SOUNDS DIFFERENT

You might have heard, Shane MacGowan passed away a week ago. He was the lead singer of the Pogues. I've thought about him and the Pogues over the past few days but not nearly as much as I thought about my friends. Back in the day, a lot of my friends from the music scene were into the Pogues and, looking back, I realized that there was a certain type of person that liked the band. I can't really put my finger on it but it was beyond the binary cool/not cool classification. It was like a secret that this small slice of the scene "got" while others were trying too hard to be the coolest in the room. I started thinking about those friends, some now deceased, and got all warm and fuzzy, remembering the Christmas Eve DJ gigs my friend Julie and I had (at the Pink Panther and later the Casbah) and the reaction that "Fairytale of New York" would get whether we played it or one of our DJ friends did.. All of the faces of drunk friends, cigarette smoke softening the view, a few on the plywood covered pool table that did double duty as a dance floor when things got crowded. Shane MacGowan was one of us on those nights.

I didn't post "Fairytale of New York" right away because I was hoping to find a quality mp3 version and this will have to do. There really is a lot going on in it. The video above is my favorite live version. In doinking around looking at Pogues stuff the past few days I ran into a trailer for a documentary, Crock of Gold - A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan that I didn't know existed (link below). It's by Julian Temple who did the Sex Pistols flick The Filth and the Fury. But, back to the song, it does something to me. It's very real, a lot of it is the interplay between MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl. At points you forget it's a song.

~ NOTE: ALL MEDIA IS HOSTED BY THE BLOGS & SITES NAMED BELOW ~

Listen:
The Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York mp3 at Internet Archive
Documentary trailer:
Crock of Gold - A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan - Official Trailer