Word: macgowan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Flowers, the Proclaimers and the Waterboys, three of the best bands working the newly fertile field of electric folk. The Pogues redirected and redefined a tradition that even such disparate talents as Tracy Chapman, the Indigo Girls and Suzanne Vega are working to excellent effect. Mind you, listening to MacGowan blister his way through Young Ned of the Hill or White City will not bring a fond smile to folkies who prefer their music mild, like a cup of chamomile, or foursquare, like a sermon on a six-string. MacGowan sing-snarls like a saloon rowdy. His mouth, missing several...
...MacGowan onstage is restless, perhaps combustible. If the other seven band members do a tune in which his involvement is minimal, he will take a hike into the wings. "It's embarrassing," he says. "I'm sitting on my bloody hands." Even when he's not in the thick of things, he is the Pogues' charismatic center. It was MacGowan and his writing that got Terry Woods out of retirement. At 42, Woods is older by a decade than the rest of the band, and he played with such mid-'70s English electric-folk groups as Steeleye Span, on whose...
...Pogues are not a postmodern incarnation of the Clancy Brothers, however. Only half of them are Irish (MacGowan, 31, was born in Ireland but moved to ! London when he was six), and it quickly became apparent back in the formative days that working up a repertoire of Irish music exclusively, even punked and pulverized, was a dead end. "It was patronizing," says Stacy simply. So instead of the raw Irish musical tradition itself, the band took the spirit of the tradition, which Stacy compares convincingly with rhythm and blues and reggae...
...centered in London, where they are an enduring force in a music scene that changes with tidal regularity, the band members still live close by one another, most of them in the same working-class neighborhoods where they grew up. "We are not the sort of people," says MacGowan, "who like to be snotty bastards, out in space." They just finished playing a few dates in the States, to get Peace and Love off to a strong start, and will return next month for a lengthier series of concerts, both opening for Bob Dylan and performing on their...
...Pogues are doing well enough, and remain enterprising enough, to explore some unlikely avenues of musical inspiration. "There are eight really strong personalities in the band," MacGowan comments. "Everybody writes." Jem Finer, who plays banjo, sax and hurdy-gurdy and who pulled the Pogues together in the early days, has written, with the aid of a "very old Italian phrase book," an aria. "We've rehearsed it," he reveals, "but it wasn't recorded for the album. Various factions thought it was pushing things a bit far. But opera is one of our secret desires." Unlike British soldiers...