Shane maGowan and the Pogues

The future members of the Pogues first met when MacGowan (vocals), Peter "Spider" Stacy (tin whistle), and Jem Finer (banjo) were together in an occasional band called The Millwall Chainsaws in the late 1970s after MacGowan and Stacy met in the toilets at a Ramones gig at The Roundhouse in 1977.^[5] MacGowan was already with The Nips, though when they broke up in 1980 he concentrated a bit more on Stacy's Millwall Chainsaws, who changed their name to The New Republicans. During this period MacGowan and Finer auditioned unsuccessfully for a licence to busk at Covent Garden.^[6] In 1982 James Fearnley (accordion), who had been a guitarist with the Nips, joined MacGowan, Stacy, and Finer, forming the band, then known as Pogue Mahone. The new group played their first gig at The Pindar of Wakefield on 4 October 1982.^[7]
They then appeared at Gossips in Dean Street Soho on Thursday November 3 with Trash Trash Trash and The Stingrays.
They later added Cait O'Riordan (bass) and Andrew Ranken (drums). The band played London pubs and clubs,^[8] and released a single, "Dark Streets of London",^[9] on their own, self-named label, gaining a small reputation—especially for their live performances. They came to the attention of the media and Stiff Records when they opened for The Clash on their 1984 tour.^[1] Shortening their name to "The Pogues" (partly due to BBC censorship following complaints from Gaelic speakers in Scotland) they released their first album Red Roses for Me on Stiff Records that October.
The band gained more attention when the UK Channel 4's influential music show The Tube made a video of their version of "Waxie's Dargle" for the show. The performance, featuring Spider Stacy repeatedly smashing himself over the head with a beer tray, became a favourite with the viewers, but Stiff Records refused to release it as a single, feeling it was too late for it to help Red Roses for Me. Nevertheless, it remained a favourite request for the show for many years.
With the aid of punk and New Wave forefather Elvis Costello they recorded the follow-up, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, in 1985 during which time guitarist Philip Chevron joined. The album title is a famous comment falsely attributed to Winston Churchill who was supposedly describing the "true" traditions of the British Royal Navy.^[10] The album cover featured The Raft of the Medusa, with the faces of the characters in Théodore Géricault's painting replaced with those of the band members. The album shows the band moving away from covers to original material. Shane MacGowan came into his own as a songwriter with this disc, offering up poetic story-telling, such as "The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn" and "The Old Main Drag", as well as definitive interpretations of Ewan MacColl's "Dirty Old Town" and Eric Bogle's "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" (this had previously been covered by Shane's fellow punk contemporaries The Skids in 1981).
The band failed to take advantage of the momentum created by the strong artistic and commercial success of their second album. They first refused to record another album (offering up the four-track EP Poguetry in Motion instead); O'Riordan married Costello and left the band, to be replaced by bassist Darryl Hunt, formerly of Plummet Airlines and Pride of the Cross; and they added a multi-instrumentalist in Terry Woods, formerly of Steeleye Span. Looming over the band at this period (as throughout their entire career) was the increasingly erratic behaviour of their vocalist and principal songwriter, Shane MacGowan. Their record label, Stiff Records, went bankrupt soon after the 1987 release of the single "The Irish Rover" (with The Dubliners). Members of the band, including O'Riordian, acted in Alex Cox's Straight to Hell, and five songs by the band were included on the film's soundtrack album.

St.John of gods,Shane macGowan

St John Of Gods

By Shane MacGowan See the man
The crushed up man
With the crushed up Carrolls packet in his hand
Doesn't seem to see or care
Or even understand
And all he says is:

F yez all, F yez all, F yez all

Once he stood in a bar room brawl
With a broken bottle in his hand
Screaming:

F yez all, F yez all, F yez all, F yez all

The coppers came
Dragged him away from his crucified Lord
Beat him up in a meat wagon
And they stood him up in court
And all he had to say was:

F yez all, F yez all, F yez all, F yez all

St John Of Gods, St John Of Gods
St John Of Gods, St John Of Gods

See the man,
The crushed up man
With the crushed up Carrolls packet in his hand
Doesn't seem to see or care
Or even understand
And all he says is:

F yez all, F yez all, F yez all, F yez all

St John Of Gods, St John Of Gods
F yez all, F yez all

I made this blogg to honour my favourite band THE POGUES.I'll try to make some descent paintings about the stories of Shane macGowan and his songs.Hope you enjoy it.I'll try to upload at least 1 painting a month.Hope you'll enjoy!

sick bed of cuchulainn

Mccormack and richard tauber are singing by the bed
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

When you pissed yourself in frankfurt and got syph down in cologne
And you heard the rattling death trains as you lay there all alone
Frank ryan brought you whiskey in a brothel in madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the yids
At the sick bed of cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair

And in the euston tavern you screamed it was your shout
But they wouldn't give you service so you kicked the windows out
They took you out into the street and kicked you in the brains
So you walked back in through a bolted door and did it all again
At the sick bed of cuchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
And the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair

You remember that foul evening when you heard the banshees howl
There was lousy drunken bastards singing billy is in the bowl
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

Now you'll sing a song of liberty for blacks and paks and jocks
And they'll take you from this dump you're in and stick you in a box
Then they'll take you to cloughprior and shove you in the ground
But you'll stick your head back out and shout "we'll have another round"
At the graveside of cuchulainn we'll kneel around and pray
And God is in his heaven, and billy's down by the bay