MacGowan’s writing shines all over the place: on the pub-life reverie “Sally MacLennane,” and “Navigator,” an irony-chiseled employees’ anthem for laborers who “shift a couple of tons of this earthly delight” and who “died of their a whole lot with no signal to mark the place.” However in the long run, two requirements outline the album. Ewan MacColl might have written “Soiled Outdated City,” and the Dubliners scored the primary and largest hit by chart place. However even when his supply nods to the Dubliners’ Luke Kelly, the tune grew to become MacGowan’s from the second he croaked the primary refrain, remodeling it from regional plaint to cosmic blues. The album ends with Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Performed Waltzing Matilda,” one of many biggest anti-war songs ever written. There could also be extra hanging variations of the Scottish/Australian folks lament (see June Tabor’s 1976 recording). However MacGowan’s sozzled, stoic, rueful depiction of a legless Australian soldier (“No extra waltzing Matilda for me”) within the shadow of contemporary Britain’s fading empire, ghosted by somber Salvation Military brass, feels vivid and true—an Irish punk’s fittingly romantic, world-weary endnote.
With its title taken, in related spirit, from Winston Churchill’s apocryphal diss of the Royal Navy, and its dada-classical cowl picture of an iconic French Romantic portray of a shipwreck (with band members’ faces artfully graffitied onto the battered our bodies), Rum Sodomy & the Lash launched the Pogues internationally. They burned impossibly vibrant for some time. There was the sensible Poguetry in Movement EP, the dazzlingly bold If I Ought to Fall From Grace With God, with “Fairytale of New York.” I noticed the band twice in New York Metropolis round this time, and the revelry, onstage and off, was superior and scary; Nirvana’s mosh pits had been kindergarten recess by comparability. However the albums acquired weaker, and by 1991 issues had fallen aside. MacGowan was kicked out of the band; his substance abuse points had been actually an element. And everybody muddled on.
MacGowan stays a songwriter’s songwriter. The late David Berman included Rum Sodomy & the Lash in a listing of the ten albums that may fill his final imaginary bar jukebox. Cat Energy coated “A Pair of Brown Eyes” as a prayer, Titus Andronicus as a punk anthem à la early Conflict. Within the booklet of the 2005 reissue of Rum Sodomy & the Lash, which added the superb Poguetry in Movement EP and single B-sides, Tom Waits described the band’s music in a poem:
Rapscallion, offended, weeping
Handed out songs, songs
That appear to be born
Effortlessly, or
Not born however discovered
On prime of an previous wooden range
He concluded that these had been “songs that all of us ought to carry.” Many people do, in pubs and automobiles and backyards. One night time this summer time, boozing within the gentle of an unlawful campfire on a seashore in Cape Cod amongst family and friends with a few guitars, our regular instigators led us in tune. And as all the time, the heartiest singing was on “A Pair of Brown Eyes”—a tune of boundless ache, written for the ages throughout the ocean lapping at our toes.
