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| March.09 Cover - The Pogues |
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| Written by Bob Townsend | |
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Page 1 of 4  The Jig Ain’t UpBack From Hell’s Ditch, Amidst a Field of Disciples, The Pogues are Still the Genuine Article “I type with me toes, suck stout through me nose, and where it’s gonna end, God only knows.” – Shane MacGowan, “Down All the Days” On the phone from his place in Finsbury Park, in North London, Spider Stacy sums himself up in a spurt of self-deprecating piss-taking. “People know who I am, because I’m the sort of mouthy one up at the front,” Stacy says. “My name is kind of easy to remember. Plus, not many bands have a tin whistle player.” Off-and-on, for the past 27-odd years, Stacy has stood beside (and sometimes stood-in for) his friend and nemesis, the wasted poet genius, Shane MacGowan, as they fronted the Pogues – the seminal Irish folk-punk band the two formed with guitarist James Fearnley in London in 1982. The story of the Pogues is the stuff of cult rock legend. The blurry images of the band’s boozed-up beginnings, wild-banging mid-’80s glory days, and whimpering early ’90s demise (marked by the sudden sacking of MacGowan in 1991), are like strung-out inkblot tests of decadent hipsterism. Stare at them and conjure the scattered spirits of Rimbaud, Genet and Bukowski, mashed up against the Clancey Brothers, the Sex Pistols and the Clash. Certainly, one of the main reasons crowds will be coming to Pogues shows this month in Atlanta, Washington, DC, New York City, and Boston is to bear witness to the spectacle of MacGowan – a sneering-hissing-drunk, spitting impossibly beautiful lyrics through rotted teeth, wobbling about the stage like a weeble, the unlikely survivor of long-term self-abuse, who surely should have fallen down by now. But he’s still here. Asked the inescapable question – How’s Shane doing these days? – Stacy first answers with a laugh. “I wondered when that one was coming,” he says, laughing louder. “What should I say here? Should I just tell you an outright lie? Last time I saw him, which was about a month ago, he was fine.” |
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