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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Pogue Mahone Kiss My Arse The Story of the Pogues by Carol Clerk Pogue Mahone Kiss My Arse: The Story of the Pogues by Carol Clerk. The Introduction is available here. Enjoy. Carol Clerk, former News Editor of Melody Maker , has turned her attention to The Pogues. She’s interviewed Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Jem Finer, Philip Chevron, Darryl Hunt, Andrew Ranken, James Fearnley, Terry Woods, and various colleagues, friends and fans. This intimate look behind the music describes their arguments, drunken spats, love affairs, the marriage of Cait and Elvis Costello, the death of Kirsty MacColl, the illnesses, the drugs, the sackings, the legal actions and through it all their passion for music. The book was released in the United Kingdom in October, 2006. ISBN 1.84609.008.3. Published by Omnibus Press. Pogue Mahone Kiss My Arse: The Story of the Pogues by Carol Clerk. He looks up from the dinner he’s been picking at, drops his knife with an enormous clang, and stares an unblinking, pale-blue stare that’s accusing, terrifying. Shane MacGowan has forgotten all about our appointment, the one we arranged in a phone call two days ago. He has forgotten everything he’s been told by various other Pogues who for weeks, helpfully, have been suggesting to him that he might co-operate with this biography. Certainly, he has forgotten the trail of false starts and aborted interviews that have littered the way to our meeting here this evening. The instructions had been vague enough to be worrying: “I’ll be in The Boogaloo on Thursday night.” “Somewhere between nine o’clock and midnight.” The Boogaloo, described by GQ magazine as “the sweetest little juke-joint in all the world”, is a pub and a venue for live music and literary celebration, high up in north London on the Archway Road. A hearty, bustling little hideaway from the mainstream, it has nevertheless become the focus of intense scrutiny by the tabloid press. It was in The Boogaloo that star-crossed lovers Kate Moss and Pete Doherty were recently discovered on a date, Kate standing on her seat to jiggle along to the rumpus of Doherty’s Babyshambles. And it was here, too, that the controversial couple were seen to clink a glass or two with Shane MacGowan. Shane’s an old customer and friend of Gerry O’Boyle, the proprietor of The Boogaloo. Previously, Gerry ran the esteemed Filthy McNasty’s Whisky Cafe in Islington, and in both places, he has offered a home from home to the Pogue who likes to know that he’s welcome to sleep wherever and whenever he needs to drop. Not so long ago, Shane moved into a flat only minutes away from The Boogaloo. Sometimes he makes it home, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s comforting to live close to what you know; to have a safety net. But there was never any guarantee that the most unpredictable man in music would turn up in the bar tonight. I’m lucky. It’s only minutes after nine o’clock, and he’s here already. It’s just that he’s not expecting me. He’s at a table close to the bar, his back to the wall, surrounded by a coterie of friends including Gerry O’Boyle and one-time Pogues biographer Ann Scanlon. Shane sits upright, solid as anything, the charismatic centre of his company. He looks really, really well. He’s dressed for whatever occasion it is in a jacket made of darkly red, shiny material. His hair is newly washed, fluffy, and there’s a freshness about his face that belies the years of excess for which he’s fabled. His complexion is that of someone who appears to have been eating his greens. Tonight, Shane is periodically stabbing at a piece of fish and assorted vegetables. The suggestion that he might agree to an interview when he’s finished his meal is met with an abrupt order: “Ask me a fucking interesting question.” For the next hour, Shane will continue to poke at his food while we duck and dive our way through an exchange that, at first, feels extremely uncomfortable. He refuses a drink, asking only for a glass of ice, and pours his own from bottles of wine that appear on the table as if by magic, courtesy of his bar tab. We’re face to face across the table, directly below a speaker which loudly cranks out selections from The Boogaloo’s excellent jukebox. In these circumstances, MacGowan’s tendency to mumble, his mangled, London-Irish slur and his absolute lack of teeth lead to the odd breakdown in communication. Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that. When this happens, he drops his knife again, slowly and deliberately, and stares the unblinking, pale-blue stare, his body motionless, as he repeats what he has just said at the top of his voice. It’s a bellow. It’s a great impatience. It’s a reprimand. Friendly advice has it that Shane is fond of reminiscing about his days in Burton Street, the short-life-housing project and creative community near King’s Cross, London, where the idea of The Pogues began to take root. What were the sights, the sounds, the smells, the atmospheres, of Burton Street? Perhaps that might be a fucking interesting question, one which he might respond to. At the very least, it could be a starting point. “It was a street with houses in it,” snorts MacGowan. “Have you talked to the other members of the band?” “Well, what do you need to talk to me for?” Because you’re the poet. This doesn’t go down well. Historically, Shane has not always been gracious with compliments, although I am trying to tell him that people are interested in his writing, in view of his considerable reputation, rather than attempting to curry favour or to insult the talents of the other band members and contributors. He shoots back immediately with a list of Pogues favourites that are not of his making: “People have credited me with writing ‘Dirty Old Town’ and ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’, which I didn’t. People have credited me with writing ‘Navigator’ on Rum Sodomy & the Lash , which I didn’t. That was written by Phil Gaston. ‘Thousands Are Sailing’ – I didn’t write that. Phil Chevron wrote it. And, like, some people think that I wrote ‘The Irish Rover’. Too much credit is given.” Notwithstanding the riches of the songs he mentions, it’s obvious that this is a ridiculous statement, given the timelessness of the work that he has produced on his own and with co-writers, but it’s a line with which he has tried and failed to derail interviewers in the past. There may be a real modesty, maybe even an insecurity, at play here, or a desire to give others their due. None of these things would be out of character for MacGowan, according to some of his bandmates. At the same time, there can be no doubt that Shane is well aware of the weight of his achievement, and there have been troubled occasions when he has had to fight hard for his musical visions, or has vigorously defended his unique contribution to The Pogues. Relenting slightly under The Boogaloo’s blaring sound system, he admits: “I do feel I’ve contributed to Irish culture. Everybody in the group did.” The hostilities have subsided: Shane begins to react to questions with answers rather than arguments, and he becomes more thoughtful, more voluble, as the evening progresses, although he remains prickly. I’m always aware that when the guitars burst especially loudly through the speaker and when he is talking just that little bit more softly, more unintelligibly, I will have to ask him to say it again, whatever it is, and I will see the stare and I will hear the sound of the clattering knife. I still hear it in my nightmares. The other members of The Pogues, in hours of interviews, have been open about the many problems that they faced both personally and professionally as their pioneering, punk-fuelled, emerald-hearted romps and ballads pitched past pitch of success to a Number One album, If I Should Fall From Grace With God , and beyond. Few would have predicted the spectacular popularity of their mission to pump some fresh new blood into traditional Irish folk music, a genre that was unfashionable and widely unloved, to revitalise it and to make it relevant and exciting even to people who had possibly never heard of a jig, a reel or an air, a cittern or a bodhran. It all caught on very quickly, at a time when Eighties audiences were tiring of the electronic precision of the new romantics. There was something irresistibly wild about The Pogues’ reckless dash, something daring about their tales of drinking and brawling and sex, and something achingly romantic in their stories of love, loss, life and death. Importantly, though, the traditions that they rescued from the past, and the musical and literary influences of Ireland, the country across the sea, were counterbalanced by a realism set in the harsh streets of London. It wasn’t always pretty, but the young especially understood it; they related. For each of The Pogues, there was a price to pay for their seemingly effortless rise to fame. Jem Finer and Terry Woods have described the struggle to hold on to some semblance of family life in the years of enforced, relentless touring.

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