It’s both brilliant and validating that UK band The Pogues are beloved by so many international fans, says Spider Stacy, who now replaces Shane McGowan – a hard-drinking poet, who died in 2023 – as the band’s frontman.
Every time he’s anywhere near an Australian or a New Zealander though, Stacy finds his sentences start sounding like questions.
“It’s like an earworm and I can’t shake it,” he tells RNZ’s Saturday Morning. “I hope it doesn’t come across like I’m sort of making fun, because I’m not.”
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The Pogues, led by Shane McGowan, who was born in London to Irish parents, were something of an anomaly when they formed in 1982, Stacy says.
“People would look at us as we were arriving on stage in some pub or whatever in London, and be like, ‘Who are these Herberts?’
“It was, like, ‘Well yeah, these guys may well indeed have accordions and banjos and tin whistles and whatnot, but they’re a punk band, you know’.”
There’s no doubting that – we’re a punk band – in some respects, maybe the last proper London punk band.
Shane MacGowan of British group The Pogues, died on 30 November, 2023, after a long illness.
LEON NEAL / AFP
Stacy has no problem with The Pogues being described as an Irish band, but says, despite their Irish-influenced songs, half the original members were English, so they were more correctly “a London band”.
What all The Pogues did share, he says, was a sense of political justice, expressed with a “velocity” and “attitude” that audiences all around the world responded to.
Spider Stacy
Marnie Ann Joyce
That said, Stacy remains a big part of London’s Irish music scene today and is excited that it’s having “such a creative time”.
In May 2024, just a few months after McGowan died after a long illness, the surviving members of The Pogues got together with a bunch of young guest musicians, including Fontaine’s D.C. drummer Tom Cole, Goat Girl bass player Holly Mullineaux, harpist Iona Zajac and Dara Lynch from the Irish folk group Lankum, for a show at London’s Hackney Empire.
“I just started thinking, ‘Right, OK, there’s been this eruption over the last 10 years in Ireland of really thrilling new talent, people doing very innovative and interesting things with traditional Irish music.”
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Having already done a Pogues reunion “that went on for 14 years”, this show was different for the band, Stacy says. Although it was partly in remembrance of McGowan, the vibe was more celebratory than sad – a tone that The Pogues have always strived for.
“It was more like something from the mid-’80s, so yeah, actually, I felt Shane there.
“There’s all this stuff to say, ‘Look what this man did’, and also, actually, ‘Look what we did together. Isn’t this great, you know’.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand