The Pogues: Classic or Dud

blame insufferable patritos fans lol

documentary is good btw. i didn't even hate johnny depp.

one thing I did not know: that “streets of sorrow/birmingham six” was treated by the authorities as a “fuck tha police”-level threat to order

oh cool I see this is on Hulu, that's my Saturday night

no interviews of any pogue bandmates was weird and disappointing
I wasn’t crazy about it but some good vintage clips
Poor man is basically nosferatu now, what is his actual ailment? Liver disease? aftermath of stroke?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYY_EaCPGFw

that “streets of sorrow/birmingham six” was treated by the authorities as a “fuck tha police”-level threat to order

Yeah, that came out as the Birmingham Six case was finally working toward eventual exoneration. They were all released in '91. It was a huge political cause.

xpost I'm not saying that's what I think wrt the Pogues, I like them a lot, but I just know a lot of people that kind of are like peace out on any Irish type stuff because of...I dunno...Boston I guess

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, April 16, 2021 10:02 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

and truly it has very little to do w the Pogues or even actual Ireland

― Blues Guitar Solo Heatmap (Free Download) (upper mississippi sh@kedown), Friday, April 16, 2021 10:05 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

lets not forget the Bennigans, which my partner immediately referenced the first time they heard me put on a Pogues record

"the Bennigans", jfc, idk where that came from

Um, us neither...

ha fair i meant Bennigans the (now defunct i think?) restaurant chain often thrown as a reference for annoying US fake-irishness

https://bennigans.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/BENN_2021SPD_Website_Banner.jpg

Ah.

Thx

I think there's a bit of difficulty disentangling the Pogues from all the horseshit Irish pride mook shit like Dropkick Murphys
Except they don't sound anything alike. I was in Dublin a few years ago and went on a musical pub crawl like all the tourists do. Our hosts —who could really play — absolutely trashed the Dropkick Murphys repeatedly (and justifiably). When the Q&A session came, I nervously asked about Shane and his standing among traditional Irish musicians like themselves. They had nothing but respect for him.

Yes, I know what the Pogues and Dropkick Murphys don't sound alike

guy was probably relieved to have a tourist asking him about literally any band other than the dropkick murphys

@UMS just to clarify, no one thinks you are endorsing this POV! you're just reporting the news :)

watched this, really took me out a bit. obviously it's julien temple so it's got it's quirks but i'd rather his eccentricities than the standard straight to streaming formula music docs of which there are so many.

to the irish discussion, was a great example of what tom d. was talking about wrt plastic paddies in the u.s., the film felt so connected with ireland on so many levels, how deeply shane believed in his irishness, the pain and the hurt and the bloodshed and the poetry and the literature and his ancestors and the countryside itself, all of it. here it's just a dodgy "celtic" tattoo around the bicep of a bouncer and dyed-green beer and green mardi gras beads on st. paddy's day.

it really broke my heart to see him now. just completely slack, no expression, barely upright, methodically downing glass after glass of white wine. he would say things that made sense, sometimes were even funny or insightful, but it's almost like he's trapped in his own body -- some kind of lucid coma.

the parts where the sinn fein leader is talking to him are so uncomfortable. he wants something from shane that just isn't there anymore.

you could see it in the eyes of some of the people he talked to - the woman who was his biographer (i think?) and even ilx's beloved boaby gillespie. saw little moments where he would roll his eyes - "okay what should we talk about then?" after shane tells him to quit interrogating him about moving to london, little sad, knowing flashes in his eyes.

his family history and childhood was gripping. so much hurt and pain and alcohol, just gallons and gallons and gallons. getting fed booze at 6 years old by his aunt, how was he supposed to turn out.

i liked his sister the best, i think she understands him. to have such a gift and such a sensitivity to understanding people - to be able to really *write* that into a song. what a gift. and then to see someone drown that gift, year and year, blot it all out, extinguish whatever talent god had given him. really heartbreaking.

i think it hits a bit closer, because i've always been a social drinker, a fun drunk, i like talking to people. but in the last year sometimes i get the impulse to just deaden everything.

at the end when he says he wishes he could write songs again and play pool. it's so clear that's never going to happen again.

yeah watched this today and all the contemporary bits with him were extremely difficult to watch.
the shots where he would raise a glass to take a drink, it took me a few times to realize that they werent in extreme slow motion, that was just how he moved. crushing to see. would have scared me off drink altogether if i'd seen something like that in my teens.

also fuck johnny depp, what a little sycophant ghoul wannabe he is, found his new hunter s. thompson to cheer on into the grave

yeah i wont soon forget the part he rang that bell and was like "i defy any bastard to shane isnt sharper than the rest of them put together!" or whatever, meanwhile shane is across the table struggling to breathe

the worst

theatrically laughing hysterically at every little thing shane managed to mumble out

i found the parts where he was being interviewed by his own wife...um....interesting?

yeah, no idea whats going on there.

its gonna be on my mind for a while, i can say that for sure. by the end of it all i could think of was the body of work that will never exist, songs he'll never write, poems never published, the memoir we'll never read. in the tribute at the end, it was brutal to watch him barely able to croak out a few lines of "Summer in Siam" next to Nick Cave & knowing theyre the same age.

Still need to see this, but I've always wondered how much of Shane's current state is due strictly to drink and not that in combination with all of the other substances he's ingested over the years.

I haven’t seen it yet either, but tbh the mere fact of a non-dead Shane in 2021 is a bit of an astonishment. I thought he was a goner when he got de-Pogued in the early ‘90s.

He briefly got re-Pogued. At least, I saw the band in ... 2007 (?) with him and they were great.

afaik he never left the reformed band

^ he was in nine years of the original run, fourteen years of the reunion

When the Q&A session came, I nervously asked about Shane and his standing among traditional Irish musicians like themselves. They had nothing but respect for him.

I had a similar experience years ago in Manchester, as a college student. There was an Irish folk-rock band my friends and I used to go see a lot, a real hot-shit group full of "national champion" musicians. We got to know them a bit and had some drinks with them. They had a few Pogues songs in their repertoire, and I was a huge Pogues fan, so I asked the band what they thought of them. First they all laughed about what terrible players most of the guys in the Pogues were. But then their lead singer said something like, "But y'know it doesn't really matter if you can't play when you've got Shane MacGowan's songs." They all nodded.

johnny depp's new irish accent is tied with Bono appearance as the worst thing in this.

I remember Jimmy Tarbuck giving big props to Shane, just ahead of his appearance on a chat show they were both on.

just watched this last night

on the one hand in general Julien Temple drives me up the wall bc his docs are like overdecorated xmas trees

but

Crock of Gold is weirdly beautiful in its way. it‘s sad & stark but maintains the intent of celebrating him with his flaws, & works really well as genuinely sincere reminder of his godgiven talent for music & writing

like it felt like the kind of thing that might be put together about other great poets or writers

him saying if he was handed a full syringe today he’d still shoot it & his biographer’s genuinely shocked reaction (and his rationale “a reward for being a good boy”) - i mean, god if you are looking for a real snapshot of addiction, there it is

the footage of nick cave & shane singing summer of siam together made me bawl

this movie, whoa. what a story. reliable narrator crisis. or not? i think the crisis is only in my head.

yeah with Shane who fuckin knows

i love the moment when MacGowan is talking to Bobby Gillespie about the coronet solo in Fairytale of New York & he says “you know it right” and Gillspie looks at him SON blankly to the point where clear that he doesnt but also it’s unclear if Gillespie even knows that Fairytale is a song, a Pogues song, what even is a song or who is this person talking to me rn

*SO not SON oops

when Shane says quit interrogating me and Bobby half rolls his eyes and says "well what do you want to talk about?" is priceless

yes that was gold

I was more shocked by Shane's condition in a BBC documentary made ten (15? 20?) years ago. There are clips of it in Crock of Gold: in one memorable bit Shane gets lost in a pub, wandering out from the bar into the corridor and keeps shouting "Where's the pub? Where's the pub?" That was a real wrencher, but having seen it, he didn't seem too bad in this one.

What's Bobby Gillespie doing in this anyway?

Lol, seriously. What the fuck does he have to do with this story? Save it for the Stuart Adamson (RIP) doc.

We started this last night. It's really good (sad) so far, but we were wondering if Shane had had a stroke. I guess it turns out that in 2015 he suffered a fall in the studio and injured his pelvis. I'm assuming he blew off medical advice to take it easy or whatever. Hence the wheelchair.

Pretty sure Irish folk music is not a genre Primal Scream have latched on to yet. Unless someone knows better.

yeah I don't know, he just kind of shows up

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceMxRE6ViIQ

I'd say him and Shane are just "mates" in the same way he and Depp are

Gaun yersel' Boab!

I read it as an attempt to have Shane interviewed not by traditional interviewer / documentarian types, but by different-yet-complementary cultural figures.

Having, say, Bob Dylan interview him would have been a surprising choice, but we as the audience wouldn't be any more enlightened or informed

And (not to be That Guy) but the cornet solo in question is from "A Rainy Night in Soho."

I point this out only because one could make a little doggerel about how (in McGowan's telling) he fired Elvis Co. for wanting an oboe solo on "Soho" and he said "No. Go."

ahh thx curse my bad memory

I was reading a bit & Temple decided since MacGowan is a pretty ornery interview in general, that to get a variety of conversations he’d gather friends/famous fans/ people he’s sat down & talked to before

i suppose in lieu of footage of macgowan telling temple to fuck off repeatedly

which … doesnt sound like the worst idea …