Punk, Poet, Prophet: In Praise of the Late, Great Shane MacGowan : Ed Simon on One of Music’s Great Lyricists (Ed Simon, March 17, 2025, Lit Hub)
“There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands,” MacGowan sings in “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” the album’s first track. Poetry between heaven and hell, with all the sublimity of Yeats and the profanity of Behan, where they “took you up to midnight Mass and left you in the lurch / So, you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.” Wild music, but haunted. Shades of the dunes when on “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a MacGowan describes “blood and death neath a screaming sky… And the arms and legs of other men / Were scattered all around, / Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed / Then prayed and bled some more.”
Back when I used to drink, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash was a favored album to shell out quarters for in the neon cacophony of the barroom jukebox; “Farewell to New York City boys, to Boston and PA!” belted out at Silky’s, Kelly’s, the Cage. “I’m a free born man of the USA!” goes the chorus in “Body of an American,” from the EP of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, a declaration of independence, but half-hearted, knowing that the inverse of freedom can always be another form of servitude.
I quit drinking, but I still listen to the Pogues.