The Pogues
Rum Sodomy & The Lash

The soundtrack of a western film set in a Dublin pub. This could be a plausible description of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, the second album by the Pogues and cornerstone of their discography, whose title is inspired by a phrase from Winston Churchill about the Royal Navy and features on its cover an image of a ramshackle raft laden with unfortunate souls that closely resembles the tangle of "anime prave" ferried by "Caron Dimonio" of Dantean memory.

Overwhelming, carefree, irreverent, politically incorrect, boisterous, and alcoholic folk-punk, played by the most raucous, defiant, and moving crew of the '80s.

James Fearnley (accordion), Cait O'Riordan (bass), Peter "Spider" Stacy (vocals and thin whistle), Jeremy Max Finer (guitar and banjo), Andrew Ranken (drums) and of course Shane MacGowan, whiskey poet and singer with a grating voice, create an album that, with overflowing flutes, violins, choruses, and accordions, spits out old stories of alcoholics, sailors and whale hunters, war veterans, vagabonds, gunmen, pipers, and harlots.

Rum Sodomy & the Lash, produced by Elvis Costello - who wrote, "I saw that my task... was to capture them in their decaying glory before some more professional producer screwed them up" - is an album where the Pogues, with an exhilarating and grotesque swagger of drunken buskers, recover and assimilate the authentic, raw, and wild spirit of traditional Irish music fueled by punk rage and massive doses of alcohol, like no one had ever done before.

The explosive and painful roar of the opening track, "The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn" and the tribal "Wild Cats Of Kilkenny," the seafaring ballads "The Old Main Drag" and "Navigator" as well as the dazzling ebullience of "A Pair of Brown Eyes" and furthermore the superb and unsettling interpretation by Cait O'Riordan of "I'm a Man You Don't Meet Every Day" - which must have impressed Costello to the point that he later married her - and the other two splendid traditional tracks, "Dirty Old Town" and "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda," make this record emotionally overwhelming and proved to the world that the Pogues were a great band.

And one Sunday - on August 4th, 1991 - for the first and only time, I saw the Pogues play live at Semple Stadium in Thurles, County Tipperary, Ireland. Shane didn't sing a single song from start to finish. After a couple of verses, he would leave the stage while the band continued to play unperturbed, and then he would return, once with a pint of beer, another with a bottle of whiskey, and yet another time with some indefinable concoction, collecting glasses and bottles on the planks of the stage all around the base of the microphone stand until he fashioned a sort of alcoholic altar consecrated to Bacchus.

It was a great concert, not so much for the musical quality of the performance, but for the atmosphere of a happening, a drunken gathering among old friends, a Dionysian ritual officiated by the high priest Shane McGowan, as "drunk" as, if not more than, the numerous crowd of devotees present that evening.

And the day before yesterday, at last - after a death announced for years but never arriving - Shane passed away, at sixty-five, with his liver swollen as usual and a parade of new teeth, due to a viral encephalitis that perhaps only slightly shortened the suffering of a man annihilated in body but not in spirit by his severe addictions.

The dark lady took for herself a great songwriter, a special person with wide, ravaged smiles, one of the last heroes of rock’n’roll, on the same day as the centenarian Henry Kissinger. And it makes me smile to imagine this strange couple, heading towards the Elysian fields.

Who knows if Shane spoke to Henry. Perhaps not.