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Rebel Rabble

The Pogues

Article from International Musician & Recording World, January 1985

The jolly lads (and lass) currently blowing up a Gaelic gale with their drinking man's Folk have Adrian Deevoy reeling


While all around are sampling sounds and playing Fairlights, the Pogues are sampling Guinness and playing ceilidhs.


On the corner of O'Connell Street and Camden High Street you'll find the Pogues. Drunken, raucous and issuing Pogueslogans ('lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink', 'lock up your drinks' cabinets') in broad Anglo-Irish brogue they'll whirl you round the house (and mind the dresser) before you can say 'the top of the milk to yas' or is it 'yourself'?.

The Pogues are one band that can spell ceilidh.

Ironically, not all the Pogue personnel are Irish but Shane MacGowan was reared on enough diddly, diddly rebel songs and Brendan Behan poetry to fair emulate a shindig soundtrack and piece together the elements essential to Irish music. Unfortunately this is where Shane's songwriting and musical expertise peter out and Maestro Jimmy Fearnley comes in.

So how do you make Irish music in North London? What constitutes an Irish band anyway? Why is the Pogues LP, Red Roses For Me so jig 'n' reel inspiring? Why do they drink so bleedin' much?

Answers Maestro, please.

"This all began when Jem the banjo player came around to my house with an accordion. Jem had joined up with Shane and Spider the tin-whistle player. They used to busk in Finsbury Park Tube station and they got to play a gig at Cabaret Futura where they got up and sang rebel songs. They got pelted off with chips so they thought they'd like to take the idea further and form a fully fledged band.

"I didn't quite know what to make of the accordion. I'd never played one before. I'd played guitar for yonks in The Nips and before that but the accordion is very different from the guitar. It's got eight buttons and they provide a chord or a drone and there's 37 notes on the keyboard side. The fingering is pretty easy to master but it's the movement and momentum that's the hardest part. It's all right live because you can miss a beat or whatever but in the studio you have to get it dead right.

"The worst thing about the accordion is that it gives you a really bad backache. You find that after a gig, because you can't sit down your back is killing you and the only way to relieve the pain is to anaesthetise yourself with the demon drink. The other problem is that it's very loud. It used to drown everything out when we played acoustically at parties. I played Captain Pugwash to my niece who's three to show her what I did for a living and after one note she started bawling because it was so bloody loud."

Has the fact that you were all musical debutant(e)s on your respective instruments been a drawback?

"No, I suppose it should have because none of us could play at all. When I met Cot, the bass player, I shook her hand and said, 'You must be Cot the new bass player' and she said, 'No, I'm just Cot'. That was a bit difficult but it's no trouble now. One of the most difficult things is getting the bass and drum patterns right because some of the songs are very fast. Actually we have more trouble getting Shane to sing the fast lyrics quick enough.

"But we all carry different parts of the melody and I suppose in that capacity I am the musician, but you have to listen closely to hear that the banjo and tin whistle are playing sort of counter-melodic parts too.

Shane MacGowan — Camden's answer to Paddy Maloney

"We're by no means virtuosos now, whatever that means, but we can always seem to play what is required. Someone recently suggested that we make the songs longer by, and I cringe as I use the word, jamming, but we couldn't, thank God. We're not musicians in that sense that we can extemporise around a tune like the Chieftains. I find the songs quite long enough anyway. All I'm normally fit for after playing is sitting down, having a drink and smoking lots of fags."

In the face of technology and chips with everything is the minimalistic approach very satisfying?

"Oh, it is. We played at The Fridge in Brixton and when we set our stuff up we had the guitar, banjo and my accordion going through the PA and all there was on stage was three mike stands and a bass amp. The band who were supporting us turned up and they honestly filled half the fucking auditorium with racks and racks of keyboards and bleeding television screens for their drum machines. It made me feel fantastic to think that our most hi-tech bit of equipment was the tray that Spider uses to bash himself on the head.

"When we used to play acoustic gigs and even now when we play, we can actually carry our gear to the gig, and when the organisers say, 'Where's your truck' we just say by way of an answer, 'where's your bar, where's the stage, give us the money."

You must be very reliant on the live sound engineer for a good sound.

"Very. We had this big problem when we were supporting Elvis Costello because after he'd soundchecked we'd get up to do ours and his sound engineer would want to bugger off for his dinner and this went on and on. We'd get up and 'voomf' — he'd be off for his dinner. Eventually we took him aside and said if you keep doing this you're gonna be eating fucking guitar for your dinner and he was fine after that. Very co-operative."



"It made me feel fantastic to think that our most hi-tech bit of equipment was the tray that Spider uses to bash himself on the head"


Is miking up a problem?

"Not really. We use a bridge pickup on the guitar and another on the banjo. At the moment I use two microphones, one on either side of the accordion, but I'm thinking of getting some transducer mikes for that because apparently they make special mikes for the accordion. Actually transducer mikes without cables would be great. I'm always falling over the bloody cables. I'm just waiting for Stiff to come up with the money."

Is there a limited amount you can say about a banjo?

"God knows... God knows. Jem plays a five string with the drone G and the banjo is tuned to a G chord. He's actually worked like a Trojan learning to play it well because the chords are fairly easy but the fingerpicking is absolute bloody murder. He's got those steel fingerpicks too which are very hard to get used to. He gets together with Chris (Thompson) the banjo player in the Boothill Foot Tappers and they have 'banjo talk'. You thought drummers were boring when they started. Jesus Christ..."

There's not an awful lot we can say about your drums. There's only two of them....

The Pogues (R-L) Shane, Andy, Cot, Jimmy, Spider and Gem

"Well live we use this really deep, 18" tom tom and a snare but in the studio we use one of those big marching band tom toms that you wear on your stomach, and we lay that across a couple of chairs. It makes this sort of subsonic farting sound when it comes out of my speakers at home but in the monitor room in the studio it sounded great. You thought everything was going to come out of your bum. But Andy can use all those rim shots and things and I've always liked the idea of having just two drums. We auditioned loads of these wankers with millions of rototoms and they just couldn't stop them selves from playing all the time so we felt it would be an effective safety valve to have just two drums and stick a bison behind them."

What make of guitar do The Pogues favour?

"What do you want to know that for?"

It's very interesting.

"Are you taking the piss? Oh, all right then. It's a 12-string Eko. An Eko Ranger 12, a very underestimated and very cheap guitar. It's got a bloody beautiful tone, very rich and it's very physical to play too. I played that one for the guitar parts on the album. That's mainly because Shane can't play very well. Actually at one gig he was so pissed he played G all the way through. Forgot to change chords.

"When we were recording The Auld Triangle I was trying to get this very soft, sort of timeless sound so we were wrapping the pick in a felt from the bottom of the studio machines and using really soft plectrums. Then one of the engineers suggested that I should sit underneath a blanket with the guitar and they could put the mike outside and that would make the sound a lot softer. Of course I fell for this hook, line and sinker and when I went back into the control room all the bastards were sitting there mixing it all sat under this blanket pissing themselves laughing. I went out and bought a felt pick. Engineers are like that."

And Ireland. Have you been deeply affected by the finer nuances of Joyce's prose, the charming, camp wit of Wilde's pithy maxims and the grave honesty of O'Brien's rhetoric?

"Well we found when we listen to Irish music in the van, which we do quite a lot, it just makes us want to drink. It inspires drinking in a person.

"But to be a spokesman for the collective I'd say one of our major influences is The Dubliners. If we were to talk conceptually and we're about to, the last album was our Dubliners album and the next one will be our Clancy Brothers album.

"We played in the Leisure Centre in Galway which is apparently a complete white elephant and most of the audience were German tourists apart from the odd student in a knitting pattern jumper. I didn't pick up any tips, pretty terrible really."

Enough to drive a man to drink?

"No, but from a knitting point of view it was very bad. Not an Arran sweater in sight."

From the tow path of Camden Lock to the banks of the Royal Canal The Pogues, the drinking man's Human League, seem destined to carry on fighting the good fight. Until they repeal the licensing laws may the Landlord of Life never call last orders on them.


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The Managers


Publisher: International Musician & Recording World - Cover Publications Ltd, Northern & Shell Ltd.

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International Musician - Jan 1985

Artist:

The Pogues


Role:

Band/Group

Interview by Adrian Deevoy

Previous article in this issue:

> On Video

Next article in this issue:

> The Managers


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