The Pogues live at The Point, Dublin

Won’t see another one?
Feels that way. Fine by me. The world’s too horrible. But deep down, I’m quarter-hoping that a couple of nights before Christmas 2050, I’ll Zimmer-frame it along to the Point for the zillionth festive Pogues affair to find that Shane, age 92, is still well up for it. The man described by The Observer as ‘a relic of the old pre-boom Ireland of hopeless old pissheads doing zilch’ would, for all his legendary unreliability, sooner join the British Parachute Regiment than let down the clan at Christmas time.
Still, the pre-gig banter centres on the possibility of a drunken no-show or on-stage collapse: Shane may be the primary architect of this nation’s ongoing cultural renaissance (apologies to Jack Charlton), but he more closely resembles a living corpse than almost anyone I’ve ever seen.
The other Pogues aren’t exactly walking advertisements for the health-boosting properties of a rock’n’roll-paddy life, either. Will they click? It’s to be hoped, since the support slot has far too generously been allotted to the truly painful Dropkick Murphys, whose excruciating uptempo cover of the already foul ‘Fields of Athenry’ says it all.
Allaying our fears, the gang manage to locate the stage door. The Popes were such an effective Pogues doppelganger that you’d be hard-pressed to notice any difference, but it’s still rough, raw, deep and bloody effective, and Shane, with birthday in sight, is downright sprightly as casualties go. The crowd, as ever, is the stuff of Sunday Independent nightmares, very identifiably Irish and without a dotcom yuppie in sight. Sure, there’s a mild whiff of here-for-the-beer, hail-hail-Glasgow-Celtic, up-the-‘Ra mindlessness, and the male urinals predictably come to resemble a giant vomitorium - but it somehow feels safe and warm among real Paddies, an endangered species throughout Tigerland, when one’s long grown tired of unwillingly rubbing shoulders at ligs’n’gigs with wannabe continental sophisticates.  
Irritatingly, elements of the throng treat the night as a karaoke singalong excuse to rattle out the 20% of lyrics they’re actually acquainted with – and, amongst the gems, there’s the odd track I could live without ever hearing again (‘Irish Rover’, ‘Dirty Old Town’ and, yes, ‘Fairytale’ have all died slow deaths from over-familiarity). But the highs are vertigo peaks: ‘Turkish Song Of The Damned’ remains one of the pitch-blackest lyrical visions in written history, ‘Rain Street’ and ‘White City’ ache with saudade longing for times lost and memories half-forgotten, ‘Body of an American’ burns with love, joy and boxing references, and ‘Sayonara’ epitaphs my 2005 just fine (‘She kissed me softly on the lips/She took my hand without a sound / This was our happy-ever-after / So motherfucker hit the ground’).
I turned my face away, and dreamed of arson. Might see another one…