The Pogues: Rum Sodomy & the Lash Album Overview

MacGowan’s writing shines all over the place: on the pub-life reverie “Sally MacLennane,” and “Navigator,” an irony-chiseled staff’ anthem for laborers who “shift just a few tons of this earthly delight” and who “died of their lots of with no signal to mark the place.” However in the long run, two requirements outline the album. Ewan MacColl might have written “Soiled Outdated City,” and the Dubliners scored the primary and largest hit by chart place. However even when his supply nods to the Dubliners’ Luke Kelly, the music grew to become MacGowan’s from the second he croaked the primary refrain, reworking it from regional plaint to cosmic blues. The album ends with Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Performed Waltzing Matilda,” one of many best anti-war songs ever written. There could also be extra putting variations of the Scottish/Australian folks lament (see June Tabor’s 1976 recording). However MacGowan’s sozzled, stoic, rueful depiction of a legless Australian soldier (“No extra waltzing Matilda for me”) within the shadow of recent Britain’s fading empire, ghosted by somber Salvation Military brass, feels vivid and true—an Irish punk’s fittingly romantic, world-weary endnote.

With its title taken, in related spirit, from Winston Churchill’s apocryphal diss of the Royal Navy, and its dada-classical cowl picture of an iconic French Romantic portray of a shipwreck (with band members’ faces artfully graffitied onto the battered our bodies), Rum Sodomy & the Lash launched the Pogues internationally. They burned impossibly vivid for some time. There was the sensible Poguetry in Movement EP, the dazzlingly bold If I Ought to Fall From Grace With God, with “Fairytale of New York.” I noticed the band twice in New York Metropolis round this time, and the revelry, onstage and off, was superior and scary; Nirvana’s mosh pits had been kindergarten recess by comparability. However the albums bought weaker, and by 1991 issues had fallen aside. MacGowan was kicked out of the band; his substance abuse points had been actually an element. And everybody muddled on.

MacGowan stays a songwriter’s songwriter. The late David Berman included Rum Sodomy & the Lash in an inventory of the ten albums that might fill his final imaginary bar jukebox. Cat Energy coated “A Pair of Brown Eyes” as a prayer, Titus Andronicus as a punk anthem à la early Conflict. Within the booklet of the 2005 reissue of Rum Sodomy & the Lash, which added the superb Poguetry in Movement EP and single B-sides, Tom Waits described the band’s music in a poem:

Rapscallion, offended, weeping
Handed out songs, songs
That appear to be born
Effortlessly, or
Not born however discovered
On high of an previous wooden range

He concluded that these had been “songs that all of us ought to carry.” Many people do, in pubs and vehicles and backyards. One night time this summer season, boozing within the mild of an unlawful campfire on a seashore in Cape Cod amongst family and friends with a few guitars, our common instigators led us in music. And as at all times, the heartiest singing was on “A Pair of Brown Eyes”—a music of boundless ache, written for the ages throughout the ocean lapping at our toes.