"The Pogues bring the first day of the festival to a close and are utter shite. Shane MacGowan has put on a pound or 20 of late, and with a pair of sunglasses nailed in place and his beard merging with his navel fluff, he looks like a cross between Roy Orbison and Dave Lee Travis. Unbelievably, his voice is even more dreadful than on the group's last album."
The band was falling apart, y'understand, and for the good of his own health and of everyone else's, Shane MacGowan, the best songwriter of his or any other generation, was helped along the road marked To Blazes Wi' You, Sire.
The Pogues carried on with Joe Strummer fronting for a time, and recorded a couple more albums with Spider Stacy mostly on lead vocals. Shane formed The Popes and made two astounding records, the polished, rock / folk (but not folk-rock) epic The Snake and the darker, doom-soused Crock Of Gold. These days he seems to spend much of his time hanging with Pete Doherty, recently taking to joining Babyshambles onstage for to run through "Dirty Old Town".
It makes sense, the two o' them crossing paths. There's a definite bind twixt MacGowan and Doherty, as men fond of the waft o' the intoxicating fugg and as men blessed with an almighty way with a pen. Both have gone out of their way to add to the romantic mythology of their homesteads; Pete's unerring search for the Arcadian soul of yonder English spread, Shane's continuous feeding off of and revitalizing of a pre-Celtic Tiger Irish folk tradition.
And, of course, neither are on particularly good terms with sobriety.
Who at all knows, maybe Pete's fairly prolific way with a song or two will inspire Shane in some way to get back to the studio? He hasn't released an album since 1997.
(Interestingly, Pete's girlfriend, Kate Moss, was romantically entangled with Johnny Depp when he was hanging with Shane way back in the early nineties. Depp can be heard slapping power-chords round about throughout "That Woman's Got Me Drinking" from The Snake, and he also directed and starred in the promo for that raucous hell-hounded classic.)
Just shy of the millennium, The Pogues reformed, having realized that a couple nonsensical grudges are no reason at all for to deny the world a chance to hear "Turkish Song Of The Damned" being played by the fellas done etched it in vinyl way back when. It was supposed to be a one-off tour, but they're still on the road, and now even bassist Cait O'Riordan's rejoined, having ran off with Elvis Costello once the latter was done producing Rum, Sodomy And The Lash in 1985..
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1 - -E
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2 - Duke De Mondo
thank you!