MacGowan's writing shines throughout: on the reverie “Sally MacLennane” and “Navigator,” an ironically chiseled workers' anthem about workers who “shift a few tones from this earthly delight” and who “died in their hundreds without a sign to mark where .” But ultimately, two standards define the album. Ewan MacColl may have written “Dirty Old Town” and the Dubliners scored their first and biggest chart hit. But even if his delivery nods to Luke Kelly of the Dubliners, the song became MacGowan's from the moment he hit the first chorus, turning it from local to worldly blues. The album ends with Eric Bogle's “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” one of the greatest anti-war songs ever written. There may be more striking versions of the Scottish/Australian folk lament (see June Tabor's 1976 recording). But MacGowan's raucous, stoic, mournful portrayal of a legless Australian soldier (“No more waltzing Matilda for me”) in the shadow of modern Britain's faded empire, ghosted by dark Salvation Army brass, is alive and well – an Irish punk is a proper romantic, world-weary.
Taking its title, in a similar vein, from Winston Churchill's cryptic record of the Royal Navy and the classic cover image of an iconic French romantic painting of a shipwreck (with the band members' faces deftly graffitied on the battered bodies), Rum Sodomy & the Lash launched the Pogues internationally. They burned incredibly brightly for a while. There was the brilliant Poguetry in Motion EP, the dazzlingly ambitious If I should fall from God's gracewith “Fairytale of New York”. I saw the band twice in New York at that time, and the party, on stage and off, was awesome and terrifying. By comparison, Nirvana's moss pits were a nursery school alcove. But the albums got weaker and by 1991 things had fallen apart. MacGowan was kicked out of the band. His substance abuse issues were definitely a factor. And everyone was confused.
MacGowan remains a songwriter's songwriter. Including the late David Berman Rum Sodomy & the Lash on a list of 10 albums that would fill his ultimate fantasy jukebox. Cat Power covered “A Pair of Brown Eyes” as a prayer, Titus Andronicus as a punk anthem à la early Clash. In the 2005 reissue booklet Rum Sodomy & the Lashwhich added the extraordinary Poguetry in Motion EP and single B-sides, Tom Waits described the band's music in a poem:
Rapscallion, angry, crying
Past songs, songs
This seems to be born
Effortlessly, or
He was not born but found
Above an old wood stove
He concluded that these were “songs we should all carry”. Many of us do, in pubs, cars and backyards. One night this summer, drinking by the light of an illegal campfire on a Cape Cod beach, among friends and family with a few guitars, our usual inspirations led us into song. And as always, the most heartfelt song was in “A Pair of Brown Eyes” – a song of boundless pain, written for the ages beyond the ocean that rolled at our feet.
