“F*** me, this is so fun,” says “Spider” Stacy, to the ebullient crowd at London’s Brixton O2 Academy. It doesn’t take a body language expert to tell that they agree.
When he says this, the Pogues’ current de facto frontman – bedraggled, energetic and prone to feral whooping – is halfway through a setlist comprised entirely of tracks from 1985’s masterful album Rum Sodomy & the Lash. This is a very different band to the Pogues of 40 years ago, with Shane MacGowan, the band’s talisman and a songwriter of rare brilliance, having died in November 2023. Only three original Pogues are here, the others being banjoist Jem Finer and multi-instrumentalist James Fearnley; the rest of the lineup (nine-strong at first, with a brass section joining partway through, and starry guest vocalists in spurts) are mostly younger. And yet, in the thick of the frenzied Irish singalong, nothing really seems to have changed at all.
