The 1985 Project Part 41: The Pogues - Rum Sodomy & the Lash

Now we start covering records which weren't celebrated by the Critics Poll that year

We finished all 40 albums in the 1985 Village Voice Pazz and Jop Poll so I thought it would be interesting and fun to check out the records that place in a smaller but more recent poll conducted by Brad Luen for his Semipop Life Substack blog. The first place finisher was Fear and Whiskey by the Mekons, which we covered in Part 26 of this series. The second place finisher didn’t show up in the Top 40 of the older poll.

The Pogues were a vital force in Irish folk music and rock circles back throughout the 80s. By fusing their punk rock roots with the music of their elders, the Pogues made records that didn’t sound like either genre. Lots of bands have imitated them without ever getting near the originality and vitality that made their own particular Irish folk/punk so special. And they did all this with the most important member of the band falling victim to drug and alcohol abuse that made his role increasingly erratic until he was actually fired from the band and the Pogues faded into a role as nostalgia artists.

Rum Sodomy & the Lash was the second album by the Pogues, and it probably stands as the second best thing they ever did – their 1988 record If I Should Fall From Grace With God was not only my personal gateway into their genius but is among the most masterful albums of the entire decade. The band underwent a couple of line-up changes for that release, which made the music more professional even as their lead singer and songwriter became less able to be counted on. I remember the promoter of their 1988 St. Louis concert telling me he didn’t think Shane MacGowan would live another year – he actually stayed alive until 2023.

The second album was produced by Elvis Costello, and as he did for the debut album of the Specials a few years earlier, he took the approach of documenting what the band sounded like as his template. There are no production tricks on Rum Sodomy & the Lash, just the sounds of a band that knew it was good and knew it had strong material playing it the way they did on stage.

MacGowan was becoming sharper and sharper as a songwriter, and three of his best originals appear on this record. “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” gets the album off to a rousing start. The drums sound like a bodhran, a melody is plucked on some stringed instrument while acoustic guitars are strummed harshly, and MacGowan sings in the relatively clear voice he still had for this album. The picture is painted – a man lies at death’s door while his friends gather around his bed. Then the band kicks into high gear, playing a raucous take on traditional folk, and MacGowan spits out tales of the dying man’s reckless abandon during his life. This is a celebration of life, and life for this man is filled with fights and sex and fighting bigotry and drinking and spewing up in church.

“A Pair of Brown Eyes” is, to me, one of the great songs of its time. It’s a ballad that sounds a couple hundred years old but with played and sung with all the power of contemporary rock’n’roll. I should say that it’s the tune that sounds ancient – the lyrics reference a jukebox and a devastating battlefield that presumably took place during WWII. The song is sung from two different viewpoints of two different people who lost brown-eyed loves. The one was in the war, and the other suffered a more recent loss. The two men do not commiserate; in fact, MacGowan’s narrator says he hates the other. He lives on the hope that somewhere he’ll find those brown eyes again; the older man knows he won’t. And the song intertwines these two characters with a beautiful melody and a sense of resignation tied to dreams.

The third original gem here is “Sally MacLenanne,” the track with the best combination of pop hooks and folk traditions. Accordion, tin whistle, bass, drums, and acoustic guitar drive the music at full throttle. There’s a neat little drum break at ends of some lines that’s one hook, and the chorus is easily singable. This is another one with two characters whose viewpoints seem to blur – the narrator who tells of Jimmy who left when he was very young, and his own adventures as a barman. When Jimmy returns, he finds that the narrator seems to have taken his place, and thus everything is different.

Two songs not written by a Pogues member complete the round-up of best material here. Ewan MacColl – father of Kirsty MacColl who would memorably duet with MacGowan on the band’s most famous song “Fairy Tale of New York” on the next record – had written “Dirty Old Town” way back in 1949 for a play. I first heard it by Rod Stewart – I suspect the Pogues first heard it by the Dubliners. At any rate, it’s the centerpiece of Rum Sodomy & the Lash. Each verse is like an English folk haiku – “Clouds are drifting across the moon / Cats are prowling on their beat / Spring’s a girl from the streets at night / Dirty old town, dirty old town.” MacGowan sings it with a combination of tenderness and threat that makes this the definitive version of the song for many of us.

The album ends with a version of Eric Bogle’s “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda,” one of the most poignant and powerful anti-war songs ever written. It’s about an Australian soldier called up to fight in WWI, who loves to dance with his own Matilda. There was a popular song in those days called “Waltzing Matilda” which gets mentioned frequently as the song goes on, until the Pogues play a snippet of it at the end. The fighting at Gallipoli is harsh, and our hero gets his legs blown off in battle. There will be no more waltzing for him though the song continues to haunt him. “And the old men march slowly, old bones stiff and sore / They’re tired old heroes from a forgotten war / And the young people ask “What are they marching for?” / And I ask myself the same question.” It’s a bleak ending to an album haunted by fate, a record that knows the joys and the exhilaration can turn to loss and living in memory’s corners.

The rest of the record is more than fine, too. It’s hard to believe it got passed over by the 1985 Pazz and Jop Poll because Rum Sodomy & the Lash clearly deserves 8.5 points out of 10.