Back in the HIGH LIFE

THE PROGENY of Carlow farmers and Mayo nurses have never been so ably represented. At the place where once The Clancy Brothers met punk they’re now congregating in peaceable numbers to fly the flag, carry the colours. The Pogues are not only alive and kicking, they’re running a fever that’s dangerously close to placing them in the furnace of respectability where only the truly great songwriters loiter.

But then again loitering is what they do best. And with intent. Anyone who thought that Shane’s exit stage left had left them bereft of a writer and a mainman has had to re-index this shower under “prodigious” (and out of “piss artists”), pronto.

We’ve been quite a while waiting for Waiting For Herb. After the release of Best Of The Rest it was looking like The Pogues were on auto pilot, content to saddle up onto the retro bandwagon for good and glory. And why not? Armed with a back catalogue that boasted some of the more sublime moments committed to record this side of 1980, the faithful would’ve been well served with a fistful of concerts careening down the already well-trodden avenues of ‘Summer In Siam’ and ‘Fairytale of New York’.

Instead what they’ve got is a mighty fine postgraduate degree in the fine art of recovery without an anaesthetic. Never ones to sully a dingy image in sepia print, The Pogues are once again baring the heart and bones, gore ’n’ all, for our delectation and delight.

It is Spider Stacey and Jem Finer who step into the breach in an attempt to paint a picture of the innards of The Pogues camp these days. Sporting a Glasgow Celtic scarf and pilfering the final few mouthfuls of a takeaway pizza, Stacey is the very epitome of urbane charm.

A tad unexpected that – I was more prepared for acute immersion in a vat of Arthur’s house wine. Civilised handshakes are all very well within the confines of the National Concert Hall or even, at a stretch, The Point, but in a bar with one of the most notorious bands of the past decade? Why do I always manage to arrive just when the party’s over?

Even the midnight hour of their Olympia concerts proves daunting. “No disrespect intended,” Spider offers tentatively, “but 12.30 in Dublin is very late!”

Jem Finer – another charming man – is equally phased by the witching hour. “It’s kind of hard, you see,” he explains, “because if you try and have a rest beforehand you have the horrible feeling that you’ve just got up, but if you sit around until 12.30 you’re going to be as exhausted as well. It’s best to have a bit of a rest, I bet.”

Me too.

Waiting For Herb boasts an embarrassment of eclecticism, with seven members of the core of eight contributing to the penning of the material. (Philip Chevron being the only absentee).

“It just happened,” Jem Finer explains. “It’s not like we had different people seeded. Whatever songs were deemed to make the grade made the grade, simple as that.”

Having had the luxury of Shane as a songwriter for so long, it must have seemed a bit of a chore to have to sit down with the express idea of coming up with material that would come within an ass’s roar of his tunes. Or had so many ramshackle years together infused them all with an implicit ability to churn out colour-by-numbers Pogues tunes to order?

“Yes, if Shane was still in the band he probably would have done most of the songwriting,” Stacey admits, “but all of the albums depended on what we deemed worthy of inclusion.”

Finer is keen to set what he sees as this (not inconsiderable) misconception on its head for once and for all. In the Shane era, the songwriting, he insists, was just the starting point from which the finished tunes took off.

“The whole band would play a huge part in how something was translated from a few chords on guitar to words,” he says. Stacey is equally adamant that the credits were shouldered by all even in the early days.

“You shouldn’t be misled by what you read in the album credits,” he says, “because everybody had a lot more input that the sleeve notes would have led you to believe.”

Far from being a chore, Spider relished the chance to put his thesaurus to the test.

“Writing a song and knowing, as it’s taking shape, that it’s good, is a real buzz,” he says. “Taking the bare bones and fleshing it out is unbelievable.”

And Stacey’s own ‘Tuesday Morning’ is testimony to such a feeling. Probably the strongest song on Waiting For Herb and well up to any of their past offerings, it’s a rickety, rollicking ode to true love masquerading as a shiny happy pop gem fit for MTV primetime framing. And it’s not alone in its boudoir. Finer has penned no finer lyric than ‘Smell Of Petroleum’, a true ‘Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds’ for the raving ’90s, while Terry Woods’ ‘Haunting’ lingers and fingers at the subconscious long after the laser’s been zapped.

The temptation to move away from the trademark Pogues sound was not one which bothered the band après MacGowan, contrary to what the hottest image makers might’ve prescribed.

Stacey recalls the transition period as a natural process that required little or no formal intervention. “We didn’t make any conscious decision with regard to the sound,” he says. “The songs have their own internal logic which dictates the shape they eventually take. If we had wanted to distance ourselves from what it was that we were supposed to be about, we’d have changed the name of the band. What is the point of The Pogues if they don’t sound like The Pogues?”

Yet for many, The Pogues and Shane MacGowan were synonymous. Stacey nods in acknowledgement of this hangover (sic!) from the old days.

“There is, and probably always will be the odd person who, for whatever reason, chooses to spend good money to come and stand in a crowd and shout for someone who’s left that band nearly two and a half years ago. If that’s how those people choose to spend their money, that’s their problem.”

Finer’s philosophical rejoinder to those retro rockers is short and sweet: “Luckily for every one of those there’s a couple of thousand who come to see the band as it is now.”

The latest tour sans Shane and his pint of Martini is, Spider reckons, probably the best they’ve tackled in a long while. The shows in Paris and Zurich stand out as particular hot spots where everybody blissfully Waited For Herb in the best Godot frame of mind.

Finer fingers the reason for the highs with ease. “It was because we didn’t fuck up,” he insists. “We did what we were supposed to do. To give an extreme example, the last time we were invited to do any gigs in Scandinavia, three years ago, we played a big ice hockey stadium in Stockholm. There were 4-5,000 people there and Shane refused to go on stage. We eventually persuaded him to and after 3 songs he walked off. That’s the sort of thing we were up against, so if you then play a concert where everyone’s doing their job, you get a great performance.”

Did such experiences leave the rest of the band with a bitter taste in their mouths?

Finer handles the conundrum with admirable insight. “Unhappy, rather than bitter,” he suggests. “If you see somebody that you really care for who’s obviously not in a good way, it’s horrible. We were friends long before the band was even thought of. It’s like if you’ve got someone in your family who’s not doing so well, it’s a horrible thing. Bitterness doesn’t come into it. It’s a mixture of annoyance and sadness.”

The demise of the live band, in the truest, most spontaneous, impromptu sense of the word is something that Finer and Stacey feel particularly aware of. A ticket to a Pogues show is still a guarantee of a night on a wing and a prayer, with less emphasis on the script and more on the spirit. It’s an approach that’s been all-but scuppered in these days of Zoo TV hegemony, but one they both hold close to the heart of what the band is about.

“The band goes from strength to strength,” Finer insists modestly. “The more we play, the better we get.”

Spider is similarly overawed by their own resumé. “I’d really like to know of another band who’ve coped with what we’ve had to cope with, and come through it the way we have. If I’m bragging, well then, so be it! We are entitled to occasionally clap ourselves on the back.”

Do the band feel they’ve been ghettoised by the press who often seem more hellbent on recording their alcohol intake than their musical achievements? Spider has an unexpectedly obtuse perspective on this thorny question.

“Yeah,” he nods pensively, “but I think it depends on what press you’re talking about. By and large I think the music press have just taken us for what we are. There’s a stereotype image of The Pogues which I don’t think really has any credibility. I mean, The Sun’s the biggest selling tabloid in Britain, but really, do all those people who buy The Sun actually take it seriously?

“I don’t think so. I think the vast majority of its sales are because people want to look at pictures of girls with their tops off. I think that’s probably one of the most inoffensive things about The Sun, pictures of girls with their tops off. The bilge that comes out of that so-called editorial column is far more offensive.”

A lot of women would have a hard time agreeing with that particular viewpoint, though Spider is quick to qualify his remarks with more meaty insights on that fine publication.

“Of course I can understand, women find it offensive. But that fucking headline when they sunk the Belgrano: ‘Gotcha!’ – 350 people dead, and they were gloating. Unbelievable.”

Finer extends the analogy of the stereotype of the band to the Irish nation and is quick to point out how offensive it really is to anyone with a tincture of Irish blood in their veins.

“I’m sure that there are plenty of Irish people who object to being portrayed as a bunch of drunks,” he says.

The bar’s backing soundtrack as we speak now is Elvis’ ‘Everyday I Write The Book’, an adroit backdrop to the conversation as it steers a course towards the rocky topic of iconoclasm. Now that The Pogues have entered this newly-acquired phase of respectability, do they agree that they’ve shed the mantle of iconoclast, a burden that they carried so demurely for so long? Even the presence of a David Bailey photograph, (“The Chief,” from his African Photo Archives, no less) gracing the album cover bespeaks of a newfound artistic sensibility – or does it?

“I think we are iconoclasts – but we don’t try to be,” says Spider. “It’s a natural consequence of our attitude.”

Finer smiles impishly at the prospect: “Now that I know what ‘iconoclastic’ means I’m going to go to great lengths to make sure I’m very iconoclastic! Now that I’ve just discovered this whole new aspect to us. It’s one of those things you’ve never looked up in a dictionary because you can’t spell it! (Heh! heh!) I’ve never thought about it but now that you’ve mentioned it, I think it’s the future, it’s the way ahead!”

Trust Spider to have the definitive word on the subject. “In one sense,” he suggests, “we’ve never been iconoclastic because we’ve never had any special regard for icons.” So there. Smoke that one, Herb.

And as to the possibility of a return ticket for Joe Strummer in the front seat, the two are adamant that his calling lies elsewhere.

“We sold him to Galatasaray, the Turkish league champions!”, Jem reveals (an exclusive! at last!). “And we’ve been trying to buy this guy from Los Lobos but they won’t sell him!”