In accordionist James Fearnley’s memoir of his time with the Pogues, Here Comes Everybody, there is a description of the band’s first headlining tour of Ireland, and in particular, a gig in Carlow during which a mass brawl breaks out in the audience. Afterwards, Fearnley is horrified, both by the crowd’s behaviour and frontman Shane MacGowan’s reaction, which involves turning on his bandmates and delivering them a lecture on human nature. “People are just this much away from murdering each other, this much away from raping each other, this much away from knifing, shooting, massacring, garrotting … It’s fucking dog-eat-dog everywhere you look … It’s what they want to do and if it’s what they want to do, they’re going to do it anyway no matter how much fucking whingeing you do.”
Fearnley is baffled: how, he wonders, can anyone who thinks like that also “write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening self-pity for the human condition”? He has a point: the songs that seemed to pour out of MacGowan between 1984 and 1987 – the period covering the Pogues’ first three albums and most of the music on which his reputation rests – really were as extraordinary as Fearnley suggests. He could write things like The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn, which opened 1985’s Rum Sodomy & the Lash – a gripping, chaotic phantasmagoria that lasts barely three minutes, but manages to touch on pre-Christian Irish mythology, the disabled 18th-century criminal Billy Davis, Austrian tenor Richard Tauber and the saga of Frank Ryan, an Irish Republican who became a Nazi collaborator. And he could write songs like Streams of Whiskey or Sally MacLennane, which, at least while they played, made a life of permanent alcoholic stupefaction seem hugely exciting and inviting.
