The quality of MacGowans lyrics is something that never ceases to amaze me. Just about every tale of Shane involves copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. He was a party animal who lived and played very hard. But within that same person, was one of the most sensitive, caring souls, who had a great sense of justice and a hatred of injustice. As a songwriter, I often look at the work of such geniuses to try and learn how to improve my own style and content. What strikes me about the Pogues lyrics is the brutal honesty in them. If you take Fairytale of New York, it is not a fairytale at all. It is a very sad and melancholic tale of two people who are falling apart. The only real redemption is the soundtrack that lifts a broken spirit. . The Song starts with "It was Christmas, in the drunk tank". Not how most Xmas fairytales start. The song descends into a bitter argument and trading of insults between the two parties. Just when you think you've hit rock bottom, the chorus kicks in "And the boys of the NYPD Choir were singing Galway Bay, and the bells were ringing out on Christmas Day" and you are transported to somewhere else completely.
It intrigues me where that song started. My parents used to joke about "having the Xmas row". Often it was caused by my Dad going for a drink with his mates and getting back late for lunch. In the Irish tradition, alcohol is a big part of Christmas and having all manner of family around often meant that resentments that have festered for years surface as the drinks flow and the conversations develop. I have seen some terrible Xmas rows (not so much within my family, but with mates) and on a few occasions, we've had extra people for Christmas dinner, as rows exploded in the families of friends. I suspect that these drunken Xmas rows that Shane must've seen plenty of, would have planted rich seeds in his mind. There has been plenty of talk of AI putting creative people out of work. Could an AI ever create something like Fairytale of New York? The reason I love the song is that it oozes humanity. We know the characters are deeply flawed, but we also know that they are interesting.
This brings me back to drug and alcohol misuse. I have often mused on whether the likes of Shane MacGowan would ever have produced the work they did if they were absteemious types. Clearly it is unlikely that he'd have written a ssong like Streams of Whiskey, but what would he have written in it's place? Alcohol didn't make him a genius, but it did put him in a lot of situations where inspiration abounded. There are two elements to artistic genius, the first is finding inspiration and the second is transcribing it into something amazing. When lockdown was announced, the songwriter in me rejoiced. I'd finally have time to sit down and take my time to write the songs that I'd been too busy to get down. The Sun shone, I picked up the guitar and.... Absolutely nothing. I had no inspiration at all. I'd try and play new riffs and just realise that they were bad rehashes of old riffs. I took to learning to play TV theme tunes on the guitar to keep my hand in. I was starting to worry that I'd just been kidding myself that I'd ever been able to write songs. Then lockdown was eased, we started living again and the ideas flowed. I realised that much of my body of work is derived in pubs etc, where someone says something that triggers an idea. Once there is an idea that is interesting, it is easy. Over the years, I learned that the best songs are actually about quite mundane moments in life, that are transformed into magical images by the addition of music. One of my favourite songs is Dock of the Bay by Otis Redding. It is a song about doing absolutely nothing, but it transports me to a different world.
Sittin' in the mornin' sun
I'll be sittin' when the evenin' come
Watching the ships roll in
And then I watch 'em roll away again, yeah
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
I'm just sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
I left my home in Georgia
Headed for the 'Frisco bay
I've had nothing to live for
Look like nothin's gonna come my way
So I'm just gonna sit on the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
I'm sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
Look like nothing's gonna change
Everything still remains the same
I can't do what ten people tell me to do
So I guess I'll remain the same, yes
Sittin' here resting my bones
And this loneliness won't leave me alone
It's two thousand miles I roamed
Just to make this dock my home
Now, I'm just gonna sit at the dock of the bay
Watching the tide roll away
Sittin' on the dock of the bay
Wastin' time
Source: Musixmat
That is the true measure of genius. To me, it is a measure of humanity and genius to take the smallest thing and make them into a musical painting that is both compelling and beautiful. Just as MacGowans illustration of two deadbeats arguing in the cells in a New York drunk tank has become an integral part of many peoples Xmas, Redding made a hobo sitting in San Fransisco docks doing nothing into a beautiful celebration of life. Maybe I've missed out, but I can't think of too many songs about soberley sitting in the office, dreaming of upgrading your BMW, when you get your next bonus. I am sure far more people in the UK spend their time daydreaming about such mundane things, than visualising drunks in the slammer in New York, but few seem inspired to set their daydreams to music. When I used to work in an office, I found it really uninspiring artistically. You do the same thing most days and for me the highlight was the bacon roll run. I used to go most days. It got me out of the office and I'd chat to the staff in the cafe. I wrote a song about the decline of the culture of family run Italian cafe's in Soho a few years back. Places like Starbucks are far more sterile. You get your coffee, sit in the corner with your headphones on and stare at your mobile phone. Not like the old days, where you'd sit in Sidoli's cafe in Aldgate and swap jokes with cabbies and the owner of the gentlemens club over the road.
The nature of MacGowan and Reddings genius was to take those small things and distill them into brilliant songs. To me, what makes a song brilliant is that the writer captures something in the lyrics that means something to you and then adds music that places it and embeds it in your mind. At the end of Fairytale of New York, it plays out with rather majestical, upbeat coda. The lyrics have set the scene and the music delivers us there. One of the things I love about Christmas is that it is a time of music. There are the Christmas chart belters that we all love, that we associate with a snog under the mistletoe at the Xmas party, or that Granny and Grandad would dance around the table to. Then there are the Christmas carols, that for me, take me back to school and the carol service. When my kids were little, watching them sing Away in a manger always brought a tear to my eye. Away in a manger was written by Irish American composer William J. Kirkpatrick. Apparently he died after waking up in the night with a tune in his head. He went downstairs to score it, and when his wife woke up he was slumped over the desk, dead. We can only wonder what song he took to the grave. The hymn was written in 1895. Just think that up until that year, this key Xmas tune simply didn't exist. When I was born in 1962, almost none of the pop music we associate with Xmas was written. Next time you enjoy Fairytale, Slade's Merry Christmas, George Michaels Last Christmas, just think for a second how lucky we are that we live in a time when all this music has been written.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing for me is the idea that all of those mentioned above had something that triggered and inspired them into putting pen to paper and writing this music. Maybe if they'd had a different breakfast, walked down a different street, if it had been raining instead of sunshine that day, they may have been in a different mood and that song may never have existed. There are 8 billion of us on the planet, but if Shane MacGowan had randomly bumped in to a mate the day he wrote it, and spent the day doing other things, maybe the song would never have existed. Never let anyone tell you that humanity isn't a wonderful thing. When I was a kid, I asked a wise old Catholic Priest why God made the world. His response? So that we could fill it with music. I have no idea what goes through the mind of God, but I guess that when he listens to Fairytale of New York and Dock of the Bay, he must feel happy with his efforts (let's save the yes, but... for another day in another season).
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I mentioned above that after lockdown, I found my songwriting inspiration again. One of the good things about lockdown was it forced me to look at the songs I was writing and ask myself some difficult questions. Just before lockdown, I'd written a song called Longshot Didn't Die. As with most songs in the Allen Ashley period of the band, Allen made some amendments to it when he saw the lyrics. I realised that this was very much the direction I wanted to take the band in musically. As Allen had left the band and I was singing, I didn't have to consider whether he'd feel comfortable singing the lyricis I wrote. I had a couple of old songs that I thought fitted into the latest iteration of The Dots, but of the period 2012-2019, I felt that apart from Longshot, none of the songs sat well with where I wanted to take the band.
I very much wanted us to sit somewhere between Ian Dury and Madness and I wanted the songs to be about London and about growing up here. I wanted a Ska feel to the music, with Duryesque wit and observational humour. The first song I wrote specifically for this new era was "The Burnt Oak Boogie". Unlike just about every song I'd written before, it wasn't a story, a scenario that I'd constructed. It was a completely autobiographical look at the place I I'd spent a lot of my life knocking around and how it affected me growing up.
The first verse was about my mum's love of the place, the cheap mushrooms at the market etc, the best library in the world, the fresh eels. How she'd send us off to the funfair at Montrose park and warn us to be back by dark. The second verse was about the lady I consider to be surrogate Grandma, Annie O'Keefe who lived in Homefield Road. I'd always wanted to pay tribute to this wonderful little old Irish lady from Co Kerry, who was the kindest person I ever met. Her husband Joe was a caretaker, he bred budgies in their back garden and they had a dog called Beauty. The third verse is about growing up and moving on.
The first time we played it was at The Mill Hill Music Festival in 2022. I was overwhelmed by the reaction. People loved it. I came up with a concept for the video, lots of shots of Burnt Oak past and present, with some footage of the band being silly in there. I shot the stock footage and was planning to film the band shots, when we got a phonecall from the Dublin Castle offering us a gig at short notice. To try and rustle up a few extra punters, I decided to put the video out, without the band footage. The video immediately went viral and had thousands of views. Quite a few punters saw it and came to the gig. Many told me how the song was brilliant and caught the Burnt Oak vibe perfectly. It was a bit of a Eureka moment. I realised that I'd been trying too hard to write the perfect song and trying to be too clever. The great songs mentioned above just flow. If a song doesn't flow, it doesn't work. For me, the Burnt Oak Boogie was a song that worked. We didn't overcomplicate it. Here it is
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