes, Booze and Bovver, a compilation of singles from MacGowan’s earlier band The Nipple Erectors (later renamed The Nips) is fun, Shane had lots of energy when he was younger. By contrast, I’m having a little trouble warming up to The Snake. It’s good enough, but to my ears Shane seems tires and it sounds like he’s doing the songs by rote and he’s doing it as a job.

So which Pogues album (and by extension, Shane MacGowan album) is your favourite?

2

A wonderfully impossible question to answer, too many Pogues songs have become if you like part of the soundtrack of life to choose one over another …

Though if I must choose I suppose I’d have to go with If I Should Fall From Grace With God.So many great songs, my personal favourites being:

  • Turkish Song of the Damned
  • If I Should Fall from Grace with God
  • Fairytale of New York
  • Thousands are Sailing
  • Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six

… and not a dud in the bunch. An album that I have replayed more times than I can count, and one which, in my opinion, would grace any music collection, pretty well no matter what one’s taste is.

3

Easily Rum Sodomy & the Lash is my favorite. There isn’t a single dud song and it’s one of the handful of albums that I have listened to constantly for weeks on end without growing tired of it. When I fell in love with The Pogues I fell hard.

After that I have to give If I Should Fall From Grace with God the edge over Red, Roses, for Me. but only by a hair, and that hair is the song Fairy Tale of New York. The whole album (both of them really) is amazing, but Fairy Tale is about as close to a perfect song as I can think of.

The Pogues were a great, amazing band, and I am glad to see that Shane hasn’t kicked yet and may even be getting a bit better. If you watch the Documentery If I Should Fall From Grace: The Shane McGowen Story he looks like he is about to drop dead of liver faliure at any second most of the time.

4

*Rum, Sodomy and the Lash *by an arse hair from *If I Should Fall from Grace *- both legendary albums. The sick bed of Cuchulainn is my clear favourite Pogues song, so RS+L gets the nod for me.

Shane was finished by If I should fall from grace - nothing they did afterwards was in the same league.

5

I actually like Hell’s Ditch, thankyouverymuch. Not everything on it, of course, and it’s not my favorite album, but it does have some great songs. Lorca’s Novena, for example, is a wonderfully haunting song. But the songs I don’t like on Hell’s Ditch I pretty much hate.

Despite my username, I’m hesitant to say that Red Roses for Me is my absolute favorite. I think it would be a tie between that and Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash. You can’t beat RRfM for sheer energy and fun, but on RS&tL they matured and came into their own.

The Snake has some reasonably good songs, but you do get the feeling Shane’s not into so much anymore. The Donegal Express, though, (that’s on that, isn’t it? I had another Popes album whose name escapes me, so it might be on that) evokes memories of the early Pogues.

And completely unrelated, will you marry me, Johnny L.A.? You actually have a Nips album? Where the hell did you find that? And is Vengeance and Nobody to Love on there? I love those songs.

6

duplicate post. :o

7

Maybe. I’m not seeing anyone. :wink:

I got it on vinyl a long time ago. I’ve since obtained a CD version so that I can put it on my iPod. Looks like Amazon is OOS, but there’s one (new) copy available from a seller for $15.48. Here’s a list of the tracks:

1 KING OF THE BOP
2 NERVOUS WRECK
3 SO PISSED OFF
4 STAVORDALE RD, N5
5 VENUS IN BOTHER BOOTS
6 FUSS & BOTHER
7 ALL THE TIME IN THE WORLD
8 PRIVATE EYE
9 GABRIELLE
10 VENGEANCE

8

Hmm I’ve actually heard quite a few of those. Myspace Music is a wonderful thing. Too bad Nobody to Love isn’t on there. You can hear it here if you’re so inclined. Thankfully the Beltones covered it, or I might never have heard about the Nips.

9

They’re next on my list I guess. I wonder why I hadn’t heard of them until yesterday.

10

I like how the OP doesn’t even mention Pogue Mahone. Probably for the best, as it’s really not a good album. It does make you appreciate Waiting for Herb, though, which would probably have been better received if it had been released as a solo album by Spider Stacy that just coincidentally happened to have all the rest of the Pogues except Shane. It’s a good album, but it’s just not a Pogues album.

Anyway, If I Should Fall from Grace with God is unquestionably their best album, so I’m going to go ahead and say that Peace and Love is my favorite album, just to be contrary. Some good traditional sounds there, but over all a much more mellow album than their preceding efforts.

11

Because “excellent musicians” =/= “popular musicians.” Yeah, they’ve made it on many best albums/best bands lists, and they have a lot of diehard fans, but I doubt that even at the height of their popularity they were on the radio anywhere outside of a few big cities or the occasional college station.

Plus, guessing your age from your comments in the other thread, their first few albums came out before you were born.

Don’t feel bad. I was late to the party too, I only heard about them when I was 18, after they’d broken up and before they did the reunion thing, and that was only through a guy I was dating at the time. I remember hearing “Good Rats” on Dropkick’s Sing Loud Sing Proud, and laughing about how ridiculous the singer sounded, pretending to be drunk.

Shortly thereafter, I realized they’d invited Shane MacGowan to sing that song, and that’s how he actually sounds. :smack:

12

Not to hijack, but Shane’s finally got his teeth sorted!

13

Heh just imagine what you would have thought if you’d seen how he actually looks. :smiley:

Shane is a genius musician no question, but he looks and acts exactly like a derelict rummie. Those teeth … !

14

I don’t have that one. I should probably pick it up, just so I can have all of the albums. (I never saw a need to get the compilation albums, as I already have the songs.)

I can’t let this thread go without mentioning The Pogues playing with The Dubliners. Great rendition of The Irish Rover. And speaking of the two bands, I’m not sure which I like better: The Limerick Rake by The Pogues, or by The Dubliners. I like the instruments on The Pogues’s rendition, but I also like the a cappella of The Dubliners’s.

15

Not just my favorite Pogues song, but my favorite song period is “Haunted”. But strangely it is not found on regular US album versions (including greatest hits collections). My second fave is “Rainy Night in Soho”. You have to see him playing that in “If I Should Fall From Grace”.

16

Since I’ve first started listening to them, I thought SHane should have his teeth fix. Now that I see the new chompers, they just look wrong.

17

OMG Shane has teeth now?! That’s almost wrong, somehow. Very strange to see that picture, I remember a friend’s mom who had some bad teeth and when she finally got them fixed she just looked wrong.

I would still do it to the 1985 version of Shane MacGowan, teeth and all.

18

Hell yes it’s wrong! A universal constant has just been altered! :wink:

You can find “Haunted” on YouTube, plus you can get it on iTunes on an album called Emerald Rock (it’s a compilation).

Love love love the Pogues!

Obligatory mention of the excellent film If I Should Fall From Grace- The Shane MacGowan Story.

19

Of course it needs subtitles. :wink: :smiley:

20

“Sit Down by the Fire.” It gets a mention. That is all.

Actually, on edit, that’s not all. I have no desire to watch a biography of Shane MacGowan. Or, really, to ever look at him up close. Blergh.