Interview With The Pogues 1986

​Interview with James Fernley And Spider Stacy For - NERVE, AUGUST 1986
The latest saviours of rock and roll limped into Toronto, their bus having broken down at some indeterminate point outside the city. What are you going to do after they finish the tour? the driver, a crusty Southerner, was asked. "Fumigate the bus," he answered.

Lucky even to get an interview, I encountered not the lead Pogue, Shane MacGowan of the dental disaster fame, but James Fearnley, accordionist, and Spider Stacey, tin flute virtuoso. Fearnley, a rail of a man with the casual demeanor of a private school history tutor, seems to have cornered the market on dignity among the Pogues. He also manages to play a squeeze box with the same savoir cool that Keith Richards brings to the guitar. Stacey is a different kind of bird. Wearing a tie with a shirt shorn of its buttons, he comes off as a bit bar-worn. Wielding cockney sarcasm with the ease of a habitual joker, he would often find occasion to hiss out a glottal, mischievous chuckle, sounding not too unlike Ernie on Sesame Street.
Well into the interview, when I felt them to be a bit at ease, I had to bring up the issue that trails the Pogues from interview to review to interview: booze.

"I've got a bit fed up with it, as a matter of fact," James says, obviously hoping to end the matter there.
"We drink," Spider adds, "but so do most other people. We don't drink a particularly large amount."
"I suppose when we started off we did drink quite a lot," James says, resigned to addressing the subject once more. "When you're new to anything you sort of..."

"Actually that's wrong. Some of us have been in groups that made quite a habit of getting drunk before going on stage." "Well, yeah, I was including them."
"I've seen you drink on stage with the Nips before so don't give me that bollocks"
"I was never drunk on stage with the Nips."
"OH JAMES! WASH your mouth out with SOAP!" Spider squeals in the voice of an enraged Southern school marm. "THAT'S A BLACK LIE!" Spider leans back laughing, then continues with an ironic drawl. "Okay, James was never drunk on stage with the Nips...I was always drunk on stage."

We continue on the drinking debate until Spider pinpoints where the inevitable "Pogues-as-drunken-music" conclusion chafes him:
"It's a kind of racism, really. The whole 'drunken Paddy thing. It's a bit insulting."
The Pogues do make good drinking music, but so do Buckwheat Zydeco, Elmore James, Black Flag, and Johann Sebastian Bach. The Irish are reputedly a drinking people, but so are the Germans. The Pogues recurring battle with the boozy metaphor should stand as a warning for the first polka-punk band that finds itself signed to a major label.

As for the appeal of the Pogues, it would be facile to say that their music struck an ancestral chord in me. Rather, the Pogues have found a new way to tackle this beast called rock and roll, an enigmatic creature with the ability to sprout new limbs where ever it is hit. If bands like the Pogues continue their assault, pretty soon we won't recognize the thing, and that is undeniably good.

In the absence of Shane, his presence is inevitable in any discussion of the band's creative machinery.
"I remember sitting around at some girl's flat with Shane," Spider recalls, "and he was fiddling around with the guitar, and he started singing "Paddy on the Railway' which is an old Irish number, one of the cover versions we do, but he started doing it really, really, fast. It was on this Dubliners album we used to listen to. This was a while before the Pogues started and it definitely must have sparked something in Shane's mind. The way he does things-there's the input, and the moment it goes in, everything starts to go into gear. The actual output might not appear till nearly a year later, or suddenly it'll be there. I think he likes to take his time with things."

Another comer stone of the Pogues' reputation is the manic energy with which they approach live shows. Certainly, on record, songs like "Waxie's Dargle,' 'Down in the Ground Where the Dead Men Go' and The Sick Bed of Cuchulain' give the game away, strongly suggesting a powerful live presence. "The fact we play all fast, I think that's simply because it hasn't occurred to us to do it any other way." Spider says.. "don't think we could have done it any other way." James adds. "I don't think it comes out of our personalities to play as furiously as we do."

"I think it does," Spider says abruptly. "I think we're all fu..." "...You think we're all fusious? I'm not!"
"Everybody's got a certain manic streak in them."
"Yeah, I'll give you that. That's true."
"With the exception of Terry (Woods), who's a different case entirely, everybody was really into punk. I think the vehemence
with which we deliver..."

"...is because at the beginning we couldn't play very well."
"We'd just try to disguise it."
"By just walking on and going BOOM! This is yours, we don't
want it anymore!"
James goes on to describe one of the band's best gigs, in Lon- don on St. Patrick's night.
"I was really tickled by one review of that night. I don't know who the journalist was, but he mentioned someone going into the toilets and he had one leg of his jeans missing, his left shoe missing, and no shirt on his back. We get all these clothes thrown on stage, we get shoes..."

"...We always get shoes for some reason. We've had one ora just one fucking bra. That was in France."
A side effect of playing even vaguely Irish music in a political climate as shaky as Britain is that a band like the Pogues are expected to answer for centuries-old problems in a three-minute tune. But this doesn't interest the band.
"We don't write songs that deal with specific political situations," Spider explains. "We do songs that are about broad issues. The general anti-war, anti-authority stance I think is implicit in what we do; it might not be stated but it's implied. It's not our business to make statements about (the Troubles in Northern Ireland). Everybody in the band has their own opinions, but that doesn't add up to the band having a particular platform."

Perhaps the best publicity the band ever received was in an interview with Tom Waits around the time his last album Rain Dogs was released. Asked who he listens to, he named a few terribly obscure people and then the Pogues, who he compared to rowdy Irish troubadors the Clancy Brothers. "They're like the Dead End Kids on a leaky boat...there's something really nice about them."
"That was great-we feel the same way about him. Not that he's like a drunken Clancy Brother-well I suppose he is like a drunken Clancy Brother. Maybe if he shaved that silly beard off. (laughter) It's a nice beard, Tom!"
"Maybe if he got rid of those alligator shoes."
The Pogues have gotten this far on what is perceived as a novelty, although from the band's account it seems to have been less intentional than that. As accidentally as they came upon Celtic folk-punk, it seems that they'll continue to absorb musical styles until, far from being a novelty, the Pogues could make an indelible stamp in rock history. Until then, they're more fun than being smuggled into a women's prison on a full moon, and while I'm at it, kiss me, dammit, I'm Irish.
The whole gang-MCA-Rick MaGinnis