Domestic Left #40: In broken glass, the heavens’ tender constellations
I was first introduced to the “Celtic punk” band the Pogues, whose lead singer and principal songwriter Shane MacGowan died at the end of November, by a young woman I dated for a couple of months when I was 17. It was kind of a rebound relationship — I was still heartbroken over losing my first true love — and was cloaked in a sort of romantic decadent nihilism. I remember on one, I guess, “date,” we drove around country roads outside of town in the Kansas winter and took black and white photographs of each other holding a bottle of Old Crow bourbon, slouched dissipatedly against the concrete walls of locked restrooms in closed state parks. (Thankfully, social media had not yet been invented.)
She had a tape of the 1989 album Peace and Love, which I suppose at the time was their most recent, and, as was the way of the times, I dubbed it onto one side of a blank 90-minute Maxell XLII 90 cassette. I’m sure I still have it somewhere, the most lasting artifact of that relationship.
Two songs in particular resonated with me. “Young Ned of the Hill” was one of the first songs I taught myself to play by ear. It combines an uptempo minor-key melody played on tin whistle and mandolin with punk-rock energy and defiant lyrics about a centuries-old historical grudge:
A curse upon you Oliver Cromwell, you who raped our motherland
I hope you’re rotting down in hell for the horrors that you sent
to our misfortunate forefathers whom you robbed of their birthright
“To hell or Connaught1,” may you burn in hell tonight
“Lorelei” takes it name from a mythological river maiden who lures fishermen to their deaths (though I later learned that she is German, not Irish). The melody and the lyrics ache with longing (“River, river have mercy / Take me down to the sea / For if I perish on these rocks / My love no more I’ll see”) over propulsive midtempo rock; it chugs along like a river current to a final instrumental crescendo, where a repeating guitar pattern plays suspended over the I-vi-ii-V chord changes common to 1950s teenage love ballads (“Earth Angel” and the like). It was the soundtrack to the sad and messy end of that relationship.
In college I became familiar with more of the Pogues’ history and catalog and discovered, with a certain amount of embarrassment, that the two songs I was initially drawn to were not written or sung by MacGowan2, who has widely, and deservedly, been lauded as one of the greatest songwriters of our time. (Peace and Love was the album on which MacGowan’s addictions and unpredictable behavior began to take their toll; he wrote and sang only six of the 14 songs on the album. After one more album, 1990’s Hell’s Ditch, the rest of the band kicked him out.)
The first thing that strikes you when you listen to the Pogues’ first three albums — Red Roses for Me, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, and If I Should Fall from Grace with God, which is probably their masterpiece — is the intensity of MacGowan’s singing: longing for lost love in “A Pair of Brown Eyes”; snarling at a hated landlord in “Boys from the County Hell”; blessing a child in “Lullaby of London.” In a remembrance published in the Guardian, the Scottish singer Bobby Gillespie wrote that when MacGowan sang, “he was a force of nature, all punk power and visceral emotion.”
Combining that raw feeling with lyrical sophistication, MacGowan wove the punk defiance and romantic longing that first drew me to the Pogues’ music into a boozy, swaggering declamation, one that reels from aggression to tenderness and back again, sometimes in the space of a single line or cadence.
Before this year I had been blissfully unaware of the metaphysical debate over whether Die Hard (which apparently takes place around Christmas? I’ve never seen it) is or is not a “Christmas movie.”
A similar debate could be, and probably has been, held over whether “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ most famous song, is or is not a “Christmas song.” It is not only set at Christmas (opening line: “It was Christmas Eve babe / In the drunk tank”), but the lyrics invoke the holiday repeatedly, with a refrain about bells “ringing out for Christmas Day” serving as a kind of talisman of romance at the end of each chorus. The song is played incessantly (including by yours truly) throughout the month of December, and it is the odds-on favorite to be the number one song in Great Britain tomorrow (for which it is always a contender).
But it is not tucked away on a Christmas album, intended only to be dusted off and played during the holidays. It is on If I Should Fall from Grace with God, sequenced between a raved-up punk jig about gambling on horses (“Bottle of Smoke”) and an energetic instrumental that bounces between Irish tradition and 60s movie theme music (“Metropolitan”). And it is not really a song about the season — it is a song about the dissolution of a tempestuous relationship, one bookended by MacGowan’s duet partner Kirsty MacColl first tenderly recalling “when you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve” then pointedly declaring “Merry Christmas you arse and thank God it’s our last.” In between those two Christmases, the partners relive their romantic beginning and, well, trade fairly colorful terms of abuse (some of which has not, as they say, aged well).
Still, it ends, if not hopefully, at least not without hope, and I suppose that is, in some sense, in the spirit of the season. After MacColl accuses MacGowan, “you took my dreams from me,” MacGowan responds that he “kept them with my own.” And in the final line of the last verse, before they return to the singing of the NYPD choir and the ringing of Christmas bells, he declares, “Can’t make it all alone, I built my dreams around you.”
MacCall and MacGowan’s characters in “Fairytale of New York” are Irish immigrants in the big city, as MacGowan’s parents were in London. MacGowan was born (on Christmas Day 1957) in England, not Ireland.
Before forming the Pogues, MacGowan sang in a rockabilly punk band called the Nips, and edited a punk-rock magazine called Bondage. MacGowan was familiar with Irish traditional music — his parents sent him back to Ireland, to stay in what his mother described in a 2001 documentary as “a house of music and song and storytelling,” as much as possible during his childhood. Still, you get the sense that he and his mates returned to that tradition — in the midst of the “Troubles” — as much out of a desire to piss off the English as out of love for the music of their ancestors.
In that 2001 documentary, the Irish artist Deirdre O’Mahony — who was an art student in London at the time — describes how when the Pogues were formed, “You had bombs going off left, right and center. There was a lot of racism in London at the time and a lot an anti-Irish talk every time there was another bomb. So for him to turn around and kind of celebrate his Irish culture ... that was what was such a huge revelation with the Pogues.”
Just a few years after England had been gripped with moral panic about punk rock, a group of young punks began playing music that, to the gammon-faced English, was almost genetically imbued with terrorism. Like, perhaps, a Palestinian DJ or rapper might be seen today.
The title of this post comes from Cian Ferriter’s poem “The Sickbed of Shane MacGowan” (originally published at the Irish Times, but behind a paywall) — though I added a comma to make it read slightly better out of context.
Several years ago, a therapist suggested that I look into the work of Elaine Aron, who researches and writes about “high sensitivity.” While, having grown up in the 80s I am, ahem, somewhat “sensitive” to applying that term to myself, I nonetheless found that it resonated.
In his Guardian piece, Gillespie wrote:
Shane was a good old-fashioned romantic. He saw the beauty of the spirit and the flaws in people, celebrated them and identified with their struggles. He felt too much probably, saw too much with the poet and songwriter’s gift of vision. And maybe that’s what all the drinking and drugging was about. He had to numb himself to get through his life.
“Young Ned of the Hill” was written by mandolin player Terry Woods with Irish songwriter Ron Kavana (loosely based on the traditional Irish ballad “Éamonn an Chnoic”) and “Lorelei” was written by guitar player Philip Chevron.