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Regaining Shane - side

A Pogues primer

Here are a few things anyone headed out to Avalon should prepare for before the Pogues hit the stage.

THE DRINKING SONG | This is a band who started the first song on their first album with “In the rosy parts of England/We’ll sit and have a drink,” and who have a history of opening shows with the self-explanatory “Streams of Whiskey.” And there’s plenty more where those came from.

THE DUET | It was a rock-and-roll moment for the ages: Shane MacGowan playing the lout in a duet with the late Kirsty MacColl called “Fairytale in New York.” And it’s practically a Celtic standard at this point. No way the band could get away without playing it. So the band have drafted Jem Finer’s daughter Ella, now 22, to come along for the ride whenever they reunite; according to her proud father, she handles MacColl’s half of the song just fine.

THE CELTIC CLASSIC | As the band’s drunken punk frontman, Shane MacGowan has often overshadowed another important aspect of the Pogues — the firm grounding in traditional Irish and Celtic folk songs. “Poor Paddy” is just one of a number of Irish laments they favor live. Paddy crosses the ocean to America only to labor on the railways in the early 1840s; by 1867, he “was thinking of going to Heaven,” where, of course, he works on the railway. A true Irish song of the damned.

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