Music Review: The Pogues - Hell's Ditch

"I will not be reconstructed!" growls Shane MacGowan somewhere in the final verse of "Sunnyside Of The Street," the opening track on Hell's Ditch by The Pogues. "I will not be reconstructed!" says he, and the melodies round about wither for a moment beneath the intensity of the heat rising off of this most loaded of lines from this most legendarily loaded of songwriters.

"I will not be reconstructed!"

First I ever heard that line I was sat facing the stereo speakers in my bedroom, seventeen years of young and with the jaws hangin' to the knees and the tongue lashed black with the grog. A dizzying collage of Arcadian revelry and damnable debaucheries all flickering and fizzling on the crest of the brains, aye, there surely were, and straining for to hear the record o'er the screeching of those scenes hung back my eyes like phantoms hung front a furnace.

"I will not be reconstructed!"

I dare say I raised a fist upon hearing those words, those words like swords of sulfur thrust through the sheets of delirium draped across the teenaged skull.

"You're damn right!" I'd wager I hollered, "I will not, sure as God I won't!"

Scarcely a year later and I was lain on the floor begging for reconstruction, but Shane, he still gnashed what teeth he had left and refused any such notion of the sort with all the vehemence at his command.

He's still refusing.

Here and now, however many years after I first heard that most astounding record, Hell's Ditch, the fifth Pogues album and the last to feature Sir MacGowan, here and now listening to the remastered, expanded edition all lavished with the beautiful booklet there and the seven bonus numbers, here and now I'm still startled something fierce by that line, and still find myself thinking of an evening;

"Pray tell, Lord MacGowan, to whom at all was that line directed?"

Chances are it was directed at his band-mates stood round about in the Rockfield studio, fellas who by the time of the record's release (1990) had grown all sorts of tired of Shane's antics and affronts;

Missing tours with Bob Dylan, playing shows with his trousers at his ankles for the duration, becoming immersed in Acid House and presenting his sore beleaguered work-chums with a half-hour epic of blissed-out techno abandon intended for the next album (this mythical number has yet to see the tartan light of day) and generally plowing ever further into the darkest depths of insanity with nary a thought for the consequences.

Perhaps it was directed at the critics who'd been wringing their hands raw over the state of your man's mentals for much of the five years hitherto? Critics who had initially fallen over their quills in a bid for to note every drunken escapade with near-fetishistic glee, but who all a sudden stood aghast at those self same antics?

Maybe it was a reminder to himself that even whilst the band he fronted were outgrowing his initial blueprint with alarming alacrity, still he remained true to the ideals and notions had led him, way back when, to reclaim Irish folk music from the insufferably inoffensive cardigan cognoscenti and bring it back to the raucous, reveling masses where it belonged. The Pogues were no longer playing Irish folk music, at least not on record, but Shane, he was still the phantom of old literary Ireland come raging red-eyed and snaggle-yapped from midst the stomp of "Finnegan's Wake".

"I will not be reconstructed!"

Then again, maybe he didn't even write that line. "Sunnyside Of The Street" is one of three tracks on Hell's Ditch credited to Shane MacGowan / Jem Finer, the credit one also finds under "Fairytale Of New York" from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, being the only Christmas Song that makes sense at any time of the year and very possibly the best song of the 1980s.

Article Author: Duke De Mondo

Visit Duke De Mondo's author page — Duke De Mondo's Blog