1. The PoguesIf I Should Fall From Grace With God
The Pogues changed my life in the same way that a number of roots rock bands like Green On Red, The Long Ryders or Rank And File changed me. They took traditional music and made it their own. I had always grown up loving traditional country music, but I didn’t like the politics behind it and I didn’t like the guys I knew who listened to it.
When I was a kid, my dad went to England and came back with The Pogues’ Rum Sodomy & The Lash. That’s how I found out about them. I became a huge fan because they had the heart of punk rock and were in love with traditional music.
The reason why I like If I Should Fall From Grace With God is that I felt it was the peak of them having the punk heart – on a song like ‘Bottle Of Smoke’ – while also having a romanticism about them. That album incorporated different styles of music; ‘Turkish Song Of The Damned’ had a Middle Eastern feel, they sang a song about south Australia, while ‘Fiesta’ had a Spanish vibe.
I was a kid. I had never been out of the country. I had been to two states in the US. All of a sudden, I was hanging out with these wild Irish guys, who were passionate young men playing Irish music influenced by world music. It became a huge record for me – a record that meant you could take traditional music and make it into whatever you wanted.
When I was growing up with punk rock, the romanticism of music took a back seat. A song like ‘Fairytale Of New York’ is a very romantic tune. It is bigger than [something by] an angry young kid, singing in his basement. Even when I was trying to act tough as a kid, I was always a fan of the classic ballad and this album has huge songs that could have been written by the great songwriters – but they would have been written by the great songwriters whilst on a drunken bender.
My buddy and I would play drinking games to this record. When we played ‘Fiesta’ we’d jump on a table we had and we’d break the table. At the end of the night we’d play the ballads – but neither of us had girlfriends – and we’d just dream we were in Ireland or any place that was better than we were. I have always seen music as an escape.
I was doing a reading for Motel Life in London in a bar that used to be Shane MacGowan’s drinking bar. I was really nervous in case he was there – I assumed he practically lived there – and I hadn’t done many readings at that point. I did the reading and afterwards Shane comes up to me and fakes trying to steal a book from the merch stall, which I thought was really sweet. Then, he kissed my hand. I swear to god, I have never had my whole arm feel like it had been electrified. It was like being kissed for the first time. I couldn’t sleep the whole fucking night – I just walked around London thinking "I met Shane MacGowan and he didn’t make fun of me and he kissed my hand." It was one of the greatest nights I have ever had.
