Capping off a month of (compared to usual) frantic RP activity, we tie up loose ends in the Pogues canon in episode 110. Tackling the downslide of the band's career, we speed through their last two albums with Shane MacGowan as lead vocalist, pretty much ignoring the two made without him, briefly touching on Joe Strummer's brief sojourn as Pogues frontman, and devoting a sizeable amount of time to Shane's second solo album with imaginatively named backing band The Popes, The Crock of Gold.
We look at Shane's miscellaneous non-album work, including a writing contribution to the How To Train Your Dragon 2 soundtrack, and return to one of the wildest threads in forum history, where a bunch of neo-Nazis attempt to claim Shane as their own, and also address his legendarily voluminous drink & drug consumption and speculate on the general condition of his health in his sixties.
Lastly, we continue to examine MacGowan's politics, addressed in this quote we only discovered subsequently to recording the episode: "I always felt guilty because I didn't lay down my life for Ireland. I felt ashamed that I didn't have the guts to join the IRA, so the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt."
Produced by tom disso. Artwork by Jack.
