It’s been a tough year for Ireland’s musicians. Sinead O’Connor died in July, and this week Shane MacGowan, frontman for the Pogues, died a week after being discharged from a hospital. He was 65 and, given his problems with alcohol and heroin, many people were surprised he lived that long.
MacGowan is often called a poet because lyrics tend to rhyme, but his distinguishing talent wasn’t pretty phrasing so much as storytelling. If he hadn’t become a singer, MacGowan’s tales of booze-fueled carousing among the working class could have made him the premier Irish short-story author of the punk era. Setting those tales to the traditional sounds of Irish folk music made for an incongruous pairing – I can’t think of another punk band you could dance a jig to – but it worked so well that bands like Boston’s Dropkick Murphys went on to copy the style if not the substance.
Fittingly for someone born on Christmas Day, MacGowan’s best-known song is the yuletide classic “Fairytale of New York,” in MacGowan’s account written when then-producer Elvis Costello challenged him to write a holiday song. Despite, or maybe because of, its tawdry tale, it reached No. 2 in the UK singles chart in 1987, and has reentered the chart frequently since. It marked the peak of the band’s popularity, but the fame did MacGowan no favors. In 1991 he was kicked out of the band because of his alcoholism, though he rejoined them 10 years later and stayed until the Pogues – short for a Gaelic phrase that means “kiss my ass” – disbanded in 2014.
“Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” was the title track to the band’s 1990 EP, which featured rock rather than Irish folk. With its Memphis-style horn section, this track adds a touch of blue-eyed soul. It became the Pogues’ first single to chart in the U.S., where it reached No. 17 on the Modern Rock chart.
