A beautiful album, it truly is.

Mind you, now, it's a record that sounds none much at all like any of the four Pogues albums that preceded it, a record that all but abandons Irish folk for to wade in waters of a more multicultural coloring. Each note hangs heavy with the sun-kissed coo of the Mediterranean, all flamenco flourishes and Mariachi strum. It's a record high on Lorca and Genet and the mythology of the Popular Front as opposed to Behan and McAlpine's Fusiliers.

(In light of this, it makes perfect sense that Joe Strummer, no stranger to a Spanish revolutionary poem or two himself, should have been brought in as producer on the album.)

Aye, Shane has surely raged at the "World Music" tinge of the album, but then again, Gavin Martin, in his fantastic liner notes to this new edition, quotes the man himself as saying that the reason there are no Irish songs on the album is because he "wasn't in the mood" to write them. In addition, the two Shane-less Pogues albums that followed Hell's Ditch (the underrated Waiting For Herb and Pogue Mahone) are both stood knee-high in traditional Irish melodies, although, granted, that may have been some attempt to regain ground after the disappointing sales of the previous two records.

But whoever's responsible, Hell's Ditch, with its orange, dust-kissed palette and its Spanish flies all a-buzz round the verses, it sounds incredible.

One of the many casualties of The Pogues' reputation as drink-lashed madmen barely fit to raise a yellowed paw let alone tune a mandolin, is that the amazing musicianship oft-times gets overlooked. On Hell's Ditch they sound tight as a Mormon's arse in a field fulla gay. The Pogues were never ramshackle on record, and certainly nowhere on Hell's Ditch is there a note out of place nor a beat fluffed nor a string plucked in error. It's a record that lulls and grinds with dizzying aplomb, that snarls and whispers, that throbs and sighs.

"Lorca's Novena", with its military shuffles and choruses of the damned wailing in and around the narcotic swirl of the strings, "Summer In Siam" with the piano like the waters trickle-tringing 'pon sun-scourged shoulders and the sax dancing in smoke-ring circles overhead. "Hell's Ditch" with its taunting, maniacal, increasingly frenzied accordion intro and its deranged eruptions of whirling opium orchestras thereafter. "Ghost Of A Smile" with its dreaming bass lines and its giddy whistle.

Holy lord Jesus and the sand-raw heels o' Mary, says I, it's enough to have a fella bent double o'er the speakers weeping and wailing in awe of every verse.

And those verses, those words…

Even when peering through the fog of a thousand and one hangovers and with the heroin mists all wreathing round the eyes, even then Shane emerges with a fistful of the most divine language a man could ever hope to lay a lobe 'alongside.