|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dublin born Philip Chevron (originally, Ryan) has worked in almost every area of show business. He has written, directed and produced for over 25 years and most notably spent several of those years as the guitarist in the legendary Irish band The Pogues. Following in his father's footsteps, Chevron served his apprenticeship in showbiz under the German cabaret singer and star of stage and screen, the late, Agnes Bernelle. Recently, Chevron has been investing his energies in theatre.
"I'm dong whatever comes up basically, at the moment that seems to be mainly theatre. I have just done the Quare Fellow with Cathy Burke, which has been the best fun I have had in years. I recently did a play called 'Songs In Her Suitcase' which is about the woman who was my mentor when I was very young, Agnes Bernelle. She is the one who got me started in this business. I worked for her as an apprentice doing everything really, from painting the scenery to being her musical director, all the jobs in the theatre. She died about four years ago and lived an extraordinary life. This play tells the story of her life through puppets; she sees the puppet show in action, which is supposedly telling her life story, so she decides to inhabit the puppets so she can tell the story more accurately. Working on this play has been great. It is something I have a direct knowledge off. That has just reminded me, there was a really nice evening we had, The Pogues and Agnes had a big meal together in London. She played the Bloomsbury Theatre. It was a big showcase gig for her album 'Father Is Lying Dead On The Ironing Board'. I remember the thing because we had been recording 'A Pistol For Paddy Garcia', which I was producing. It was a rush against the clock to get the thing finished, so we could go and see Agnes. So everybody trooped down to the Bloomsbury Theatre to see her. Shane spent the show in the bar, and said it was excellent. I never actually seen him sit down in a theatre, but we all went and had a meal with Agnes afterwards which was fantastic"
In The Beginning
Although he did not feature in The Pogues's debut album, 'Red Roses For Me', Philip Chevron was always closely linked with the band and eventually came in as deputy banjo player. Here he describes how he came to be a Pogue.
"It has always been a bit ambiguous about who was the original members of the Pogues. I don't think anybody was an original member! Andrew (Rankin), for example, was supposedly the drummer from the outset, but in fact, Andrew only agreed to play drums temporarily because he was the singer in his own band. He always said that he would fill in on drums until they had found a drummer, then he looked around and he was in the band for ten years. It was a bit like that for me, because I only came in as a substitute for Jem (Finer). He had taken time off as his wife, Marcia, was having their first baby. So I came in as a sort of deputy banjo player which coincided with Shane wanting to concentrate on singing rather than playing the guitar. Shane did originally appoint Spider (Stacey) as the singer with The Pogues. Then it came to the point where they would share the vocals, but the more he became associated with the song writing and the image and the visual of the band inevitably he became the focal point. However, if you have a personality as strong as Shane's it is kind of hard to get away with that. It was always a battle with the record company and especially Steve Lillywhite. From my point of view, I was only meant to stay there a couple of months but one thing led to another and the gates had been shut and the key thrown away.
Frank Murray had brought Terry (Woods) in. Frank had been managing the band for a yea at that point and had seen that there was even more potential with the band than there already was. The band, at that stage, had very much a cult following in London. It was part of that scene when there were Physcobilly bands and Rockabilly bands and a few neo-punk bands.
It was very much like the punk thing at the beginning; it was a reaction against the new romantics basically. Most of those bands remain unheard, but they all made good records. Some of them went on to greater prominence like the 'Prisoners' and 'The Men They Couldn't Hang' and us. I don't think the press had seriously taken notice of any of that scene. They were still up their own arses talking about the New Romantics.
Some London television station did a documentary, which Ben Elton presented. It was about this underground scene in London. I think that is where the 'Waxies Dargle' film is from. It concluded, 'although The Pogues might have a nice little career in the pub, they would be heard no more, you would actually hear more from 'The Boothill Foot Tappers". This was hilarious, I have nothing against the 'Boothill Foot Tappers', but what they were doing was what the media mandarins was trying to find. Something that was a commercial possibility, and the last place they saw that was with The Pogues. They entirely missed the point. What we were doing was playing music that people identified with because it was against the commercial grain, whereas, 'The Boothill Foot Tappers' had a so-called different professional attitude to it. Right from the start Shane and Jem were in no doubt that this could go all the way.
One person who did take it seriously was Elvis Costello. Elvis had been working with me on 'The Captains And The Kings', the Brenden Behan song, and had been out of the loop for a few years at that stage. He made his country album in Nashville and he done 'Imperial Bedroom', which was a very dense and complex album. Somewhere along the line he felt that he lost connection with the punk scene, which had energized him in the first place. He encountered me, and I was very central to this whole underground thing because I was working in 'Rock On' at the time (this was a shop where people went to buy the records of these bands). He said to me 'show me where the action is, take me to see some of these bands'. One of the bands that I took him to see was indeed The Pogues.
Now, I wasn't in the band at the time, I was just their mate then. There was talk of me producing them and at that time I had already produced 'The Men They Coudln't Hang'.
For Elvis, he got it right away. There were many bands I could of taken him to see, but I felt intuitively that he needed to see something that was not 'new-waveish'. As it turned out, he fell instantly in love with the bassist, Cait O'Riordain.
Elvis's opinion had some clout in the industry, and he put his money where his mouth was and put The Pogues on a support tour around England and Ireland. It turned out that some of the gigs were great and some of the gigs were not so great, but Elvis had taken the risk of putting the band out there. That was the first time The Pogues played in Dublin, and they were extremely nervous about the prospect. Being Irish, I understood that, although there would be resistance initially, in time, Ireland would love The Pogues. The members of the band that were not born and brought up in Ireland had a different journey to that realisation.
One incident, where it all came to a head, was when we put out the second album. We had a press conference in Dublin, which BP Fallon recorded for his radio programme. It was basically a huge setup where BP Fallon understood that there was potential fun to be had by putting The Pogues and a bunch of Pogues haters together in the same room. There was a certain group of people who were opposed to whatever we were trying to do because we were plastic paddies. 'We had no love for Irish music' because we hadn't learned the Uillean pipes for fifty years in the Gaeltaicht. It was deliberately calculated by BP Fallon to put the cat among the pigeons. We had people like Noel Hill who just challenged the whole thing from the fore of the press conference. ' What you are doing is bastardising Irish music'.
I fought this argument before and Terry (Woods) had all this shite with Sweeny's Men. I came up through the Horseslips wars. The Horeseslips also got all this shite and flack from people. To me, it was strange that anyone should think that we were doing anything else but advancing Irish music, adding something to the tradition by giving it a kick under itself. All good traditions need to be shaken up a bit now and again. Someone needs to come along, be it in the cinema, literature or music, and say 'this is going in the wrong direction, but I know where it can go'. Shane was very much the person most of all that understood that.
The one secret weapon that we had that these people didn't catch on to was that Shane was actually a great songwriter. If it was any other band coming along doing 'diddle di' shite then they might have had a point. They were not listening to the songs in their entirety. In their ignorance and blind stupidity they were bypassing songs like 'The Old Main Drag' and a 'Pair Of Brown Eyes' and kept saying 'no, no, no listen to this instrumental instead'. In actual fact, most people who decided this at that early stage have gone on record to say they were wrong. Noel Hill had the decency and courage to say 'I was a fool and this is a great band'. It doesn't mean that there are not still people who think we are the spawn of the devil, but then off course we are!"
The Pogues launched their unique mix of 'Irish Punk' to the world via their raucous debut album entitled 'Red Roses For Me'. The punk vibe was constant throughout (except for the final track, an Irish balled called 'Kitty'). 'Red Roses' came from a period in the bands history when the band's drummer Andrew 'the clobberer' Rankin really was a 'clobberer' and tin whistle player, Spider Stacy, chipped in with the beer tray, a novel alternative to the cymbal, played by whacking a beer tray over the head.
"The first record is a punk album. I think that Shane believes, and I would agree with him, that it could have been produced better. It was done on a budget and it was done in a hurry. The idea was to just get the band down on record. There was a huge exciting galvanising effect when the first album came out. It was a very exciting album. There was fair warning that Shane was a good songwriter but he hadn't put it all out there. I knew it from his work with the Nips. I think people took the view that it was a great album but it would be interesting the see what they followed it up with. What Elvis wanted to achieve on the second album was to capture the essence of The Pogues. He was afraid that someone might come in and produce us, or something. He felt that his job was to capture the essence, but that is kind of what happened with the first album. I think that is what Shane's argument against Costello always was. Although Costello was probably right to get the essence of it down somewhere, everyone always underestimated the extent of the bands ambitions. They always took a slightly patronising attitude. I suppose they saw us as naïve artists. In the sense that people who create great results without having the training or anything. Anyone who worked with the band at that time got to know very quickly that this was a band with limitless music ambition, which came to fruition much later with Fairytale Of New York."
So when did The Pogues actually feel they made it?
"When you are in a band like The Pogues, you don't actually register having 'made it'. Partly because you are just on a rollercoaster and the objective is to get to the next gig or to the next recording session. 'Making It' suggests that you had a goal in mind that you had to attain. I am not saying that we didn't have goals in mind, it is just that they weren't necessarily expressed in the way of sitting down and planning. We all understood that the way the thing was organic, and whatever developments it took it took because it needed to take them, not because we had predetermined those developments. So there was never a sense of making it. You would probably become frustrated because people wouldn't let you achieve the goal if they could help it. The first time we went to America, the entire industry just starting talking megabucks - I thought this to be hilarious - they weren't seeing us as a creative project, they just saw megabucks. They saw shamrocks growing out of every orifice. They thought 'here we are at last with a great Irish band in America'. They just started rubbing their hands with glee. They were seeing something different than what we were seeing, maybe they thought that we were going to do 'If You Are Irish Come In To The Parlour' or 'Galway Bay'."
'Thousands Are Sailing'
As chart success arrived in 1987 with 'Fairytale Of New York', The Pogues released, perhaps, their best album, 'If I Should Fall From Grace With God'. This album showed evidence of a band that had matured and developed. A wider range of song writing, an expanded sound and a crisper production by U2 producer Steve Lylliwhyte all fed into making this a truly excellent record. Chevron's chief contribution to the album was the marvellous ballad 'Thousands Are Sailing'. A song which embraces the broader aspects of the Irish-American association, while specifically describing the treacherous and, indeed often, futile journey on the coffin ships as thousands of people tried to escape the great famine.
"Personally, I like Shane singing this song. I don't mind who sings it as long as someone gets it across. Most people grow up with a view of America gleamed from TV. From 'Starsky And Hutch' or from old Western movies or black and white Hollywood musicals on the Sunday afternoon. My view was very much that Sunday afternoon one. America is on of those places that you don't really connect with until you have been there. I think that is till true, although the media have brought America a lot closer to us. Certainly in the Eighties I never felt connected to it in anyway. I was fascinated with it and the Irish-American angle, particularly with respect to George M Cohen. He was a really interesting songwriter. Being the son of an Irish emigrant he encapsulated the spirit at the turn of the century in New York, a view that could only come from an immigrant. In American theatre at the time the musicals were kind of operates about The Prince Of Ruaratina meeting the gypsy girl who is actually the Princess of Romania and all is well at the final curtain. Cohen said 'fuck that' to all that shite 'let's put some real Americans on the stage'. He was actually the first person to say 'here is Joe Soap' and he was singing a song on how great it was to be an American. There was that great sense among the Irish and immigrant Jews of how much they appreciated the opportunities of America. I was very excited about all of that and of all the great work that had been done by Irish emigrants, and off course you connect with the heroes like JFK as well. I grew up in a time where I actually saw JFK. I saw him in the street when he came to Dublin. I was just a little boy and all I could think was that he had red hair like me. Somehow the assassination of Kennedy brought home to us the bigger picture of Irish America and the sadness and great struggle that went into making America the great country that it was and still is.
The first time we landed in New York, off course we were all a bit jarred on the plane; but it was all very exciting from the word go. We were picked up in a limousine and driven through New York in these fucking limos. What you see is this great site when you come over The Queensborough Bridge. That is when you see that skyline for the first time, my heart just burst. I thought 'this was unbelievable, this was America'. It felt like what it must have felt like for those people coming in on the ships years ago. Although the skyline wasn't necessarily there at the time, there was something drawing you. The first thing we did when we got to the hotel, jarred as we were, myself and James Fearnley went out of the hotel and I said 'I want to see Broadway, come on, we are going to go to Broadway'. When we got to the street and I realised that it was Broadway, I stopped James and I said 'hold my hand - we are going to walk down Broadway together'. Hence the line in the song 'we walked hand in hand down Broadway like the first men on the moon'.
So, the song was partly based on personal experience of what it felt for me to be in New York. I started writing the song that night. Admittedly, it took a little bit longer to record it. Over a period of time I had been back to America a few times and got more impressions.
What I wanted to do was to see the experience of going to America in 1986 against the historical background of going to America in 1847 and all the points in between. Off course, at the time the time the song came out emigration from Ireland was at the highest level it ever was since the famine. The main point of the song is that sense of how you belong someplace. You go somewhere else and you don't necessarily belong there and you can feel just as angrily there as you did in the place where you left. In other words you never find your home.
I consider myself a patriotic American, by which I mean I believe in all the things that America stands for. The opportunity, freedom and liberty, all the things if says in the constitution. That is for me a document of biblical value. Therefore I feel that I have a stake in it when I see it being corrupted by aggressive actions from part of America, such as we have seen in the last couple of years.
America is the country for those with the energy to get out of here, those with the energy to go and create something new, the energy to get the fuck of the farm that was going to be inherited by the eldest son. It was always the mavericks in the family that went to America. For instance, Patrick Kavanagh was very much a poet of the land. Tarry Flynn is a about the contradiction of having to go to Dublin to be a poet of the land. In the country they just laughed at him. Tarry Flynn has scenes where they mock him 'Oh isn't that a lovely little rabbit there now…look at it going down the burrow'….'look at that nice mushroom growing there!'. So he was just mocked for being a poet of the land. Whereas, in Dublin he had the distance to be able to see that and was taken seriously'.
Being a Pogue
Even to this day the reputation and legend of The Pogues is still talked about. The band with the rotten-toothed singer, the band that swore in their songs, the band that were always drunk, the band that took drugs, the band that were banned! Now a teetotaller, Philip Chevron reflects on his days with The Pogues and talks about the aspects of being a Pogue.
"I always say my years in The Pogues were the best ten years of my life and the worst ten years of it, it's not a glum statement. There were times of it when the party element of it was just extremely funny, extremely enjoyable as great as you can possibly imagine it.
But, every time you use electricity you have to pay the bill and that was the downside to all that. Everyone has to pay a bill. The downside for me was that it was a very hard bill for me to pay personally because it caused problems. I had a lot of emotional stuff that I was going through at the time that fed into all that drinking. If you have personal shit, personal demons, then there is no better place to hide them than in The Pogues. It was a license to drink breweries dry. Having said that, there is a degree of artifice in our drinking reputation. I could sit in the Clarence Hotel fifteen years ago and there would be Pogues fans around all having a drink before the gig and they would assume that I would be absolutely maggoty arsed, but I wouldn't because I had a gig to do that night, I was working. People would be buying drinks for you and there would be ten drinks in front of you but that doesn't mean that I would drink the ten drinks, but they would say 'you should have seen Chevron last night in the Clarence he had ten drinks in front of him'. The truth of the matter was that I had a sound check to do at four o' clock, nobody notices that the ten drinks stay untouched. People did attribute drunkenness to us that we didn't actually have a lot of the time. That is not to say that there were not times that we did. We certainly knew how to enjoy ourselves but at the end of the day you have to do your job. To this day I watch Shane get to the point where he is on stage. His process is just a million miles from mine. If I did what he did I would not make it to the stage".
The Irish Rovers
Possibly one of the most natural collaborations to happen was that of The Pogues and The Dubliners. The two bands possessed a similar raucous style; their songs deliberated on similar themes and indeed a fondness for drink was shared. This next section details the famous story of when the mayor of Derry invited the two groups for a drink in the Guildhall.
"It was the first time that there was a catholic mayor in Derry. So, suddenly the Guild Hall was open to Catholics. We were up there to do the Tom O'Conner show with the Dubliners. We were plugging the 'Irish Rover'. Afterwards, we were given an invitation by the mayor to come to this civic reception, for us in honour of the Dubliners and ourselves. John Hume would be there and so on. They made a huge miscalculation by inviting us back to the fucking mayors parlour and said 'will you have a drink?'. At that stage we were all knackered, we were in the middle of a promotional tour. The record company had us going from one TV studio to another, we felt like fucking Westlife. We were all starting to buckle under the pressure, so when someone said 'come in and have a drink in the mayor's parlour' we said 'okay, lets relax a little'. The mayor didn't know what hit him, he thought he was hosting a polite civic reception where a speech would be made thanking The Pogues and The Dubliners for their contribution to Irish music, John Hume would say nice things and everyone would leave. That didn't happen. We started singing 'The Auld Triangle' as it happens. You could see John Hume getting tighter and tighter thinking 'should I be here?'. One thing led to another and it all got calamitous. 'The Auld Triangle' was getting louder and louder and it was deemed vaguely inappropriate to be singing it in the Guild Hall, even under a Catholic Mayor.
At one point I saw the mayor dash out issuing instructions, saying 'close the fucking drinks cabinet'. I saw this and thought 'I'll just have more drink!'. I don't actually know how we got out of there but it was certainly true that Terry Woods, Ronnie Drew and Barney McKenna attempted to drive back to Dublin in that state. I don't know how far down the road they got but it wasn't too far. I think it was Barney that was driving, they were thirty miles down the road and the police stopped them. They were perfectly genial. They saw who they were and said 'I think it would be better if you didn't just drive the rest of the way to Dublin', the car was on the other side of the road at this point!. The police thought 'let's put them in the cells so they can sleep it off'. A few hours later the lads were starting to come around in this cell and Ronnie said 'what hotel is this?' and Barney replied 'hotel? we're in fucking jail, sing 'The Auld Triangle' now you cunt.' I always feel so sorry for John Hume because he is a great man and had no part in any of that. However, he is in the photograph. The evidence is there that John Hume was there when The Pogues disgraced themselves in the Guild Hall. Worse things have happened to him since, I mean later he was on stage with Bono, that's much worse."
Going Straight To Hell
When Alex Cox's original project, a film of the Pogues on tour, fell through, he reverted to what was his contingency plan. A spaghetti western, starring The Pogues, Elvis Costello, Joe Strummer and numerous other stars. Inevitably, a cinematic masterpiece it would not be, but as we will now find out, it provided the story behind the Pogues song 'Fiesta'.
'This film is a spoof but I suspect that we made it deadly earnest. It was shot in Almeria in the south of Spain. This is the place that they made a lot of the 'spaghetti westerns'. It was cheaper to shoot westerns in the south of Spain than in the desert in Nevada. A lot of European directors made westerns in the south of Spain, which became known as 'spaghetti westerns', spaghetti because mostly Italian directors made them. There were actually sets down there that were specifically built for these films.
Alex Cox, who had a long-standing love of this genre, had us booked to do a film in Nicaragua. Ourselves, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello. He was going to film us touring Nicaragua. The finances fell through for that in the last minutes. So, he had all these pop stars hanging around with nothing to do. He thought 'rather than just waste them, I'll rustle up a million dollars and make a spaghetti western'. The thing was wrote in a hurry and filmed in a hurry. I still have a great fondness for it. It is an absurd film and no-one knows what it is about. The in joke about it is that it is the world's most expensive home movie."
"Fiesta actually came out from our time in Spain. This song is about the time we were in Almeria filming 'Straight To Hell'. We had peculiar hours. We would get up at six in the morning and drive to the set, which was about twenty-five miles from the hotel. This meant that we had to get to bed relatively early, which was difficult enough for The Pogues. Joe Strummer got around the travelling by never leaving the set, he slept in a car. He only came into Almeria for the scenes that needed to be filmed there. The actual hotel in the film is the one we stayed in. Typically we would get back at eight o' clock have a bite to eat and a few drinks to unwind and then go to bed. We were filming at Fiesta time, and the Spanish take their Fiestas very seriously. The problem with the Fiesta is that they start at sun down and continue to sun up. That wouldn't be too bad except the noise of the fiesta is something else. All through the time we were in Almeria there was two tunes that kept playing, they came like Chinese water torture. It would stop for five minutes and then start again. The first tune was what we made the main tune in 'Fiesta' and the other one was the coming from the doll-selling stall. You know the line 'will you kindly kill a doll for me'!
The slogan coming over the PA was the guy on the stall shouting the Spanish for 'come and wine a Chochana'. So, these two songs were alternating in our heads like some horrendous and hellish nightmare. We were still in character when your trying to sleep with these noises and all the red wine that we drinking too didn't help. We started coming back from the set thinking we were real cowboys and Indians, it was like great method acting. Reality and fiction got very blurred. 'Fiesta' doesn't really mean anything, expect this colossal bad dream where everybody gets transformed and everybody's personalities are exaggerated. Shane caught this by making cartoon characters out of everyone. The Sumtuosa was Cait O' Riordain, who is a well-endowed lady. Jamie Fearnley was a play on the fact James was the only one who spoke any Spanish. We just burlesqued the whole experience into one song. Shane and Jem pretty much wrote it. It turned out later that we also had to pay the people who wrote that main tune. It turned out to be a Liechtenstein polka. We had no way of finding out so we decided 'lets just do it' and if anyway says 'you knicked that' we would pay them."
The Beginning Of The End
One of the biggest talking points surrounding The Pogues has always been 'was he pushed or did he jump?'. The question, of course, refers to the departure of the founder member and lead singer, Shane MacGowan. Many theories have come from both camps over the years. MacGowan argues that the Irish music theme was being eliminated. The band believes it was the chaotic lifestyle that MacGowan pursued that led to their parting of ways. Whatever the real reason is, one thing is for certain, when Shane MacGowan left the Pogues, the band suffered a setback, one that was to spell the end. That end eventually coming in 1996.
"With any band you go on a strange curve that at some stage reflects the fact that you become popular. You then have to deal with that. Retrospectively, we were never going to be able to deal with the popularity well because popularity demand things of you, thins that you are not willing to give. It demands stupid things like meeting and greeting the people from the record company. You would be perfectly pleasant to these people but are thinking 'I need to rest here I don't need to be saying hello'. The demands on you increase, your obligations to your loved ones increase as the demand from the outside increase. So something has to give.
The problem was that we were a volatile band. There are just some bands that like that. The Stones were never a volatile band, well Keith and Bryan Jones were volatile, really though the Stones were just a business. The genuinely volatile bands were The Beatles, The Sex Pistols and us. Part of out greatness was also the thing that was going to destroy us. I think we knew that. There was enough sensible people in the band that thought maybe it doesn't have to be that way. However, they were always outvoted by the process itself. Things were always justified to us, things like 'if you go to Finland the money would cover the flights of the next tour' they would always find a justification. Meanwhile people were having domestic issues because they are meant to be home that week. We eventually had a situation where we worked two weeks on and then took two weeks off. That helped to some extent but not really. If you are working at that level of intensity then what happens is that you spend your free two weeks preparing for the following two.
What you got from The Pogues was a peak with 'Fall From Grace' and the perceived wisdom was that it was down hill from there. I think what happened really was that we were just totally honest with our fans and the public in general because other bands would of said we can't put out 'Peace And Love' it's not 'If I Should Fall From Grace With God'. So, our view was that 'why be dishonest if this is how we feel'. The band was going through a very volatile period at the time. People were having domestic issues and other things were happening to people and people's families. Daryl and I witnessed The Hillsborough Disaster, there was a hundred issues feeding in. A lot of things came into the blend that made things very difficult, and off course Shane started taking a lot of acid at that time, which is no great secret. That changed things because we constantly had to work around his state of mind. So for the next album (Peace And Love) we said lets 'publish and be dammed' - we were unhappy so lets tell people we were.
It was the same token with 'Hells Ditch', there is a more relaxed air about it. There is a more pastoral and country theme about it. Shane had been to Thailand trying to sort himself out. We recorded the album literally in the country in Wales. We stayed together miles away from anybody. So there is a pastoral theme, almost like that Sixties Hippy thing - getting your head together in the country. The whole album was like trying to find the light again. It is called Hell's Ditch because that is kind of where we were jammed into and we were looking to the 'Sunnyside Of The Street'.
One thing that Shane forgets when he talks of us trying to sideline Irish music is that he was the one trying to do that. He was the one saying that he wants to do this twenty minute acid house experimental track called 'Contact Yourself'. This was a bog bone of contention on the Peace And Love album. None of us were going to walk into Warner Brothers and say 'here is our new album, and by the way one whole side is a jazz acid house contraption called 'Contact Yourself'.
I think the point that Shane always tries get across is that we were all ambitious to get our ideas heard. But, there wasn't room for all those ideas. There was room for certain degrees of ideas where you could say 'okay we can have a jazz track like Gridlock or Metropolis'. Believe it or not, Blue Heaven was a really great idea that went horribly wrong in the studio. I agree with Shane went he says it was rubbish. It was a great idea that was conceived in Birmingham, Alabama. It was response to being in the southern states of America. Daryl and I had built into it all our fears and paranoia's about Hillsborough. Both of us had a really hard time after that. We were seeing things coming out of the fucking walls! The site of people dying in front of you never leaves. Your natural instinct is 'I want to save this person's life' and you can't because there is a row of policemen in front of you with Alsatians.
At the time there was a whole concept of world music. We felt that we played a fairly strong role in making that happen. We thought at one stage that we could do pretty much what we wanted, we got arrogant and Shane did too. So in that point we may have lost some of the Irishness."
"During the period that we did most of our work, from '85 to 89', Shane worked furiously hard. You would be walking past his room at three or four in the morning and you would hear this ineloquent guitar playing and you could hear him muttering the melody with sheets of paper everywhere. His process was that whatever it took and whatever frame of mind he was in the songs would come out in a certain way. Very often you would see him on the tour bus or on the van, you would see him there very concentrated and tapping his foot and hands, then you knew that he was working out the tune and maybe the secondary tune that would be the whistle or something. So, quite often he would have the song worked out to that extent. He would quite often come to rehearsal with the full song, but as often as not there was times when stuff didn't quite land right and required tweaking or adjusting. If something felt like it could be stronger someone would say 'how about just putting in that chord or this chord'. That's not to take away from the fact that Shane was responsible for the main body of the song in almost all cases."
When we look at the current condition of Shane MacGowan's career today, it is clear to see how he has indeed 'fallen from grace'. It would appear that MacGowan seems content with feeding his loyal audience virtually the same set has he has since he left The Pogues. The disappointing collapse of a prospective project with Terry Woods and Ronnie Drew earlier this year has appeared to shut the door on MacGowan releasing any fresh material. Here Chevron reflects on the past ten years of Shane MacGowan's life and has hope of some new offerings.
"I don't think Shane has changed that much. It is very hard for me to pass judgement on someone else's life. He always hated the pressure of being Shane MacGowan, the notoriety and the infamy. However much he wanted the band to be a democracy, he was always going to be the focal point. He thought he would leave the band and let Spider be the singer again. He tried very hard to make an accommodation with his fame. I think the process of the last ten years has been him making an accommodation with his fame to the point where it can't hurt him anymore. So, if he can perform being Shane MacGowan for people, and give them what they think they want, he will do that at no cost to himself. In the past it was at some great cost to his sanity, his sense of privacy and his creativeness. I think what he did the last few years was to figure out a way to switch on Shane MacGowan when he needed to. I think he is still writing but I don't know why he has a problem in presenting the results. Maybe he needs a sympathetic environment to bring it out, one that he is not at the moment. Maybe he just needs to bounce his ideas of someone and I don't think the present situation is conducive to that but I think it will be again"
© Martin Roddy, 2004