on 2011-03-17 dscanland Said:

Even though they are English-born, The Pogues are Irish at heart, Shane MacGowan being Irish himself. A great album for St. Patrick's Day!
Not Rated

Review:

on 2011-03-17 CharlesMartel Said:

At the time, I never really cared much for the Pogues. All that Irish folksiness just seemed so out of place, somehow. The band seemed to ride a wave of so-called Celtic rock which was a label thrown at anyone whose roots were in Scotland or Ireland (and a few, like Dexy's Midnight Runners) who wished they were. Alright for a night over the Guinness and some craic, but really once you had left that pub behind, the Pogues were nothing more than a mildly pleasant memory.

And as the years advanced, and Shane MacGowan turned from troubled young man into a rambling alcoholic with none of his original teeth and a decreasing number of his original brain cells, well the Pogues lost any consistency they may have had and became an example of another band for which substance abuse had pretty much destroyed whatever qualities they had in the first place. And then you look at it in the cold light of day and wonder if the Pogues' music played any part in the downfall of the Waterboys who swapped the potential greatness of the Big Music for the insipid, bum-clenching cheese of their leprechaun-impersonating fourth album.

But over the years, you mellow. And when the Pogues had passed, disappeared after sacking the unpredictable and booze-addled MacGowan, like many others I began to appreciate them more and more. However, this journey took a while. Like many, it began with "A Fairytale of New York", sung as a duet with the late Kirsty MacColl, probably the greatest Christmas song ever written. It is a song of love turned sour, as passing years and heavy nights on the booze have taken their toll, of broken promises and dashed expectations. Yet it endures all the same, perhaps one last time, in the memories of great festive seasons past. From there, you begin to explore other aspects of their catalogue which you had previously overlooked and find, to your quiet surprise, that actually, you were quite fond of a lot of what the Pogues did. It is at such a point that you begin to hunt down a suitable compilation.

The more you listen the more you appreciate the thinness of the ridge the Pogues walked. On one side was the abyss of Irish folk music, a niche which many enjoy but a niche all the same. On the other side is another abyss, the abyss of gritty urban punk a good three years after gritty urban punk lost its lure to the youth of the UK. And then you begin to appreciate, to marvel even, at how a drunken MacGowan could stagger and reel his way across the band's albums and yet still lead them across the ridge without them falling in to either abyss.

This compilation, issued in Europe only, draws heavily from the Pogues' first three - arguably the Pogues' best three - albums. MacGowan was at his peak and had sufficient moments of sobriety to pen some truly insightful lyrics. There are also a few tracks from the more erratic later albums where MacGowan's instability had become the band's collective liability. A reasonable cross section of the Pogues' work, perhaps a little too folksy to be the perfect compilation, but then the perfect compilation is so hard to find. Still, if you enjoy the Pogues occasionally, this is as good a sample of their work as you are liable to find anywhere.
Rating: 7/10