More Than Just The Craic

One of those bargain retrospectives, The Very Best Of The Pogues is a good representation of what this Anglo-Irish band was about. Famous for chaotic booze fueled stage shows, there is an element on the record of songs glorifying pub culture and the Friday night craic but near the surface is always the dark side eptiomised by Shane MacGowan's lyrics. His non-voice can get a little wearing over more than an hour of music but he is in the tradition of Irish poets and raconteurs and has a compassion for the damaged characters that populate many of his songs. Musically too, the band had wider influences than Irish folk and jigs, sometimes sounding cajun, sometimes almost oriental, occasionally as if at a fiesta. A rock band they most certainly were not. There is an elegiac quality to some songs such as Misty Morning Albert Bridge and even the Christmas chestnut Fairytale Of New York and this contrasts with full on celebrations of drink such as Sally MacLennane and Streams Of Whisky. The Old Main Drag is a grim tale of the underbelly of central London but the group's masterpiece closes this disk, The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. This is a narrative about the survivors of the disastrous Gallipoli campaign of WW1 and is a poignant reminder of the futility of war.