THE POGUES
Back On Track With Their English Style of Irish Insolence
| | Publication: Suburban &
Wayne Times
Date Printed: Thursday, March 28, 1996
Section: Arcade
Page: ?
By: Michael Regan, Arcade Editor
| "(George) Clinton had a point about music, you know,
there was a message there that was quite fundamental. It's all about music
being a racially-connecting thing. If you liberate your mind, you can actually
go in any direction and not be hung up in the background," Pogues bassist
Darryl Hunt says over the phone from London.
With that in mind, it's important to mention that since the departure of
Shane McGowan [sic], there is no Irish left in the Pogues, perhaps the most
successful band to successfully cross-over traditional Irish music with
rock.
"I think we pay respect to everybody's culture," Hunt explains,
"Of course, we get a lot of source and a lot of energy and a lot of
ideas from Irish music, as we do from many things."
"We fly around and pick things up in our little spaceship, our Mothership,
and land back in London," Hunt continues in the Parliament motif.
With an irreverent attitude and growling, powerful voice, MacGowan, who
came of age in London in the early heydays of the Sex
Pistols and the
Clash, was the perfect front-mand for the hard-edged brand of Irish
folk music the Pogues embraced. And, as such, many fans considered the Pogues
first attempt at life after MacGowan, 1993's Waiting for Herb (Elektra)
which featured Joe Strummer on vocals, to be somewhat watered-down in comparison.
[Your intrepid maintainer butts in: Mr. Regan is evidently not very familiar
with the Pogues' previous releases. It's true that Joe Strummer stepped
in for Shane MacGowan so that the Pogues could complete their 1991 Hell's
Ditch tour. Strummer has never, however, officially recorded
with the Pogues (except on live cuts on some of the Waiting for Herb
singles).]
Asked if he ever thought MacGowan would rejoin the Pogues, Hunt says "not
at the moment, maybe there might be something someday... It could happen.
But at the moment we are what we are and he is what he is."
And what they are at the moment, with the release of their new album Pogue
Mahone featuring tin-whistler Spider Stacey on vocals, is a lot more
similar to what they were when MacGowan was belting out the vocals.
Pogue Mahone, which in Gaelic
means "kiss my ass," was the original name of the band. However,
the name, coupled with such things are the title of their 1985 album Rum,
Sodomy and the Lash (the three things Winston
Churchill supposedly said the British Navy was famous for) caused the
band to be banned from the BBC and British radio and they eventually shortened
the name to just the Pogues. The new album brings to mind the sloshingly
raw, almost insolent, but beautifully melodic Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.
And according to Hunt, it is an attemtp to bring back the energy of and
attitude of those early days.
[Your intrepid maintainer butts in again: Another mangled fact. The band
dropped the name Pogue Mahone before they recorded and released their
debut album, 1984's Red Roses for Me.]
"They were saying on the third album that we were mature, we must have
bloody gone rotten by now. If you get mature after each one, well, we're
well past the sell-by date on the cheese, you know?" Hunt says. "Hopefully,
we'll have 'Parental Guidance' stuck on our albums in America. I've always
wanted that."
And with that, the conversation with Hunt automatically turns to politics
and what he percieves to be the differences between the UK and the States,
namely Britain's "totally liberal approach to sex, alcohol and religion
that you don't seem to have."
"We are both handicapped by our past in different ways," he says.
"I guess you never get over the fact you have such a funtamental Christian
minority, coupled with the alcohol problems during prohibition; residue
of these infringements on civil liberty." But, he says, the trade-off
is that Americans have a Bill
of Rights and a good checks-and-balances system. "Can you imagine
in England them impeaching a Prime Minister?"
When the conversation turns back to music, Hunt is quick to point out again
how certain style transcend geography.
"If you look at the history of country music, bluegrass and Appalachian
music, it comes from the soft of one and three beet [sic] in central European
music... In these days they would play it on a jug or hit a box and that
sort of became the country beat.
"If you go to Spain in festival time, or Hungary, or Musich in a beer
garden, you'll find that beat there."
The Pogues play at the Trocadero in Philidelphia on April 13. Call 1
215 923 ROCK.
Copyright 1996, Suburban & Wayne Times; Wayne, Penn.
All rights reserved
Your intrepid maintainer is DzM.
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