Get Your Yeah Yeahs Out!

Memory often plays me factually false, especially when I'm trying to recall lost London days round Camden town and Soho market, where the Murphia met, but this time I think not.

At the Rock On stall in Soho, the rock rarities' collector's Mecca where long before punk flung its mudpie into Bill Brungy's eye, Ted Carroll and Roger Armstrong would tell you stories about their Chiswick signing, Joe Strummer and the 101'ers. Or later there, Stan Brennan might talk about his own indie label devoted to the Nips, the band fronted by his friend, Shane O'Hooligan.

Onwardly into the early Eighties and Phil Chevron, retired from the Radiators, would be located behind the counter at the 'Rock On' emporium - now removed to Camden just three doors down from the tube station - from him, Elvis Costello would purchase the rare soul sounds he consumed before making 'Get Happy'. There too, you'd meet Frank Murray talking about his managerial charge Kirsty McColl. Meanwhile, Rock On had divided to beget the Rocks Off shop on Oxford Street where, oftentimes, Stan Brennan's assistant was the self-same Mr O'Hooligan, now reverted back to his Irish Catholic baptismal name of Shane MacGowan.

As that other ex-shop assistant Peter Buck might confirm hardly the worst environment for a hungry songwriter and hopeful bandleader to pass the day playing that r'n'b obscurity, this cajun classic or that Brit-beat rarity that time, but not you, forgot

This is one line of vision into The Pogues - only one of many but an important one. Because I know why and how, despite the rapscallion English gypsies Shane MacGowan recruited into The Pogues to fart in the face of designer pop, The Pogues can be deemed a London-Irish band.

A stupendously, crudely obvious statement perhaps but back here in Ireland, we rarely give equal emphasis to the London elements in their identity. But with The Pogues, West End girls don't meet East End boys. Instead on a rainy night in Soho, take the Northern line to Camden, The Pogues' true spiritual home.

It's cosmopolitan but not in the lacquered ways of Home Counties cultural foodies. This is Ken Livingstone's London, not The Face's, a place where people never need to doll up to proclaim their character. North London is where the Empire struck back, where succeeding waves of Irish Caribbean, Asian and Cypriot emigrants founded their own mini-Commonwealth, all - despite the apocalyptic, blood-soaked ravings of the prophet Enoch - nestling easily alongside the natives, resting their elbows at the same bar where the juke-box can include a bluebeat classic beside the Philomena Begley and Makem and Clancy selections.

This is a London where checking in and out of different cultures is a matter of necessary natural and daily neighbourliness. It isn't home to the cultural tourism of suburban bores from out Finchley way who think culture comes as a Renault accessory and who'll agonise your ears as they bland on about their bijou in Normandy, their last holiday in the Seychelles and that adorable new Laotian restaurant Timothy found in Kensington.

Because people have to work and live together here. And drink and die together because this is a London that shows its scars unashamedly - that desolate bag-lady, the Irish drunk in the corner with eyes that are black pools of foreboding, the sheltering street-punk who's found the city speed too fast and floundered into petty crime - and, of course, the ageing couple at the next table with their familiar feud, forever blaring for all the bar to hear - "You scum bag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot."

A romantically coloured view from an irregular visitor over ten years? Well, perhaps this is imaginative rather than precise geographical truth. You might speak similarly of Brixton and maybe King's Cross or Hammersmith so perhaps it doesn't matter who was born or who squatted where. Still, among The Pogues' specifically London predecessors are Madness and most certainly the Clash. The three groups have in common that they are all truth-tellers not trivial pursuers of pop illusion, all based on raw, unfashionable and disenfranchised musics, all embedded into cultural diversity because they've actually lived it rather than purchased it to adorn their lifestyle, all calling from a London that's almost been censored from English culture ever since Queen Margaret I mercilessly disbanded Ken Livingston's GLC.

An angle dressed up as a theory? Well, when on the new band Pogues' video you see and hear Joe Strummer proudly leading through 'London's Calling', you can't but make the connection - The Pogues are the Camden juke-box of their own imaginations.

Their latest projects emphasise The Pogues' multiple identity - Anne Scanlon's thorough biography, 'The Last Decade', a 55-minute video documentary of The Pogues' now ceremonial St Patrick's Day concert in London and a swaggering new soul-pop single, 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah'.

Yes, you read right: soul-pop. From one angle, a throwback to Shane MacGowan's original squad, the Nips, the Five Yeahs is a bracingly lustful re-assembly of old Northern Soul and teenage memories. Yet even more contrarily, it's also the 'youngest' record The Pogues have ever released. Because if 'Fairytale ' was parental pop, this is The Pogues audaciously and easily making their claim to orchestrate the teenage rampage, Shane actually sounding as if he's singing from inside the dance-floor melee, an absolute contrast to Bros and George Michael's policy of preening, polished and all-too-knowing and insincere pop domination.

But then Pogues' singles have shown a bravely marvellous eclecticism of style. Play back to 'A Pair Of Brown Eyes' and then fast forward through 'A Rainy Night In Soho', 'Haunted', 'The Irish Rover',. 'A Fairytale Of New York' and 'Fiesta' and you suddenly realise that an eventual Pogues-On-45 singles compilation would show their versatility and ability to throw the pursuit off their tracks.

From a hotel room in Germany where The Pogues are touring, banjo player, Jem Finer, testifies to the birth of the Five Yeahs.

"It would have been very easy of us to do another 'Fairytale Of New York'-type single," he reflects. "In fact, there's a song that we recorded at the same time that's in that sort of vein. A typical Pogues ballad that we could have finished and it would have been great. But we also did 'Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah' and it just seemed to jump out. It's nice to put out something unexpected, a great dance record."

But you seem to delight in the unexpected? "Possibly. It's not consciously planned to be perverse It was just a song that Shane wrote. He might have written it very flippantly. One day, we were going through songs and he said 'I've this pop song'. So we thought we'll have a bash at this."

Sometimes the best songs sound like easy-come, easy-go throwaways. Sometimes even the writer thinks they're a frivolous sketch especially when a band's got far too serious about themselves and forgotten about spontaneous combustion. Not so The Pogues. The Five Yeahs' perfection is that they actually sound as if they wrote it themselves in five minutes.

"I actually don't know how Shane wrote it," Jem admits, "but often it's the things that you don't really take totally seriously that turn out to be the real crackers. They just have a life of their own. They get up and you can't ignore them."

An antique adage is that the quality never short-changes with the B-side. Just so with The Pogues: 'Limerick Rake' is as skilfully arranged an Irish song as they've ever released, a track that must finally stifle all purists' complaints. Instead they save any stomping for the Stones' 'Honky Tonk Women'. At this rate, they'll soon have both the Chieftains and Mick Jagger opening for them!

"'Honky Tony Women'," Jem modestly concedes, "was a complete accident. I think it was in America, Andrew just started playing it on his drums, everybody joined in and we ended up doing it as an encore. So we just felt we'd record it for the hell of it."

Curiously, as Anne Scanlon's book reveals, 'Fairytale ' didn't have such an easy birth. According to Jem: "We wrote that about 1985. We did try to record it but it just didn't work. Really the next chance we got was last year when we were recording the album. It did work. I don't know why. Maybe just because we were better at playing."

"Better at playing"? First time I ever saw The Pogues' faces with an ambivalent Philip Chevron was autumn '83 at the Hope and Anchor. On that occasion I reported back: "disorientated, I felt like I'd wandered into some unfinished Flann O'Brien novel." In retrospect, one in which Flann was reincarnated in London as a particularly black punk prankster, whom I suspected, had temporarily invaded Shane MacGowan and his familiar Spider Stacey, nutting himself with a beer-tray, trapped in some peculiar role confusion between Clockwork Orange and the Spanish waiter, Manuel in Fawlty Towers. With a full house in the Hope basement including Dublin punk veterans like Brummie, this first sighting of The Pogues could only be entirely odd

Besides the conventional Irish artistic wisdom of the preceding decade had downgraded the urban ballad groups like The Dubliners, The Fureys and their progeny in favour of the more cultured stream centred on Planxty and the Bothy Band. What the purists forgot was how the technical demands of the second stream tended to deny access. These punks had sensibly chosen the more participatory style since trying to be a punk Planxty would have been as fruitless as being a punk Yehudi Menuhin.

But that night, you could only detect glimmers. I vaguely recall amps failing and somebody saying The Pogues always arrived addled on stage. They seemed then to be one of those evolutionary freaks destined not to survive in an unwelcoming environment but whose example might inspire others. It doesn't surprise me to find manager Frank Murray confessing, in Anne Scanlon's book, that he originally suspected The Men They Couldn't Hang might be the better prospect.

But what nobody outside the Pogues and their inner circle had recognised was that in Shane, The Pogues had the more clever and consistent songwriter, the man with the need to make sense of living between two and more cultures, someone whose punk insight would always protect him against the more sentimental, professional Paddy excesses of the ballad form, and through whom the emigrants would strike back to both reclaim and reorder their inheritance.

Either way my response was charitable on the occasion compared to those the then-Pogue Mo Chone were receiving in a London rife with art-damage. The band were refusing to take the precious high art road and adorn themselves with secondhand significance. The lethal worm at the bottom of the tequila bottle. The Pogues' strength of attitude turned on two factors - their loyal refusal to recant from the smartest punk ethic and Shane's instinct that the Irish ballad tradition, as transported to London, was a durable culture and not something to be demeaned or flirted with as this year's model for faithless fashion strategists.

Because, from the start, The Pogues have been fighting on two fronts. Besides the well-publicised flak they received from the more "scholarly" defenders of the Irish tradition, The Pogues got equal grief from the London media-mongers, scorned as vulgarians by those who were flattering the public into believing that good taste, not truth, was the paramount value.

Even now, Jem believes that the media are holding them back. "The only thing that has stood between us becoming popular has been the media catching up," he reflects, "when we started, what we were doing was completely perverse, totally flying in the face of fashion. And it's taken a long time for the radio to start playing us. Most of the singles we put out, if we put them out now again, I think they'd do really well."

Now The Pogues have entered their sixth year, what does Jem believe was special in their early spirit?

"It wasn't done in a contrived way. It wasn't that we said 'we're going to become really big and famous'. We just felt that we wanted to play this music. Unlike a lot of people, we weren't trying too hard. They all want to be like someone else. Like a lot of groups want to be like U2, for example. And you can't be like someone else. You can only be yourself.

"We were lucky enough to have picked on something that nobody else was doing," he adds. "Also, if we'd all been very accomplished musicians, we wouldn't have sounded like The Pogues either. We might have sounded more like Fairport Convention, like Spider, when he started, probably didn't know what a tin-whistle was. Myself, I could just play a bit of guitar and at the last moment I got a banjo. James could play piano and guitar but he'd never played accordion. So, from the start, we were doing this music completely our own way. We hadn't a traditional background to anything. We'd get the right instruments but completely the wrong way of playing them so that inevitably led to a completely unique sound."

Another witness to The Pogues' evolution is Philip Chevron himself. Surely anyone who might have earlier viewed them as some perverse, shambolic fag-end of punk must now be totally astonished by how The Pogues have outpaced their contemporaries?

"I'm not surprised," counters Philip. "I'm only surprised it hasn't gone further and the reason for that is because we're still frowned upon. I've always believed right from when I started playing that if somebody is doing something with their heart in it and it's good, people will listen. And there aren't many bands left who still do that as far as I can see. And in as much as there's always going to be a space for that sort of band, to some extent we're filling that ta the moment. It would be stupid to say that I'm surprised."

What of my concept of The Pogues as Camden juke-box?

"If you look at the last album," Jem comments, "and its more eclectic tracks, you don't have to go to Greece, Spain or Turkey to find the source - you can hear all that music in restaurants or on the local pirate radio or in pubs or coming out of people's houses. Just walking around that area, you can hear it."

But if Philip accepts their past, he also insists I view The Pogues now as "an international touring band". They remain audaciously diverse, playing Pharaoh Sanders' jazz classic 'Japan' for example, when they toured there.

According to Philip, "the reason we initially saw ourselves as a London-Irish band was due to that pot-pourri of influences and cultures which was very lively in Camden. But once you start being an international touring band, the sort of things that first attracted you to the London-Irish concept, you start finding everywhere else in the world. Effectively the way I see it is that everywhere we go, we pick up on what's there and that always finds its way into the music somehow. Like doing the Pharaoh Sanders piece, rather than a traditional Japanese piece, is indicative of that."

By now, indeed, The Pogues radiate their own influences. Jem Finer points to the new Los Lobos album "which is basically acoustic, the more traditional Tex-Mex songs. And I don't think it would be too arrogant to say that perhaps we had a slight influence on their decision. They specifically asked us to tour with them twice. It's mutual, since we're really into them but they're really excited by us and our acoustic approach to music since they started off playing acoustically for ten years in bars before they went electric.

"I think the fact that we've stood up on large stages and played acoustic instruments has given confidence to a lot of people to do that themselves. I think even Elvis, after he produced our second album, made 'King Of America' and there's a lot of acoustic stuff on that."

Nor is that all. The Pogues crop up also on Steve Earle's album Copperhead Road, backing him on 'Johnny Come Lately' as yet another Texas sings "We're gonna drink Camden Town dry tonight". And if, on Chevron's evidence, The Pogues have gone "Transmetropolitan" temporarily vacating their Camden thrones, well there's many queuing up to fill the space.

'Cos Ireland wings like a pendulum do, from the Docker's to the Dev - and that's the fact.