New Irish sounds pt. 2 (RIP Shane MacGowan)

The Pogues. Bob Dylan & Bono talk Irish music. Landless. Lisa O'Neill. Glen Hansard. A letter from Dublin.

Last week in Notes I posted a YouTube clip of Nick Cave playing “A Rainy Night in Soho” at Shane MacGowan’s funeral, which was one year ago this Sunday. A lot of readers responded — Shane’s songwriting touched so many people around the world.

So let me share a piece of writing I did a few months ago for Pitchfork, an appreciation of The Pogues masterpiece Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Below is an excerpt. If you have time, click the links; I put a lot of effort into culling them, as I usually do for my online writing. I suspect you’ll find items that delight you, as they did me.

When Shane MacGowan died last year, it felt like the passing of a head of state. In a sense it was: The Irish president attended the funeral; a pre-recorded Bono read from St. Paul’s Letter to the Corinthians; Nick Cave sang a moving “Rainy Night in Soho.” And by the time the assembly was laying into an unexpurgated reading of “Fairytale of New York”—a white-bearded Glen Hansard leading the congregation, with neo-trad ambassador Lisa O’Neill singing Kirsty MacColl’s parts, Spider Stacey and other Pogues accompanying them on instruments as MacGowan’s widow and others waltzed near the altar—it’s a fair bet many of those present, not to mention those watching the livestream, were blinking back tears. (I certainly was.) Even the pious outcries that followed this unconventional mass felt perfect—one imagined MacGowan’s jagged grin shining down from heaven.

Why such reverence? For one thing, MacGowan and the Pogues made Irish roots music cool. Sure, music nerds admired the native folk revivalists of the 1970s like Planxty and Clannad, the family band that briefly worked with kosmische legend Conny Plank and launched the career of sister Enya before finding their own crossover fame. Some American country artists appreciated the Irish influence on, and dialogue with, their own music. And Bob Dylan covered his share of Irish-rooted tunes; among others, a handsome take on “The Auld Triangle” turned up among the Basement Tapes.

As punk bubbled up at CBGB and Max’s in the Irish diaspora of New York City, you could still hear the ’60s folk-revival sounds of Ed Sullivan faves the Clancy Brothers and the Dubliners in countless Irish bars. But these were better known as hangouts for pensioners and off-duty cops than destinations for live music. By the time the Pogues ramped up in the early ’80s, pre-Riverdance and Van Morrison’s LP with the Chieftains, Irish trad was squarely stuff for family gatherings, if it was in your bloodline, trotted out with the green beer and public drunkenness on St. Paddy’s Day.

But the Pogues went beyond revivalism. They built a canon of their own, much of it flowing from the golden pen and orthodontically imposing mouth of MacGowan, their frontman and main songwriter. You glimpsed his gift on their debut, Red Roses for Me. Roughly half standards, including “The Auld Triangle,” it also had MacGowan’s “Boys From the County Hell,” a rabid, myth-building anthem loaded with writerly turns:

The boys and me are drunk and looking for you
We’ll eat your frigging entrails and we won’t give a damn
Me daddy was a blue shirt and my mother a madam
My brother earned his medals at My Lai in Vietnam

The boozing, the gang mentality, the black humor, the tangled and brutal history of occupation and emigration embedded in highly compressed storytelling are all there, laid over carousing beats suitable for jigs or pogo-ing. The Pogues were born of the first-wave British punk scene, where MacGowan became an accidental icon before he even had a band, first becoming a poster boy when he was photographed with a bloody ear at a Clash gig, then launching a single issue of a zine called Bondage. That the Pogues were a British band complicated things further. But being accepted in the world of Irish traditional music was beside the point—that music was the blood beneath the scab the Pogues were picking at, animating DNA within battered souls scattered across the culture’s diaspora. In some ways, the Pogues’ “Britishness” was the point.

All these factors produced the perfect storm of Rum Sodomy & the Lash…

This past summer, I got an email from a talented young man I don’t actually recall meeting, but who I certainly do recall singing — at an impromptu session (pictured above) in a hotel lobby following a 2023 concert by singer/songwriter Lisa O’Neill in the northwest Irish town of Cavan in Ulster. Here’s what I wrote in the NY Times about it last year:

Her February album release concert at the town hall in Cavan — her hometown, roughly a 90-minute drive from Dublin — felt like the homecoming it was. On a stage made homey with vintage table lamps, guest artists came and went as old songs flanked new, and the show ended on a spectacular, dissonance-spiked version of “All the Tired Horses,” her remarkable Bob Dylan cover that recently capped the popular period crime drama “Peaky Blinders.”

Afterward, naturally, a session bubbled up, in the lobby of a small hotel down the road. O’Neill’s father ferried in rounds of Guinness from the pub next door. A young man spoke of health struggles, and beautifully sang “The Lakes of Pontchartrain.” The Corkonian legend John Spillane, a national treasure who is something of Ireland’s John Prine, reprised an earlier onstage duet with O’Neill on his aching “Passage West,” then laid into the raucous WWI lament “Salonika,” with hearty accompaniment from the novelist Patrick McCabe, a friend and fan of O’Neill’s who came in for the show.

And on it went until sometime after 3 a.m., when the holdouts finally called it a night.

Below is a portion of the letter I received from Marcus Magee — the aforementioned singer. In the photo up top, I believe he’s the guy in the back leaning against the hotel front desk counter, standing between John Spillane and Lisa O’Neill:

I was the young man that sang Lakes of Ponchartrain and also sang one of my original songs which was about a good friend of mine Mairead McDermott (Mac Dee) who unfortunately passed away from breast cancer and came to me in a distinct dream warning me, before I too was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Crazy thing was that Lisa and amazing violinist Colm Mac Con Iomaire played at Mac Dee's funeral so it was a bit surreal for me when I played that song that night after Lisa's show, Colm played violin along with me. I have been a massive fan of his ever since I saw the Frames play 20 years ago and many occasions after that but had never met him in person before.

He told me that night that if I ever go to record this track, that he would put strings on it. I thought it was just pub talk (as we say in Ireland when the Guinness is in) but when I approached him 6 months later saying I was going to record it, he invited me to his house for a cup of tea to discuss. He recorded on the track along with my band of close friends "The Hollaw Men", a band I set up after I received my first clear scan.

[…]

One of my regrets in life was not to have done anything with my original music so this was my goal after I started to feel better. I wrote a lot during my treatment. We set out to do a one night show of my original music in the local theatre but it blew up and we then went on to sell out more theatre shows, record an album and launch it on the 23rd of April in the Sugar Club Dublin. Our next gig is in a venue I could have only dreamed of playing, the amazing Whelans main venue on July 18th, a venue that has hosted artists from Jeff Buckley to Hozier to Ed Sheeran.

It is crazy that all of this would not have happened if I was not diagnosed with Cancer. We get busy with life and forget to prioritise what is really important.

Marcus’ letter moved me, and so did his music. We exchanged emails, and I’ve thought about his story often. Prioritizing “what is really important” seems a crucial thought to keep in mind as we move into this new year. So with his permission, I’m sharing his words with you. Below is a link to his song “Mac Dee” and to his album. The band’s name is Marcus Magee & The Hollaw Men. Click here for their website.

When I was doing research on Dylan’s connection to Irish music earlier this year (for