The Pogues are a good example of doing one thing, but doing it well. They take Irish folk and give it a modern, often punky, twist. Most of the tracks on here are original compositions by Shane McGowan, but there are some traditional tunes on here, as well as covers by folk luminaries such as Ewan MacColl and Eric Bogle.
MacColl’s track is Dirty Old Town, which he wrote about Manchester, but in the hands of the Pogues it works just as well for Dublin. I’d say that this is the definitive version, McGowan’s drawl investing the track with the perfect mix of love and bitterness. Bogle is the master of anti-war ballads, and here the Pogues cover And The Band Called Waltzing Matilda, a bitter track about a young Anzac soldier returning from Gallipolli without his legs and how injured veterans were treated as pariahs. It's a powerful way to finish the album.
There are some rousing jigs, like Sally MacLennane or the instrumental Wild Cats Of Kilkenny with a thundering bodhran beat that makes you think you’re Eamon De Valera leading a gang of roisterers down O’Connell Street to give the British a good beating. And sometimes the tempo is toned down – I'm A Man You Don’t Meet Every Day is a ballad sung by Caitlin “Rocky” O’Riordan. The whole album is replete with traditional Irish instrumentation including Spider Stacey on the feadog (tin whistle), and Tommy Kean on the uillean pipes, and it simply drips Irishness, but in an authentic way, not the sanitised "Irish Pub in Boston" version that is to Ireland as “discover your tartan” is to Scotland. Although, that said, it has a lot of kinship with the music of Westerns, which I guess probably stems from the influx of Irish immigrants during the pre-Civil War era trying to escape the Potato Famine - “The canals and the bridges, the embankments and cuts, they blasted and dug with their sweat and their guts. They never drank water, but whiskey by pints, and the shanty towns rang with their songs and their fights” as McGowan sings in The Navigator.
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