Guest Listener – Linda Grant
Who’s Linda when she’s at home?
I’m a novelist and sometimes journalist. I won the Orange Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker. I also wrote this and if you disagree with it you can fuck off straight away.
Linda’s Top 3 albums ever?
Joni Mitchell: Hejira
Rolling Stones: Goats Head Soup
Patti Smith: Horses
What great album has she never heard before?
Rum, Sodomy and the Lash by The Pogues
Released in 1985
Before we get to Linda, here’s what Martin of Ruth and Martin’s Album Club thinks of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash
He wanted to be a writer and, at the age of 14, Shane MacGowan was given his chance.
A gifted pupil, well-read and imaginative, he had been awarded a literature
scholarship to the Westminster School - a highly prestigious institution that
had been educating the rich and privileged for centuries in the grounds of
Westminster Abbey.
Not only could it boast the highest Oxbridge acceptance rates of any school or
college in the world but it could also count the following amongst its
celebrated alumni - seven Prime Ministers, Sir Christopher Wren, A.A Milne,
Tony Benn, Sir John Gielgud, and, best of all, Adam and Joe.
The ideal place, you would think, for the talented MacGowan to pursue his
ambitions. At the very least he’d end up doing English at Oxford or Cambridge;
at the very most he could become Prime Minister or co-host of a popular
Saturday morning show on 6 music.
He’d been set up to succeed - the possibilities, seemingly, endless.
Unfortunately, MacGowan decided to pursue other ambitions instead - namely
drinking, taking acid, and shoplifting. To make matters worse, and ruin his
chances of becoming Head Boy for good, he was caught in possession of cannabis
in his second year. With no other option, the headmaster wearily contacted
MacGowan’s parents telling them that, all things considered, he’d prefer it if
Shane didn’t come back.
MacGowan’s father seemed to take the news really well -
“Fine. I don’t want him to come back to this stupid fucking cunt of a
place anyway”
With that the opportunity was over - MacGowan was expelled.
He spent the next couple of years drifting, alternating between a series of
dead end jobs and further failed attempts at formal education. By the time he
was 17, he had drifted so much that he was now suffering from depression, acute
anxiety, and hallucinations that terrified him so much he stopped going to bed.
A doctor prescribes him valium which he merely adds to the assortment of drink
and Class A drugs that he was prescribing himself.
It’s tragic isn’t it? The realisation that he was actually always Shane
MacGowan. Here he is at 17, dragged down by the undertow of London and homesick
for a Tipperary that he briefly experienced, and barely remembered, as a
child.
And now we hit the break, the crashing end of act one.
Eventually, maybe inevitably, MacGowan has a complete mental breakdown and his
father admits him to Bethlem - the infamous psychiatric hospital in South East
London.
It’s here that that he celebrates his 18th birthday - on Christmas Day, 1975.
I say celebrate but the truth is, he wasn’t even allowed a drink.
The curtain comes up in 1976 - he’s eventually declared sane and free to
leave.
MacGowan still sees his future as a writer, but the shift has happened - he’s
now turned his attention to writing songs instead. As he put it himself,
“that’s the way you communicate with people nowadays”.
He begins by jumping head first into the emerging punk scene in London - seeing one of the first The Sex Pistols gigs and achieving some notoriety as “that kid that got half his ear bit off whilst watching The Clash”. The scene provided a lifeline and a focus previously absent in his life - he even starts his own handwritten fanzine, which he calls Bondage. After one edition, though, he realises handwritten fanzines held together by safety pins were a load of hassle so he knocked it on the head and started forming bands instead.
After the short-lived, but superbly named, Hot Dogs With Everything, MacGowan then forms the The Nipple Erectors, a horrendous name which was ultimately shortened to The Nips - arguably even worse. Despite this, The Nips (urgh!) release a single called Gabrielle which is totally brilliant - Paul Weller telling Smash Hits it was the best single of all time.
Buoyed by its modicum of success, Shane MacGowan does a series of interviews where he yearns for a healthy pop scene and slags off Gang of Four, who he really hates.
It’s also around this time that he moves into Burton Street, a transitory community in Kings Cross made up of interchangeable squats and low rent housing. There’s music everywhere, portable lives soundtracked by huge immobile stereos - Reggae, Ska, and the Irish music that MacGowan loved as a child. The rebel songs, the melancholy - the homesickness for a place unknown. It’s here, in this bustling terminal that he will meet most of The Pogues for the first time. It’s also here that he continues to drink, aimlessly wandering the streets of Kings Cross like a character in a Patrick Hamilton novel without a plot - chasing his own tail each night before collapsing at the end of another wasted chapter.
As we enter 1981 The Nips (urgh!) are, thankfully, all played out in the death knell of punk. But MacGowan is anything but. He’s become a writer and he’s now all in.
In Kings Cross, with his friend Spider, he picks up an acoustic guitar and hurls himself into a frenetic version of Poor Paddy Works on the Railway - a 19th century Irish folk song about some fella who didn’t like working on the railway. Apparently that’s how it happened. There and then, they had the idea.
After a false start as The New Republicans, after deciding not to call themselves The Black Velvet Underground, they form Pogue Mahone - MacGowan and a collection of musicians that were passing through Burton Street. Cait O’Riordan on a bass she couldn’t play, James Fearnley on an accordion he’d only just acquired, Jem Finer on guitar and John Hasler on drums. Oh, and last but not least, Spider on tin whistle and “hitting himself across the head with a beer tray”. None of them were born in Ireland, most of them didn’t even have the ancestry. They had come from London, Manchester, Stoke on Trent, and Sussex to be here - playing this music.
Yet here they were, standing on stage in a straight line - solid and one dimensional, as the curtain falls on Act 2.
Off they go, touring the pubs of North London and pulling a crowd - The Hope and Anchor, The Bull and Gate, The Pindar of Wakefield. Smoke filled back rooms where they create a scene of their own, of copycat bands and London Irish fans. Time Out, in the worst piece of music journalism ever, label the scene “Leprechaunabilly”. Others, as if it’s a competition to come up with the worst name ever, call it “Cowpunk”. It’s volatile, drunken, and unrehearsed. Pogue Mahone, as if no one’s watching, argue on stage as they try to figure out how to get from one song to the next.
Despite all this, despite the fact they hadn’t even released a single, Music Week voted them the “most likely to succeed” in 1983.
You would think an endorsement like that would precipitate a bidding war amongst the labels, but the reality was anything but. Label execs speculated whether Pogue Mahone would have a broad money making appeal and were further put off by a perceived image problem that cast them as unruly and difficult to manage. You can say what you like about Kid Creole and the Coconuts but at least they weren’t beating each other up on stage and hitting themselves on the head with beer trays.
Their reputation was reinforced somewhat when they all turned up drunk up for a Peel Session and Cait O’Riordan got thrown out the BBC for throwing up all over the corridor.
As if that wasn’t bad enough, they then appeared on an L.W.T show called South of Watford (great name) and swore loads at Ben Elton. When Elton asked what differentiated their music from traditional Irish music, MacGowan replied with -
“The stuff we play is more fucked up, cos you are more fucked up if you live in London than if you live in a nice little town in Tipperary"
Ben Elton turned to camera and said "I think it will be a while before Pogue Mahone are on Top of the Pops”.
And he may have been right, had it not been for Dave Robinson at Stiff Records. A long-time fan of MacGowan since his days in The Nips (urgh!) he went to see Pogue Mahone at The Pindar of Wakefield and signed them on the strength of three songs.
They changed their name to The Pogues and released their first album - Red Roses for Me. The subsequent tour saw them blow up a dressing room in Loughborough with fireworks and have massive argument on the way to Nottingham over whether a tomato was a fruit or vegetable. It’s a scene that sums up the ‘80s for me - no Wikipedia, no yahoo answers, just endless arguments about tomatoes.
Eight to a van, at each other’s throats as the curtain goes down again.
The final act - Rum, Sodomy and the Lash.
MacGowan had done it, he had become a writer.
Drawing on his own experience of feeling marginalised in his home city, he wrote a series of songs that specialised in displacement and struggle.
In his most famous song, which would come after this album, he would write the line that said it all -
“The boys of the NYPD choir still singing Galway Bay”
The use of the word “still” is genius, giving the line a timeless quality - as if the police were singing Galway Bay before the song started and will continue long after it’s finished. MacGowan was documenting a modern Irish identity, one that was dispersed and in conflict with its own nostalgia. If the Galway Bay line is a shortcut to these themes, A Pair of Brown Eyes is the complete story - a young man in a pub awash with Irish song, fighting it out at the bar with his older self.
Yet, for all the associations, for all the imagery provided at Christmas and funerals in The Wire, The Pogues will always evoke one thing for me above all else - London.
In a decade where London stopped producing great bands, The Pogues were its saving grace and MacGowan its great observer. The album is littered with adventures within the displaced communities around the great train stations, the portable lives striving for settlement. They’re brought to life here - filled with action, tragedy, and humour. This was the setting where MacGowan found his voice, where he became the writer he thought he could be.
He’d resolutely done it his own way.
He’s the friend that most of us have - the one that’s read more books than you, seen more films than you, and is fundamentally smarter than you. He’s the great night out that goes on too long, that sometimes makes you wish you hadn’t started. He’s reliably different, infuriatingly awkward, and proud, and aware, of the role he plays.
But what distinguishes MacGowan is the sense that this hasn’t been a performance after all - that we haven’t been watching an act played out for our entertainment.
No, for better or worse, his reality isn’t a cliché. He was Shane MacGowan before we got there and he’ll continue once we’ve gone - long after the curtain closes and the applause fades.
Martin Fitzgerald (@RamAlbumClub)
The Critics on Rum, Sodomy and the Lah
Sounds (remember them?) said “Rum,Sodomy & the Lash is the finest slice of story-telling your heart could wish for”
Mojo, Q, and Uncut all gave it 5/5.
So, over to you Linda. Why haven’t you listened to it? WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU?????
Three reasons:
1. I thought I had, but it turned out to be Stiff Little Fingers, easy mistake to make, I think.
2. I lived in Canada from 1976 to the end of 1984. During 1985, when this album was released, I was staying with other people, didn’t have my own record player and if they didn’t have the album, I probably wouldn’t have heard it.
3. This is more fundamental. I was 11 and in my first term at secondary school IN Liverpool when the Beatles released their first single, Love Me Do. A girl in the Sixth form was going out with George Harrison, my parents knew Brian Epstein’s parents and a few months later I was skiving off school to go to the Cavern lunchtime sessions.
I came in at the very start of the best pop music there has ever been – I was buying the Beatles, Stones, Kinks, Who, Dylan, The Beach Boys, Motown, Leonard Cohen, Springsteen, Joni - a wall of sound so immense reaching to the early-Seventies that what came after it always seemed second rate. From 1980 onwards the only artists I loved were Pulp and Amy. I set my face against punk because it had a hand in damaging the career of Joni Mitchell making her lady of the canyon image irredeemably out of fashion. I was starting to lose interest by 1985, probably already had during the period of disco and plastic pop. Techno, trance, hip-hop, New Romantics, Britpop all pretty much passed me by as I began to mainly listen to classical music
You’ve now listened to it, at least 3 times, what do you think?
Wow.
I feel very stupid now.
This is absolutely sensational. I wish I had first heard this in 1985 because it would have been an LP and I would have been able to read the lyrics on the CD sleeve without the aid of a magnifying glass and two pairs of reading glasses.
The only song of the Pogues I could definitively say I’d heard before this was Fairytale of New York, so I knew that there was this capacity to tell a story in vivid exclamatory descriptive language. The tracks on this album are close to being sung short stories. I can think of few better songwriters. There is a powerful sense of history here of high life and plenty of low life, it’s music that’s absolutely of its time (particularly The Old Main Drag, a portrait of London’s meat market in the eighties) but exceptionally clever in the way it appropriates the traditional folk song and the heroes and anti-heroes of the folk song.
I also adored this version of Dirty Old Town, I loved the way it was sung as it should be, without the sonorous folky intonations of singers who have never met anyone by a factory wall, except with a notebook and tape recorder.
The album is a whole world about ordinary men on the make, its raw, its credible and it’s really sophisticated.
Musically, I found it a little frustrating. Singing new lyrics to familiar Irish tunes and jigs is a clever thing to do but the traditional sounds which must be great to dance to, get a little irritating after a while and I’d have like to have heard more originality and innovation, which is there, but not enough of it. One thing about this album though is it sounds like everyone making it was having a terrific time and the listener doesn’t feel left out.
Would you listen to it again?
Yep, I plan to listen to this many times over
A mark out of 10?
Out of ten I’ll give it a 9 because it’s cheered me up so much I’m feeling generous.
RAM Rating - 9
Guest Rating - 9
Overall - 9 (obvs)
So that was Week 54 and that was Linda Grant. Turns out she’d never listened to Rum, Sodomy, and The Lash before because she once had the Beatles for lunch and her mate had George Harrison for dessert. So we made her listen to it and she loved it to bits – although not as much as Joni Mitchell.
All in all a fair result
Next week, Josie Rourke listens to something from 1978 for the first time.
Until then, here’s A Pair of Brown Eyes
Enjoy
Ruth and Martin
xx