Like Violent Femmes, If I Should Fall From Grace With God is punk as folk. Those first 3 Pogues albums — Red Roses For Me (1984), Rum Sodomy & The Lash (1985), and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988) — are as good as any artist’s first 3 albums. This was really the last consistent effort from Shane MacGowan, who famously drank himself out of a career. But good God, MacGowan’s songwriting in this period was full of fuck you and yet lyrically, he could be so devastatingly, even delicately precise.
Listening to If I Should Fall From Grace With God, I’m struck by the MacGowan’s sense of place. Places, really. There’s not only Turkish songs of the damned, there’s trips to Lourdes, fairytales of New York, hearts in Tipperary, fighting in and rocky roads to Dublin, passengers from Limerick and passengers from Nenagh. The locations are besides the point, of course. The songs work because MacGowan is writing and singing them. His characters may be from all over the world, but that world is governed by the same brutal honesty as his own, and leavened by brilliantly delicate turns of phrase that remind me of Tom T Hall and Townes Van Zandt. And that voice. Good God that voice. What makes Shane so tragic is that, like Townes, his talent couldn’t defeat his alcohol and drug dependency. If I Should Fall From Grace With God represents the last moment where his career trajectory was still pointing upward.
The last time I saw you was down at the Greeks
There was whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks
–“Broad Majestic Shannon” (in running for greatest opening lines ever)
You’ll be counting years, first 5, then 10
Growing old in a freezing hell
–“Birmingham Six” (back half of a medley with “Streets Of Sorrow”)
Bury me at sea
Where no murdered ghost can haunt me
If I rock upon the waves
No corpse shall lie upon me
–“If I Should Fall From Grace With God”
There’s no pain, there’s no more sorrow
They’ve all gone, gone in the years, babe
–“Broad Majestic Shannon” (in the running for greatest closing lines ever)
Every damn line in “Fairytale Of New York.”
Pogues – Fairytale Of New York – 1988 [Amazon]
You know Shane MacGowan is a genius because he can write a Christmas lament that includes an “old slut on junk” and a “cheap lousy faggot” and no one is offended. He invested these characters with so much empathy, it’s like we collectively understand “Fairytale” is meant to be a perfect snow globe of Christmas tragedy.
Pogues – If I Should Fall From Grace With God – 1988 [Amazon]
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I’m buried ‘neath the sod
But the angels won’t receive me
Let me go, boys
Let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry