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.
Related:
In the moment, The 40 greatest concerts in Boston history: 15, Regaining Shane, More 
- In the moment
The Pogues live in the moment, and last Thursday that moment lasted two hours at Avalon.
- The 40 greatest concerts in Boston history: 15
The Pogues | Axis | July 2, 1986
- Regaining Shane
It was 1985 and it was time for a new kind of kick. I did not expect to find it with guys playing tin whistle, banjo, and accordion, and a guy who used to sing for the B-level punk band, the Nips ( nés Nipple Erectors) — that would be the dentally challenged Shane MacGowan.
- 30 songs to spill beer on your iPod to
No song captures the quiet desperation of a hard-drinking, hardscrabble nowhere town better than this one.
- 30 songs to spill beer on your iPod to - side
- Irrish guys are smiling
I’d searched for Shane MacGowan all afternoon.
- The Irish rovers
"The Pogues and Boston go together in ways that belong in the realm of the unexplainable."
- Titus Andronicus | The Monitor
As if to allay any fears of a starchy Civil War concept album, Titus Andronicus frontman Patrick Stickles spends the first minute of The Monitor shouting out a series of cultural artifacts that postdate that conflict by, oh, about a hundred years: the Garden State Parkway, the Newark Bears, even the Fung Wah bus.
- Trouble at the top
The back of our limo has one of those yellow ribbon decals that say “Support Our Troops” — just above the “Impeach Bush” sticker.
- Listen up
It’s the first year a long time where I truly felt like I didn’t listen to enough music.
- Bowerbirds | Upper Air
North Carolina's Bowerbirds take the prevailing indie-rock æsthetic — ornate, textured arrangements, clean vocal harmonies — and apply them to Southern gothic, Appalachian bluegrass, and folk.
- Less
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, Entertainment, Music, World History, The Pogues, Celtic Music, Regional Music, Shane MacGowan, Jem Finer, Less
