The Pogues

Irish folk rock, 1984: a sad state of affairs. The country's leading trad-inspired bands, Horslips and Planxty, had broken up, and the Chieftains hadn't yet learned how to import rockers onto their albums to get a backbeat. In stumbled the Pogues, with bad habits, bad teeth, and the future former Mrs. Elvis Costello. Elvis produced their second album, Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, and if you listen to "The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn," you'll definitely hear why the blue-blooded folkies had their knickers in a major twist. The Pogues follow a crooked road, through Next Steps.

The gradual disintegration of the Pogues runs in a parallel streak with front man Shane MacGowan's alcoholic excess and his increasingly incoherent vocals. If you follow a path from "Lullaby of London" to "Misty Morning, Albert Bridge" to "Rain Street" (on albums three through five, respectively), you can hear why, after Hell's Ditch, the Pogues and MacGowan parted ways. Two more Pogues albums followed, with MacGowan going on to lead a band called the Popes, but it was all epilogue. MacGowan covers Diamond, roughly, and shows us more of his gruff genius, in Deep Cuts.

By way of epilogue, "Danny Boy" shows faux Pogues Shane MacGowan and the Popes covering a faux Irish standard, but then there's authentic Irishman and world-class playwright Brendan Behan's "The Auld Triangle" from his excellent play The Quare Fellow. And what better benediction than the bittersweet farewell of "The Parting Glass"? "And all I've done for want of wit/To memory now I can't recall/So fill to me the parting glass/Goodnight, and joy be with you all."

It wasn't just because the Clash's Joe Strummer stepped in as lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist that the Pogues claimed the crown as the world's premier punk-folk act; they were tipping sacred cows from sunrise, day one. First, their original name, Pogue Mahone, was Gaelic for a slightly ruder translation of "kiss my behind." Secondly, their visionary lead drunkard/singer, Shane MacGowan, made Sid Vicious seem the model of sobriety and Austin Powers the crowning achievement of British dentistry by comparison. Finally, they were belligerent, rude, short-tempered, unreliable, noisy, ill-mannered, and wild — and we wouldn't have wanted them any other way. God bless the Pogues.