The river remembers what the city forgets, harbouring under the sediment a vast repository of relics, fragments, memories. Victorian mudlarks were among the lowest in the abyssal hierarchy of the time (second only perhaps to the toshers who foraged through the sewers), spending their lives sifting through shingle and mud to salvage junk and treasure. From the upper deck of the Prospect of Whitby pub in Wapping, I watch a lone mudlarking figure, an archaeologist or licensed hobbyist, searching through the dreck of low tide. He passes a group of tourists without even noticing them taking selfies, fixated on finding the river’s secrets. Between songs on my headphones, I can hear the waves, increasing with every passing motorboat, and the mudlark’s distant whistling growing ever-fainter.
It’s a suitably nautical setting for today’s soundtrack: Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Released 40 years ago by London Irish legends the Pogues, the album is named not after a decent night in old Soho, as the title would suggest, but an apocryphal quote of Churchill’s. “Don’t talk to me about naval tradition,” he’s purported to have said. “It’s nothing but rum, sodomy, and the lash.” For many years, listening to the album while writing and drinking in this adopted riverside local, I’d no idea it was recorded a stone’s throw away in Elephant Studio, in the basement of Metropolitan Wharf. Or that the pubs of the area, such as this one, were frequented by Pogues musicians: their frontman and chief songwriter Shane MacGowan and the album’s producer Elvis Costello.
The album was even launched on the river, upstream, on board HMS Belfast with the band wearing Nelson-era naval regalia. They’d been ferried to the moored cruiser from Traitor’s Gate, arriving to find the assembled journalists (one of whom ended up, temporarily, in the Thames) already tearing into the drink. After the gig, MacGowan’s admiral’s hat vanished; in one story settling onto the river bed with all that other historical debris. At the time, the album felt like a raucous act of vandalism. Now, it’s viewed almost universally as a stone-cold classic.
The cover, a remade version of Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, where the band themselves are among the wretched shipwrecked crew, acts as a framing device. What Rum Sodomy & the Lash does is allow erased, abandoned or sidelined histories to erupt — the piratical and press-ganged, the adventurous and the damned — in a way that gracefully, modestly hides the band’s self-taught virtuosity and the lyricist’s songwriting genius. It was an album that, at that time, socially and politically, shouldn’t have existed, but through courage and sheer force of nature had to.
The Thames may not forget, but society is all too willing to. There are, alas, few signs of gratitude or even recognition of the colossal impact the Irish have had on London. A statue of Oliver Cromwell, the Butcher of Drogheda, stands pride of place outside the House of Commons, but there’s scarce trace of his Hibernian victims. It took the London Irish Centre to erect a plaque in Camden Square, in 2017, to the “Forgotten Irish”, “who left their homes, counties and country… to work and rebuild this city and country, ravaged and destroyed by war… Many would never return to Ireland.”
There were calls for an Overground line to be named after the Irish navvies, the “tunnel tigers” who were crucial to building the Tube, but those calls were ignored. The vital role of Irish builders in constructing the modern City and Canary Wharf, among other locations, has been explored in the short film We Built this City — yet you’ll struggle to see much acknowledgement in those actual places. A mural in Archway’s Navigator Square, honouring thousands of Irish nurses and navvies, among others, is welcome, but insufficient. Blue plaques memorialising Irish luminaries tell uneasy stories. Wilde was effectively ruined here; Michael Collins signed his own death warrant here; James Joyce left because of the eerie coldness he felt from neighbours he called “mummies”; Samuel Beckett after the tedium of being continually undermined and dismissed as “Paddy” and “Mick”.
Even the hardships have been erased. The “No blacks, no dogs, no Irish” signs are no longer remembered. There is little remnant of the brutal St Giles Rookery, a slum whose residential conditions are regarded as some of the worst-ever seen in London. Perhaps the most poignant trace of London’s downtrodden Irish comes in the form of some lines carved into a wall in the Tower of London, reputedly by the 16th-century rebel Thomas Miagh. “By torture strange my trouth was tried yet of my libertie denied…”
Yet there are legacies beyond the architectural. One is music. In 1979, Dexys Midnight Runners released their debut single “Dance Stance”, a fine example of agit-prop soul music that pushed against the patronising “Paddy Irishman” jokes that laid the groundwork for so much discrimination and harassment. Written by second-generation Irishman Kevin Rowland, it was punchy and admirable. Its chorus referred to a litany of great Irish writers, “Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Seán O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Eugene O’Neill, Edna O’Brien and Laurence Sterne”. Its effectiveness, though, was tempered by its approach of telling, rather than showing, which allowed snobs to claim that the cited greats were either exceptions to the rule or not even Irish at all.
The Pogues offered a different approach — not just “show, don’t tell”, but embody. The result was one of the greatest Irish and greatest London albums. The combination of the two was important. Aside from The Pogues’ Dubliner guitarist Phil Chevron, MacGowan and bassist Cait O’Riordan were, or are, second-generation Irish, and were made to feel it growing up in England. It was still not an easy time to be Irish in England in the 1980s; the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven were all put in jail in a series of miscarriages of justice. 1985 was generally grim in England, encompassing the Broadwater Farm and Brixton riots, the Bradford City fire, the aftermath of Heysel and so on. In Ireland, blighted by economic recession and stifling politics, the highlight of the year was a wave of “miraculous” moving statues.
Being treated as an outsider, as being both and neither, would have been difficult, even dangerous. But it also had advantages. One was being never entirely trapped within a singular culture. There was always another place to remember, identify with, explore, dream of and draw from for inspiration. You can hear the freedom, fascination and yearning of the émigré in Rum Sodomy & the Lash, and also the sense of belonging to a city, on intimate terms with its underworld, yet being seen as an outsider. This was a troubling quandary for a citizen but a useful position for an artist. A source of animus, alienation and material.
Costello had produced the Specials, and there was overlap with the Pogues in terms of alienation, social issues and rebellious energy. Yet the Irish component was integral here, and evident from the opening track, “The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn”. The song starts cautiously, as if winding up the whirlwind to come. It captures a great deal of the chaotic gigs the band had been blazing through. And, equally, it evokes their hyper-literate quality, garnered from voracious reading. Horslips, an earlier, proggier Irish band, had made the spirited concept album The Táin about the adventures of the mythic hero Cú Chulainn. The Pogues, however, were the product of punk, and the more exploratory post-punk.
MacGowan’s vision in this opening track is hallucinatory, and peopled with figures as lost or fallen as they are heroic. It’s a wild ride of a song, so much so that its erudition could be missed by snobs. Yet however much of a splendid racket it becomes, it drinks from deep roots: not just on the relatively well-known heroic Celtic myths beloved by Gaelic revivalists and Irish revolutionaries, but by a stranger, more obscure tale, “Serglige Con Culainn”, in which the hero is cursed with a fever for trying to kill two birds from the Otherworld.
Rather than the comforting certainties and glorious defeats of rebel songs, to which MacGowan was elsewhere partial, the song demonstrates weirder, truer, more nebulous versions of Irish culture and history. The result is expansive, rather than constrictive, more life-affirming and less fixed in stone or bronze; less like the statue of the dying Cú Chulainn at the site of the Easter Rising in Dublin’s GPO, and more a still-unfolding dream of a living person.
Such ingenuity could not go unpunished. Overlooking the band’s talent, the English press soon zoomed in on MacGowan’s appearance, especially the state of his teeth, and his alcoholism. One music critic wit claimed MacGowan could “floss with rope”, while many others speculated, with varying degrees of faux concern and prurience, how long he’d continue to live. It was with some satisfaction that he survived to pension age, partly to spite them. The jibes fit drearily with a long, disgraceful history (see Punch magazine) of anti-Irish grotesquerie. But the album is full of erudition, even when the music is ferocious and aiming for the metamorphic “battle frenzy” of the mythic Cú Chulainn.
The Pogues had already mastered this combination of frenzy and learning on “Boys from the County Hell”, on their debut Red Roses for Me. There’s a deliberate feral quality that plays with false colonial dichotomies — the unrefined natives and the “civilising” empire — of which an example is Edmund Spenser writing The Faerie Queene while helping to oppress the Irish. Without saying so, the song serves as a declaration of the right to be contradictory and the necessity of being transgressive. It is written, as are many of the album’s songs, with the sort of unreconstructed street language which might get you a visit from the “Be Kind” police these days.
These same police pop up in the next track “The Old Main Drag”, putting many a London punk and Irish migrant through the wringer. (“I was picked up by the coppers and kicked in the balls / Between the metal doors at Vine Street I was beaten and mauled…”). Beginning in a drone, the song is a tale of damnation, of poetic injustice. It is sung, with immense sympathy and bleak realism, from the perspective of a homeless rent boy, a voice of the underclass, who’d come to the capital full of romance and is now adrift. It is all the more moving for taking place at the time of the AIDS epidemic, the erection of Cardboard City, the closure of residential mental health units, and the rise of heroin. It’s punk in the etymological sense of rotten wood used as kindling, which was then applied to sex workers, then juvenile delinquents, then musicians. The used, the disregarded and the thrown away but also the unsilenced.
This poignant humanism continues throughout the album, from MacGowan’s poetic yet visceral waltz “A Pair of Brown Eyes” to a hypnotic cover of the Gallipoli bloodbath dirge “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”. The former shows MacGowan’s talent for writing songs of striking immediacy, yet that still sound as if they’d existed as folk standards for hundreds of years. Again, the language would immediately collide with our contemporary hypocrisies, where speaking of violence and horror is policed and punished more than committing it.
Even at the time of the album, in fact, the Pogues ran into opposition, and not just among musical snobs and gatekeepers in England. In Ireland, their adversaries were two-fold — traditionalist embalmers of folk music, and cringe-beset “cosmopolitans” who were mortified with anything too Irish, too plebian, too diasporan. Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music, and more authentic examples of cosmopolitan hybrid-culture, than their adversaries, exemplifying the maxim that, “Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire.”
“Ironically, it turned out that the Pogues were far more effective custodians of Irish traditional music than their adversaries.”
At the heart of Rum Sodomy & the Lash’s success and legacy is embrace of apparent opposites: high and low culture, Ireland and England, city and rural, home and exile, intellect and soul, sacred and profane, debauchery and dignity, stars and gutter. So you get “Navigator”, a tribute to the Irish workers who built the railways, and MacGowan’s rowdy “Sally MacLennane”, a tribute to his uncle’s Irish pub in Dagenham, the Irish car-making workforce it served and the real-life characters he encountered, some less than salubrious. There’s also a fierce and atmospheric instrumental, “The Wild Cats of Kilkenny”, inspired by Spaghetti Westerns, or else the industrial hangover of Ewan MacColl’s “Dirty Old Town”, especially poignant at a time of deindustrialisation.
The true legacy of the Pogues exists not in print, of course, but in music. Their inheritors include the drone and conscience of the modern band Lankum, the otherworldly transformations of the past in the music of Lisa O’Neill and John Francis Flynn, and the pulse of the new in Fontaines D.C. But the album also impels its listeners to articulate discontent, defy the rot, preserve the fire, to genuinely transgress, to face reality in surreal or raw terms, to lament and howl not in the transience of placards or social media, but in an art form that hits far deeper, than rusting plaques, and lasts much longer. It’s all out there, more than ever, out of sight, below decks or at the bottom of the river, waiting to escape.
