ENTERTAINMENT
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 1987. PAGE 18
YOUR WEEKEND TV GUIDE

RTE 1
11.30 THE SESSION

First of eight-week series in which leading performers record a 'session' with guest musicians of their choice. Joining the London Irish Pogues and the Dubliners in his first public performance in four years, former Clash front-man, Joe Strummer.

12.30 LATE NEWS

A Christmas fairytale comes true

from BP FALLON in Glasgow

“I THOUGHT it was a hoax,” says Fr Conway of the Church of All Saints in Glasgow, as he unlocks the church doors. His voice expressed relief. Then he sees the bedraggled collection, just out of bed in time to get to church on midday on Saturday in the drizzle. Aran Terence Murray, two years old and about to be baptised.

His mum had rung from London, having picked the name of the church out of the Glasgow yellow pages. Her name’s Ferga, and she is married to Irishman Frank Murray. Frank Murray manages The Pogues.

Jem Finer and Philip Chevron from The Pogues are here. Joe Strummer from punk group The Clash is here too. He plays with The Pogues right now. And Kirsty McColl, selected as Aran’s godmother, battles into the buffeting of a new day that has started too early. Everyone else is back at the hotel asleep or unconscious. The Pogues were in Glasgow playing at the Barrowland Ballroom where they attracted crowds of 3,000 over three nights, breaking a record previously held by U2.

Frank has £20 down on a 33/1 bet that The Pogues’ record ‘A Fairytale of New York’, featuring the singing of Shane and Kirsty, will be number one.

SHANE MacGOWAN: number one for Christmas. Those odds were picked before the record was released. Jem has £20 down on the later odds of 20/1. Now, you couldn’t get such odds.

Today, in Ireland, Larry Gogan will announce that The Pogues’ record is number one for the second week running. They’ve been there before, with The Dubliners and ‘The Irish Rover’. ‘Fairytale’ is the fastest-selling record in Ireland since Chris de Burgh’s ‘Lady in Red’. The record industry prediction is that ‘Fairytale’ will be number two in Britain next week.

“Everyone wants the vibe of Christmas Day, the ol’ turkey on the table and the telly turned on to see The Pogues at number one in Britain,” says Frank Murray.

“If it isn’t, it’ll still be great. We’ve had a hit record and number one would be icing on the cake. But getting to number one in Ireland means a lot to this band.”

To all intents and purposes The Pogues are an Irish band. Their lead singer and songwriter Shane MacGowan was born in England while his Irish parents were on holiday, and grew up in Tipperary. Pogues’ Terry Woods and Philip Chevron are Irish, as are the road crew of Paul Scully, Paul Verner and Joey Cashman. The music is Irish.

Kirsty McColl has been brought to the forefront again, after having hits with “There’s a Boy Works Down the Fish Shop Swears He’s Elvis” and her version of Billy Bragg’s song ‘New England’. Kirsty, from Croydon, 28 and mother of two, last sang on stage half a dozen years ago when she and her band did a three-week Irish tour.

THE SUNDAY TRIBUNE, 27 DECEMBER 1987 page 7

'We can't do anything except play music' – Pogue Shane MacGowan

'We can't do anything except play music' Pogue Shane MacGowan, to BP Fallon

“The boys of the NYPD choir were singing 'Galway Bay' as the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.” Shane MacGowan, ‘A Fairytale Of New York’

SHANE MacGOWAN was 30 on Christmas Day. That he was born on the same day as Jesus of Nazareth seems poetic to some people and appalling to others. Shane spent his Christmas with his parents in Ireland near Borrisokane in north-west Tipperary, where his mother's family come from. His father a Dublin man, and now Shane's folks have returned from London to live in Ireland.

Shane was born across the water in Kent, while his parents were on holiday. He was raised in Tipperary. “The first thing I remember is Ireland because I went there when I was three months old,” Shane says, adding “but I happened to be born in England.” The way he says it, he doesn't seem to be madly enamoured by the fact. “Basically I spent the first few years of my life on a boat. I feel more at home on a boat.”

Shane MacGowan's boat seems finally to have come in. He's the lead writer and singer with The Pogues, the group who in 1987 have two No. 1 hit records in Ireland, first with The Dubliners and their rollicking version of “The Irish Rover”, and currently with ‘A Fairytale Of New York’. In Britain, ‘Fairytale’ is No. 2.

Last weekend The Pogues completed their final concerts of the year, three nights over three thousand people a night at Glasgow Barrowlands Ballroom, breaking the previous record held by U2. It was wild, it was wonderful, a most happy occasion. The Pogues played superbly. It looked like everything had finally come up roses.
It hasn’t.

Last May at the Cibeal Festival in Kenmare, in County Kerry, The Pogues played on Saturday afternoon in the sports hall of St Clare's Convent, billed as The MacMahon Family. As Shane wandered around town in festive spirit, people would come up to him, say hello, say they liked him. Now, seven months later, it's getting crazy. In Kenmare, Shane had responded shyly, politely. Now every Tom, Dick and Seamus wants to tell him he's brilliant, that he's a genius. And now and again someone will come up to him and call him a wanker.

For Shane MacGowan, pop star, the whole bloody thing is a strain. “I find it depressing when people come up and treat me like some sort of demi-God. It means they haven't got the point at all,” says Shane, sitting in the restaurant of the Holiday Inn in Glasgow. He looks tired.

“I'm good at one thing and that's writing songs. I'm not even a particularly good singer. We're a good band, a brilliant band, but that's what we are. We started out as a bar band playing music that didn't have a hope in hell commercially, not at the time, and we stuck to it. We can't do anything except play music.”

POGUE Mahone were formed five years ago, in late October 1982. There was Shane McGowan, face about London town and former lead singer with “The Nipple Erectors”, who played a fast mixture of pop music merged in with punk and r'n'b. Like Shane's current combo, the original name caused disquiet and they had shortened it to The Nips, before passing into forgotten history.

In the new group there was Shane's friend Jem Finer, from Stoke with a Rumanian/Jewish background, who played banjo. And on tin whistle Spider Stacey from Eastbourne, who'd spent some of his childhood in Libya and Guyana, where his father was a wages clerk with a company. One day Jem turned up at the squat where the guitarist from the final lineup of The Nips lived. He was from Manchester and his name was James Fearnley and had with him an accordion.

“Learn this,” Jem told James. Pogue Mahone had begun.

Glasgow, at the tail end of 1987 and Shane MacGowan is in another world half the time, extraordinarily shy and insecure. He's one of the most gifted lyricists in contemporary music. “He never writes a superfluous word or line” says Pogues fan Elvis Costello — no mean lyricist himself — who used to produce The Pogues and is now married to former Pogues bassplayer Cait O'Riordain.

Photo: FULL SPATE: Shane MacGowan gives vent to a few verses

On first meeting Shane three or four years ago, it was hard to ally his songs to this almost-dribbling-at-the-mouth figure of the time. Now he only drinks wine or Guinness or port or occasionally white spirits. He reckons whiskey is disgusting and bad for you.

This most unusual of pop stars has been misinterpreted as a fellow snarling into a microphone, vicious, uptight. When you get to the heart... he's got a soft tender face, sad eyes that momentarily spark into happiness as he hisses with laughter. There's something very lonely about him. Even mums who were originally repelled are beginning to dote on Shane MacGowan, now. They see the gentleness in him and they want to look after him, give him a cup of tea, send him to the dentist. “Ah, it's the teeth,” they'll say, like they're scolding a naughty schoolboy.

“Kirsty! Kirsty! We love you!” boys in the Glasgow audience chant as Kirsty MacColl joins The Pogues on stage. It's Kirsty who duets with Shane on ‘A Fairytale Of New York’, two years after Shane and Cait O'Riordain first attempted the song together, sharing vocals. In the Sunday Tribune on March 9th, 1986 I wrote that this Pogues song had been shelved for the moment.

Kirsty MacColl is from Croydon, twenty-eight years old and the mother of two. She’s had a couple of hits, first with her song ‘There’s A Boy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He’s Elvis’ and then Billy Bragg’s ‘New England’. It’s particularly poignant that there she should be on stage at Barrowlands at Christmastime.

Record producer Steve Lillywhite, who’s worked with U2, Peter Gabriel, The Rolling Stones, and now The Pogues, was at Barrowlands producing Simple Minds for a BBC live broadcast. Kirsty was there, having sung backing vocals on a Simple Minds LP. As the bells rang in the New Year, Steve asked Kirsty to marry him.

It’s six years since Kirsty last sung live on stage, and she and her band did a three-week Irish tour. In Glasgow, she recalls that Frank Murray — a man who has worked with Thin Lizzy and who now manages The Pogues — said to her after she’d performed ‘Chip Shop’ on Top Of The Pops, “If you’ve been on Top Of The Pops people will remember you for at least a month.” Kirsty’s first and last ever solo tour, her Irish jaunt, was hardly a spectacular success. Nerves, illness, only twenty people turning up to see this Top Of The Pops star, another ballroom where one side had the men, the other the women, “and tables of ham sandwiches in the middle.”

After the last gig, exhausted, she came off stage and a woman berated her for playing fifteen minutes short. It was Kirsty’s twenty-second birthday and she was miserable. The next day she was mugged outside the GPO in O’Connell Street by a woman. That was the end of Kirsty’s live performances … till now.

Gosh, Kirsty’s great on stage, dressed in a chequered shirt and jeans, her golden hair up and looking like a hoedown girl. “I could have been someone,” Shane sings to her, his voice ringing, and Kirsty responds, “Well so could anyone.” They waltz together, Kirsty leading her partner, and when she shares vocals with Shane on ‘Dirty Old Town’ it seems so right. Her father Ewan MacColl wrote the song.

Photo: KIRSTY MacCOLL

JOE STRUMMER from punk group The Clash is playing with The Pogues too, mostly remaining towards the back of the stage turned towards his amp but coming forward to sing The Clash song ‘London’s Calling’ and the old rock ’n’ roll number ‘I Fought The Law (But The Law Won)’. It sounds like mid-50s rockabilly, when untamed men came down from the mountains with a straw in their mouth and a rebel lovesong in their heart, legs a-twitching and ready to be the next Elvis.

Who’d have imagined that Terry Woods, the former folknik from Sweeney’s Men who still lives in Virginia in County Cavan, would become a member of The Pogues and find himself on a Scottish Christmas singing with one of the heroes of punk? It’s marvellous, Strummer’s greased hair hanging over his forehead like the demented rock ’n’ roll singer Gene Vincent as accordions and dulcimers pump out this shaking music.

Next month the new Pogues LP will be released. It’s called ‘If I Should Fall From Grace Of God’ and it’s astounding. People will marvel at the beauty of Shane’s song ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, which he wrote for Liam Clancy and Tommy Makem, but didn’t get to them on time – and controversy will be caused by ‘The Birmingham Six’, a heartfelt song that begins with Terry Woods' composition ‘Streets Of Sorrow’, loosely about Michael Collins, before reaching the main body of the piece written by Shane, lyrics like:

“There are six men in Birmingham, in Guildford there’s four,
imprisoned and tortured and framed by the law.
The filth get promotion.
They’re still doing time,
for being Irish in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Even at their sloppiest on stage, The Pogues reach out by their spirit and their zest. They are a great band. Spider, black hair swept back like a New York/Italian gigolo, understates the whole thing when he says: “The Pogues are like the little girl with a curl on her forehead. When we’re good, we’re very good but when we’re bad we’re absolutely dreadful.”

The thing is… in the music business, an area so often peopled by conmen and egomaniacs and scheisters and shits, The Pogues are wonderful people, lovely folk with no airs and graces.

AND at the moment Shane MacGowan is caught up in the music business schmock ’n’ roll game and it’s wearing him down and he’s battling on. “Music has been played for people for money or for a living since pre-history,” this most talented of men is telling you now. “The ancient tradition of Ireland was of minstrels, harpers and fiddle-players and singers, who went around singing and playing for drink and for food and for sex, and that’s what we do, that’s what pop music is about. It’s nothing more than that.”

“If you want to change the world become a soldier or a politician or a priest. We’re just musicians. Musicians are just musicians. Musicians’ opinions don’t matter, they shouldn’t. It’s wrong if they matter to people. Therefore we’re dummies as far as politics, religion and sociology are concerned.”

And now, Shane, how are you doing now?
“Sometimes I’m happy. Sometimes I’m sad. Sometimes the world is a good place, sometimes the world is a horrid nightmare. I’m like anybody else.”

And the echoes ring of Kirsty on stage singing “You took my dreams from me when I first found you” and Shane, his voice filled with passion and soul, singing back “I kept them with me, babe…”

Keep keeping them, Shane. You’re great. And people love you.

GLASGOW
Bob Flynn

The Pogues

THE prerequisite is to get astoundingly drunk and mildly disorderly before hitting the sticky carpets of the famous Glasgow Barrowlands, there to chant a drunken Rosary to the famed semi-Irishmen, The Pogues. Rabid with alcohol and emotional Irishness the audience is a major part of these shows which are like a reeling Mass for the ferocious, modern show-band who are held in holy reverence.

On a good night the Pogues can make the dead dance and so it was last night, sparking off with The Irish Rover, making the floor bounce under the jigging melee of Celtic-strip-wearing, Republic flag-waving fans. But the live mayhem detracts from the fact that this band writes astutely perceptive songs of lowlife, high romance, with Ireland as their touchstone.

They are drip-fed by the stories and songs of Ireland, the constant leaving and yearning for return which is something that touches the Scottish heart and runs through the set like the token green banners that are thrown onto the stage — an offering to Shane MacGowan, the toothless one, the twitching self-conscious figure grabbing the attention as accordion, fife and drum crackle around him.

Drawing on his endless cigarettes and pulling from his bottle he scrapes a hoarse melody that cracks in his throat but it is somehow as effective a rendering of Irishness as a trained tenor.

The band are a troubled, tousled, fervent acoustic line-up with Spider's whistle and Jem Finer's banjo adding the swing, the half-truth of their mythic drunkenness offset by the speed and control of the ensemble playing. From the maudlin to the manic they form a glorious sound.

What the Pogues do with Irish folk is akin to punk's relationship to rock, they may not be virtuoso players but they get the dynamics just right, the swing, the pace and the tip of their hat is perfect.

An old punk, Joe Strummer, was in attendance to deliver fine versions of I Fought The Law and London Calling, the band brilliantly forming the filigree twirls and jigs around hard rock. The highlight came with the appearance of Kirsty McColl under a shower of false snow to belt out the corrosive Christmas duet Fairytale Of New York with Shane, The Pogues' festive blend of realism and romance making the pirouetting crowd into an awesome carol-choir.

It is a shame that this band of brigands should attract a Glasgow audience which is indicative of the soft sectarianism of a town split by the religious preferences of its football clubs.