I came late to the IPod thing. In fact, if I had not gotten one for free from the label, I would not own one now. I never had a Walkman, and though I have a brace of portable cd players kicking around, I never actually took them anywhere.
The Ipod shuffle is perfect for me. Most aficionados would sneer at it. It can only take a fraction of the songs a big 60 gig unit holds. Yet for me, it is more than enough. I rarely listen to albums anyway. I always preferred the radio. I like songs, songs that have a beginning, middle, and end. The surprising juxtapositions which a good DJ can manufacture are way more interesting to me than an extended session lying on the floor digging into something like The Wall.
I have about 200 songs on my Shuffle. All of them mean something to me. I have room for another 100 or more, but I am still waiting to hear what they might be. For now, to abuse the cliché, these 200 songs are my personal soundtrack.
Dark Streets of London – The Pogues
Sean and I formed Rankin Street sometime in 1990, after a couple of false starts. The membership stayed fluid for a long time after, as did our repertoire. We were learning to play, but more important, trying to figure out what to play. We started out doing the standard Irish pub band repertoire, mainly Irish classics like Wild Rover and Nancy Whiskey. Very quickly we had to give that up. For one thing, we felt silly pretending to be Irish. Worse, every other band was doing the same thing.
When Darrell joined the band, the repertoire began to expand, and get a lot more interesting. Darrell shared our enthusiasm for Newfoundland songs, and we pushed more and more of them into the show. Surprisingly, with the exception of warhorses like I’se the By, local bands did not play much Newfoundland material in those days. We also started playing weird rock and folk covers, and really thinking about arrangements. All of a sudden our audience started getting a lot younger. The generally conservative pub owners complained that their regulars could not get in when we played, and they did not like our cavalier attitude to their beloved Irish songs. On the other hand, they liked the hundreds of college kids who showed up to see us play, kids who brought an incredible energy to that scene.
Somewhere in those years I heard the Pogues for the first time. Everyone loved their cover of Dirty Old Town, but this was the song that really caught my attention. I had spent my high school years in punk bands, which were all about do-it-yourself attitude, writing about your own life, and self-belief. I was always trying to put some of that ethos into: Rankin Street. To that end, we played harder and faster than everyone else, and our ‘who gives a f*ck’ attitude to performance was pure hardcore. We were always up for an odd idea, and we pushed the envelope as far as we could. That said, musically, however, it was not really happening. Too often our arrangements were bog-standard pub band.
Dark Streets of London was a watershed for me. Here was a song that had everything I loved about 1980s hardcore – pure honesty in the lyrics, a defiantly local subject, a narrator who didn’t give a shit about the tone and quality of his voice, a massive sense of humour, and best of all, a stumbling, driving shuffle riff, a hook which came almost entirely from the accordion. You could not even hear the guitar, and anyway, it wasn’t important. The piano accordion riff was both the train driver and the engine.
I remember getting a tape of this song, and playing it over and over again on the crap boom-box that had followed me from high school. Up till then, astonishingly, I rarely played the accordion with the band, just using it for the odd instrumental. I didn’t really like the way the accordion was played in songs by Newfoundland bands of the time. Figgy Duff aside, most of them used it like right-handed piano, playing simple melody along with the singer. Now I knew exactly what to do with the accordion. It would function like the left hand parts of a rockabilly piano, or maybe a blues harmonica – play the riffs, push the rhythm, and provide a powerful new sound to the songs we were working on.
It seems obvious now, but when we started Great Big Sea shortly after, the distinctive accordion parts of songs like What Are You At and Great Big Sea came directly from that idea.
The Pogues have dozens of amazing songs, but this one is a really special. For me, it was a template.
And now the winter comes down
I can’t stand the chill
That comes to the streets round Christmastime
And I’m buggered to damnation
And I haven’t got a penny
To wander the dark streets of London
-"Dark Streets of London", from the album Red Roses For Me
www.pogues.com