Review, NYC show
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/17/arts/music/17pogues.html?_r=1&oref=slogin Some Old Irish Songs With Punk and Pop
By BEN RATLIFF
Published: March 17, 2006
Shane MacGowan took the stage yesterday evening, intoning some profane verses from Lou Reed's "Sister Ray," and then the Pogues fired into "Streams of Whiskey." When Mr. MacGowan removed his sunglasses, a few songs into his first performance in New York with the band in 15 years, you could look him in the eyes. Not the whites of them: he looked half-asleep, heavy-lidded, his face a slack, puffy frown surrounding missing teeth. The upper third of his face, anyway, was the most expressive part of his body.
The crowd at the Pogues concert Thursday night.
In their seven-year run as an intact band, the Pogues amassed a cult audience around the world, fusing the sound of old Irish songs with punk and pop, bringing out the smashing force of a folkloric dance music. They made money; they had hits. They ejected Mr. MacGowan in 1991; he was only 33, but there was not much left in him, physically.
(One of his band members recently said that the end came when the singer was "leaving taxis horizontally.")
Conceivably, there could have been more life in the project. He, and other members in the band, had written a stack of first-rate songs about memory and hope and disappointment, about Irish culture moving and staying in place. With some traditional instruments, two-beats and waltzes and ballads, they sounded permanent. A little like Bob Dylan, they had created a sound in their youth that wasn't disappearing any time soon.
So the energies of the music had no problem last night, at the beginning of their four-night run at the Nokia Theater, during their first full American reunion tour. The energies of the singer did, intermittently, however. And for a Pogues show, the night before St. Patrick's Day, the crowd was more docile than one might have expected. It had aged, too, though not as sharply as Mr. MacGowan.
In a two-hour show that culled their best songs â?? opening with "Streams of Whiskey," running through "If I Should Fall From Grace With God," "Young Ned of the Hill," "Bottle of Smoke," "A Pair of Brown Eyes," "The Old Main Drag," and closing with "Fairy Tale of New York" and "Fiesta," they did as good a job as age and context would allow, playing well if slightly subdued.
Mr. MacGowan took breaks in the wings, vaguely restoring himself; others took the microphone to sing, including the tin-whistle player Spider Stacy and the guitarist Philip Chevron. But it was Mr. MacGowan who owned the best moments, with his lurching growl, especially in "Dirty Old Town," where the audience sang along through all four image-rich verses about kissing a girl by the factory wall and smelling the spring on the smoky wind. Turning words into syrup, he said a few unintelligible things between songs â?? something about Americans, something about Truman Capote and Jimmy Breslin. He drank on stage. But he appeared not to miss a word of a song.
The Pogues continue at Nokia Theater, 1515 Broadway, tonight, tomorrow and Sunday.
