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.
(Jem Finer, incidentally, is now spending his days as artist in residence at the Oxford University Astrophysics Department and generally causing no end of mischief with the "proper" artists roundabout, folks who take none too kindly to a man being awarded left and right and having no end of funding tossed his direction for to hover about in zero-gravity [whilst wearing a turban and sat atop a Magic Carpet, no less] or, indeed, placing upside-down woodsheds on the banks of Lough Neagh, with the assistance of one Paul Moore, whilst the sounds of eels and of various heavenly bodies flitter about from the speakers inside. He's also responsible for Longplayer, a piece of music that is set to play continuously, without repeating, for 1000 years, having begun to play on January 1st 2000, and set to begin anew on New Year's Eve 2999.)
But regardless, whether the lyric fell from the fingers of MacGowan or Finer, that fact remains that a fella can rightly taste the venom in the delivery.
There are many tastes to be tasted, as a matter of fact, throughout Hell's Ditch. The taste of impending doom in both the title track and the stunning "Lorca's Novena". The taste of Mekong Whiskey-drenched kisses in "Sayonara". The taste of great regret in "5 Green Queens and Green". The taste of twilight reflection in "Summer in Siam".
A plethora of tingles top the taste-holes, and all afire with gorgeousity.
Hell's Ditch, see, it's nothing if not a gorgeous bastard of a record, even if Shane himself shrugs it off as a "real dog's dinner of an album" as he did in A Drink With Shane MacGowan, the autobiography-cum-series of interview transcriptions put together by his then-girlfriend Victoria Clarke a couple years back.
Article comments
1 - -E
Congrats! This article has been selected as one of this week’s Editors’ Picks.
2 - Duke De Mondo
thank you!