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 Elvis Costello, who produced their second album, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, featuring the powerful, timeless ballad "A Pair of Brown Eyes". The Pogues follow a crooked road through Next Steps.

The gradual disintegration of the Pogues runs in a parallel streak with frontman Shane MacGowan's alcoholic excesses and his increasingly incoherent vocals. If you trace a line from "If I Should Fall From Grace With God" through "Misty Morning, Albert Bridge" to "Summer In Siam" (on records three through five, respectively), you can hear why, after 1990's 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.

Shane MacGowan and the Popes showed there was no point going down without a fight by cutting "That Woman's Got Me Drinking", and there's real pleasure to be found in the snarling energy with which that outfit invests Neil Diamond's "Cracklin' Rosie". "Lullaby of London" captures the reunited Pogues live in 2001, while for a 2005 performance of "Fairytale of New York" Katie Melua steps in for Kirsty MacColl . . . and there was nary a dry eye in the house.

It wasn't just because the Clash's Joe Strummer briefly 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". Second, their visionary lead drunkard and singer, Shane MacGowan, made Sid Vicious seem the model of sobriety and Austin Powers the crowning achievement of dentistry by comparison. Finally, they were belligerent, rude, short-tempered, unreliable, noisy, ill-mannered, and wild. And those were just the good points.