Pogues review, 1985
“They’ll take you from this place you’re in and stick you in a box. Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground, but you’ll stick your head back out and shout we’ll have another round.”
–“The Sick Bed of Cuchalainn,” 1985
Probably a good idea to avoid driving through any Irish neighborhoods — e.g., ones I used to call home in Sunnyside, Queens and Manayunk, Philadelphia — where quite a few will no doubt be poured out tonight for Shane MacGowan and quite a few more than that will no doubt be consumed. Here’s something I wrote about Shane and his band almost 40 years ago. If you’re prone to alcoholism yourself, imbibing their first two or three albums remains downright dangerous. Rest In Poguetry.
As for the review below, I think I remember it being phone-edited by Robert Christgau, me standing in the hallway of some Army barrack — probably in Fort Knox, Kentucky rather than West Germany, now that I check the calendar. Can’t remember how much he changed it. Lead review in the Voice music section that week (edited by Tom Carson, apparently, whose riff on Hüsker Dü’s Flip Your Wig started on the same page) had Bob Mack trying to convince me to like Rush, among other “dinosaur bands that most of you hope are in the dustbin”: “Just like Chuck Eddy, I read too much Ayn Rand, but he now opts for Motörhead. ‘If Motörhead, why not Budgie?’ I once asked Robert Christgau. ‘Because Budgie are too smart,’ he said.”
Not sure whether Bob Mack ever noticed, but I eventually wound up liking Budgie (and Rush too), around the time Christgau accepted Motörhead as token metal heroes. Mack (the same Bob Mack who wound up editing Grand Royal in the mid ’90s and getting Beastie Boys shoutouts and dying just a couple weeks before MacGowan, in a bicycle accident as I understand it) had gone to University of Missouri-Columbia with me, where he once kvetched in a Jethro Tull review in the weekly maneater about me liking Prince’s Dirty Mind because good music should be aimed at more than just “the viscera.” But I somehow eventually became, at least briefly, his “favorite rock critic.” Not sure if what I had to say about the Pogues changed his mind.
Village Voice, 4 November 1985/Eliminated for Reasons of Space, 30 November 2023