Yet ‘nother CD featuring the vocal talents of Shane MacGowan, a man whose appearance would scare even the most hardened member of the Unseelie Court, showed up here for review this past week. (The photo on the Across The Broad Atlantic cover mercifully has his gob shut, so you can’t see his, errr, teeth.) Now you must understand that it’s his style and not the quality of his voice that makes him listenable which is why I can state that he never really sounds great. I’ve heard his work all the way from the Nipple Erectors – who had but one release under this name, ‘King Of The Bop/Nervous Wreck’, a seven-inch 45 rpm single, before becoming The Nips in hopes of being more commercially acceptable!) – to his post-Pogues work with The Popes, so I can definitely say that he can’t sing worth a fuck. Sober (a rare occurrence ever) or drunk, stoned or not stoned, Shane has style, a canny sense of the right lyrics, and one of the worst voices that I’ve ever heard. Even Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy doesn’t have as bad a voice as Shane. Yes, Lynott’s voice is quite horrid, but not nearly as bad as MacGowan’s.
What makes Shane listenable, other than waiting to see if his Dylan Thomas-type lifestyle will derail in a most fatal manner, is that he has created a form of post-punk neo-traditional Irish music that very few other bands have managed. It takes the often maudlin, historically reverential music of Tommy Makem and his ilk and says to them, ‘fuck off, you tired old bastards, it’s our bleedin’ turn now’. I’ve heard better bands than the Pogues, and I’ve certainly heard better Irish vocalists than MacGowan — Charles O’Connor of Horslips comes to mind as does Liam O’Maonlai of Hothouse Flowers — but MacGowan was, and is still, unique. (I sometimes have trouble thinking of him as still living, since he shouldn’t be. John Jones of the Oysterband could have been thinking of him when he said in ‘The Shouting End of Life: ‘Gunpowder, whisky, falling off the wire, anything could put me in that ever-after choir / Hacks that want to see me shuffle off the shelf / I hand them each a bottle, I say: Go fuck yourself.’) And I suppose one singer like MacGowan is ‘nough for us!
This album happened because of the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the British Isles. Across The Broad Atlantic is a very queer affair, a live album cobbled together from two St. Patrick’s Day shows in 2003, one in New York, one in Dublin. The situation was created by a delay in Dublin’s celebration due to a foot and mouth outbreak which moved the Dublin celebration back. Now, other than Streams of Whiskey, which I reviewed here, I have not heard any live recordings of The Pogues with him singing. The general belief amongst music hacks is that his best work, such as If I Should Fall from Grace with God, benefited greatly from post-production work done from the studio tapes. Sorry, but his voice — and the playing of his mates in either band — is roughly the same in the studio and recorded on location. In that I can compare them to Boiled in Lead which is equally listenable live and in studio form, or Hothouse Flowers whose Spirit bootleg that I, errrr, acquired is as good as their studio material. The official, if barely alive, Pogues website disses Streams of Whiskey as being a bootleg. It might be, it might not be. I certainly couldn’t prove it was a bootleg, unlike the Spirit CD that I know is a boot. Across The Broad Atlanticapparently is not a bootleg, but its sound is no better than Streams of Whiskey, which according to Jem Finer of the the aforementioned Pogues official website doesn’t like. Big Fucking Deal. When they release the official live album alluded to as the album the Pogues want us to buy in place of Streams of Whiskey, I will certainly be purchasing it. Not that I’m holding me breath!
I mention Boiled In Lead because I reviewed their 17 March 2001 St. Patrick’s Day show, which was one of the better such concert recordings I’ve had the pleasure to hear. It’s an extremely limited-release 2-CD set of no more than 60 copies, recorded at Boiled In Lead’s annual St. Patrick’s Day concert at First Avenue in Minneapolis. Across The Broad Atlantic is simply a commercial release that you can find bloody well everywhere, from the research I did online. Like the Boiled In Lead concert, it helps a great deal if you you’ve attended at least one St. Patrick’s Day in a less than sober state, as much of the charm of both concerts is placing yourself among the audience members. Both recordings are full of loud, energetic music, and sometimes even louder noises from the fans. Technically speaking, the Boiled in Lead concert has better production, as Streams of Whiskey suffers from the same ‘noise’ problem Streams of Whiskey had. I really can’t say if it was the soundboard masters that were poorly done or the post-production engineering, but both are less than ideal in terms of their sound — sort of like MacGowan ’emself! Their material on this CD overlaps quite a bit with the Streams of Whiskey recording, as ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God,’ ‘The Sickbed Of Cuchulainn,’ ‘Streams of Whiskey,’ ‘The Body Of An American’ and ‘Dirty Old Town’ are on both recordings, so it’s interesting to see how well each version is done. In general, MacGowan’s voice is stronger, less prone to crack, on Streams of Whiskey than on Across The Broad Atlantic, which is why it’s a real pity that ‘Fairytale Of New York’ is only on the latter album. And the female vocalist here, one Theresa MacGowan (no idea if she’s related), is a pale shadow compared to the late and much missed British singer Kirsty MacColl, ex-wife of Steve Lilywhite, who produced If I Should Fall from Grace with God that she and MacGowan did this song on.
There’s a generous 20 cuts here, all worth hearing. Go buy this fuckin’ album, get yourself several pints of Guinness, and sing along off-key as you listen to one of the best St. Patrick’s Day concerts you’ll ever hear. (I must now listen to something less raucous, say Metallica’s ‘Whiskey in a Jar,’ where the vocalist can really sing well.)
(Red Ink, 2002)
