Happy Birthday, Shane

Like his idol, Brendan Behan, Shane MacGowan lives life in a slurry of whiskey and words. He's just finished another round of Christmastime gigs in Britain and Ireland with his bandmates, the Pogues, and he's left critics with no shortage of words to describe his self-destructive auto-auto de fe. MacGowan has created some beautiful songs, which he now tramples like lilies fallen beneath the wheels of commercialism.

MacGowan turned 51 this Christmas Day, and we all wonder how. How has he escaped the damage he's swallowed. How has he not fallen victim to one of the many accidents he's been a party to. How has his body not refused, even once, to mount the stage and bellow those songs that his audience now knows better than he does.

MacGowan and the Pogues return to America in 2009 for a St. Patricks season set of gigs on the East Coast.

Galway Girl

I somehow wandered onto Sharon Shannon's site because I saw a posting on the Pogue's site that Shane MacGowan was performing as part of Shannon's big band.

She's such a great box player.

I found this ad for Irish hard cider. What could be better; a glass of cider, Sharon Shannon on accordion, and Steve Earle.



Also, sadly, I found that Shannon suffered a devastating loss earlier this month as her life parter Leo Healy died unexpectedly in his sleep at age 46. Condolences to Shannon and the Healy family.

As bad news often follows good, Shannon last year hit the Irish pop charts with a version of Earle's Galway Girl recorded with Irish Country-Western and Americana group Mundy.
Which also won a Meteor Award for most downloaded song. Mundy is also part of Shannon's big band tour, which unfortunately is not booked for the U.S. as yet.



Meanwhile, bad boy Shane MacGowan is dallying with his bad boy protege Pete Doherty who these days heads Babyshambles.

Shane does lord of the fishes pose; Cait paddles on denial; Elvis channels Mike Douglas

I'm not really sure where all this started (a common plea of a websurfer lost in a thread), but somehow I went from paparazzi photos of Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, to a blogpost by McGowan's longtime "companion" Victoria Clarke, who claims that she and Shane practice yoga. Shane? Yoga! In another article, I learned that Shane and Victoria are engaged, though already the betrothal has hit a few rocks.

To an interview with Cait O'Riordan, original Pogues bassist, and former fifteen year companion of Elvis Costello. In the interview which is astonishing in its revelation of O'Riordan's struggle with alcohol and depression, but is more astonishing in her unwillingness to blame her troubles on anyone but herself. O'Riordan is currently recording in a band, appropriately enough called Prenup, with two former members of Hothouse Flowers.

To an article about a new TV show hosted by Elvis Costello called Spectacle, on the Sundance Channel. Costello has just released Momofuku, a milestone new album which demonstrates that his strength is a bit of rock and roll with the Imposters. Costello has proved to everyone that he can stretch, that he's not a one-trick pony, and that he was not simply a new wave flash in the pan. Momofuku rambles from the gorgeous word-crammed rockers that we've heard on the last few albums with the Imposters, pausing for the occasional early-morning sleepy lounge samba of Harry Worth, the unapologetic sentimentality of My Three Sons (a song I can relate to completely), and the angry-with-my-adopted-country bile of American Gangster Time.

The waning days of genius

My son Colin put me onto this interview with Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan on the Henry Rollins show. MacGowan, who has modeled his career on his idol Brendan Behan, still shows a glimmer of the rare intelligence, and creative genius that once shown brightly through the haze of alcohol. There's also a performance of The Irish Rover at the Henry Rollins site, here. Reviled MacGowan handler, Joey Cashman, on pennywhistle.

A thought about Irish cliches on St. Paddy's day

The good news is that Shane MacGowan showed up this year when I went to see the show last night at Roseland in NYC. (In other good news, Billy Bragg's opening set was tight, sparkling and enjoyable - particularly his duet with Kate Nash). Though he was intoxicated, and fell heavily to the stage after spinning between Philip Chevron and Jem Finer, Shane MacGowan seemed healthier than on many occasions in the past, and he still is able to find the lyrics to every song he sings somewhere in that pickled brain.

Which leads me to thoughts on the Irish cliche. For years, the Irish have had to overcome the "stage Irish" image that has been prevalent since the 17th century - poor, drunken, happy, poetic, drunken, funny, musical, maudlin, drunken, lovable, gullible, unreliable, drunken... In this century, the roles of Barry Fitzgerald in a plenitude of films was that of the irascible tipsy Irishmen.

In fact, in their prime, the Pogues were often accused of reviving the stereotype of the drunken Irishman as Shane MacGowan lurched about the stage, and vomited during interviews. They dismissed the idea readily, and with good cause. They were reviving Irish traditionalism, combined with a sharp-edged punkiness, but MacGowan's grasp of literature (Irish and otherwise), Celtic myth, and modern politics, made his songs amazingly dangerous tinctures of poetry and populism.

That's changed.

Last night may well have been my last Pogues show. The band themselves, and their volatile leader is not the reason, though I must say that last night was the first time I felt that they were all going through the motions, and not happily so. Who could deny them the ability to make a little cash late in their careers.

But with MacGowan incapable of creating anything new, the band hashes through the same twenty-five songs like a sorry rock and roll revival band.

Then there's the crowd. I wasn't the only member of the audience in my sixth decade, but I can assure you we were not in legion. Most of the fans were thirty and forty somethings who grew acquainted with the Pogues through the recordings long after the band had broken up in their first incarnation.

And a majority of the fans seemed to be less interested in the music (though most know the lyrics well enough to belt out a chorus at the top of their lungs), and more interested in deifying MacGowan and emulating his disease, alcoholism. In fact, there seems to be a game played at these concerts - who can get drunker than Shane.

As fans carried unstable fistfuls of plastic cups filled with beer between bar and buddies, they plowed through onlookers, glassy-eyed, stumbling and the picture of an Irish cliche. I witnessed two fights, gallons of spilt brew, and one beautiful young woman who ambled toward the bar, incoherent, with one of her lovely breasts inadvertently dangling from her spaghetti-strapped dress.

During the Bragg set, the crowd was polite, though there were pockets of Pogues fan consuming fuel for the main event. Up front, near where I was standing, as soon as the much began, the first eight rows turned into the expected scrum. What none of us expected was the rush toward the stage by drunken louts from the rear of the house, toward the stage, knocking aside any who might keep them from jigging in front of their beloved, toothless, poet-king of intoxication, Shane MacGowan.

The abuse of alcohol at the show was really frightening (considering many of these idiots were going to climb behind the wheel for drives back to Jersey, Connecticut and beyond). The goal of drinking to oblivion by a good portion of the audience made it, at minimal, uncomfortable for the rest of us, who would have been happy with a Guinness or two, a chorus of "And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go," and a glimpse of a legendary band in their decline. Instead, we spent the evening sidestepping lurching beer zombies intent on perpetuating an Irish cliche.

If it sounds like fun to you, there's always St. Paddy's day today - the annual vestige of Celtic shame.

Billy Bragg, Shane MacGowan and me

It's a story I've told often, but never here, but today there's reason to.

This weekend, the Pogues, the famed Irish/punk/rock band returns again to New York City and on Sunday, the midpoint of a three-night stand at the Roseland, Billy Bragg opens the show.

For me, the connection between Billy Bragg and the Pogues in inextricable. In a way, if it weren't for the Pogues and Billy Bragg, I might not have been doing my radio show for the past 23 years.

In 1984, I was invited by my friend John O'Neill to accompany him to a mutual friend's wedding in Bacup, England. We landed in London on September 3o, and scanning the local papers, I found that Elvis Costello was playing at the Hammersmith Palais on the next day, October 1. We got tickets, and the next night, after a fish and chips dinner, went to the show. The Men They Couldn't Hang, opened with a combination of country and western/folk and punk mixed roughly together. Then a group of young men, and one young women, all dressed in cheap suits and fedoras, ambled onto the stage and began to play the most enchanting mix of traditional Irish and ragged punk on acoustic instruments. The drummer stood with a snare and a kick drum, and the crowd sang along and pogoed. I asked the kid next to me who the band was. He said, "The Pogues. They used to be called Pogue Mahone until the BBC nicked the name because they found out it meant 'kiss my arse' in Irish." I was entranced, and while Elvis was great that night, I went away wanting more of the Pogues. I picked up their debut LP, "Red Roses For Me," which had just been released, and guess that I was one of the first people in America with the record.

A few days later, we made a long, late-night drive from London to Bacup, in the North of England. On the way, we listened to John Peel on the radio. Peel played a lot of new, and unrecognized music, and then introduced a new song from someone named Billy Bragg. He played "This Guitar Says Sorry," and from the moment the Bo Diddley rhythm played on a single reverby electric guitar leading to a ragged voice with a thick urban London accent, I was completely intrigued. I found Bragg's debut LP in a small record shop, and after reading a story about Bragg in one of the music inkies, I left England a confirmed fan.

Back in the US I searched for new Bragg and Pogues music as it was being released, and found most of my needs made at the late, great Hartford record store, Capitol Records. But in visiting the small folk record shop at the Speediest Printer in Town I found that proprietor Bill Domler had never heard of the Pogues or Bragg. He invited me onto his Monday morning folk radio show at WWUH to play some of the music, and then invited me to a training session to be a show host myself.

I missed Bragg's debut in the US when he opened for Echo and the Bunnymen (with a stop in Hartford at the Agora), but I did catch him on his first solo tour at an Iron Horse sponsored show, (which I think was in Sunderland, Mass). At that show, I did my first radio interview for WWUH with Billy Bragg.

In 1985, I attempted to promote a show with Billy Bragg at Hartford's Mad Murphy's with Paul LeMay. When Bragg had the opportunity to tour the US with The Smiths, his manager Peter Jenner called to ask if he could beg out of the date. We let him go with the promise that he would return one day (he's not played Hartford since). And I got to see the Smiths/Bragg show at the Orpheum in Boston.

Since then, I've been to many Bragg and Pogues shows, and if you're a listener, you know that I still play their music frequently on the air. As I've said, I've met Bragg several times, and joined the Pogues backstage at Toad's in New Haven after interviewing Jem Finer, and spending the evening drinking beer with Terry Woods.

But Sunday will be the first time that the show pairing will actually rekindle my discovery of this music so many years ago.

Bragg has a new album out, Mr. Love and Justice (my copy just arrived in the mail yesterday), and the Pogues are coasting on reputation, but I'm looking forward to a night of lusty reverie.

New teeth for Shane

Shane MacGowan turns 50 tomorrow, miraculously. A Christmas miracle, in fact.

The Daily Mirror, surprised at his coherence, delivered the most surprising news for the new year. Teeth.

The Pogues return to America in March to help us celebrate St. Patty's.

Fairytale of New York made it to Number 4 on the British charts based on the BBC censoring some of the song lyrics. The same kind of censorship helped get the Pogues attention at the beginning of their careers. Their original name was Pogue Mahone, which means, "Kiss my arse," in gaelic.