Month: December 2023

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Merry Christmas from Singapore

 

 

I don’t know if all Singaporeans love Christmas, but one thing’s for certain.  All Singaporean department stores love Christmas.  For instance, Tanglin Mall, which isn’t far from my workplace, has had a big Christmas tree up in front of its entrance since October.  That was before I’d even considered hanging up my orange, pumpkin-shaped fairy lights for Halloween.  Evidently, making a few extra bucks out of the festive season by starting it in mid-autumn was too good an opportunity to miss.

 

Meanwhile, the silvery monster of a Christmas tree pictured above this entry was to be found in the lobby of a much larger mall, Takashimaya.  (I’m absolutely not a fan of shopping centres, but Takashimaya has the saving grace of being home to Singapore’s best bookshop, Kinokuniya.)  When I was in there yesterday, I couldn’t believe the number of people who were swarming around the base of the tree, attempting to fit the thing into the backgrounds of their selfies.

 

Of course, the madness of celebrating Christmas in Singapore, or in any country that’s not far off the equator, is that on one hand you’re surrounded by Christmas cards and Christmas decorations featuring snow, icicles, frozen lakes, carol singers wrapped in overcoats and woollen hats, sleighs, reindeer, and a thousand other cold, wintery things.  While on the other hand, the temperature outside is in the thirties and the ground feels hot enough to fry an egg on.  This crazy incongruity was nicely captured by the committee at my local Hawkers’ Centre*, who this year decided to erect their Christmas tree beside a palm tree.

 

 

But anyway…  A very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all.

 

* A Hawkers’ Centre is a complex packed with stalls where you can buy all manner of food and drink at affordable prices.  In fact, in expensive Singapore, Hawkers’ Centres are probably the only places were foodies can indulge themselves without also bankrupting themselves.  

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Rab Foster does some ghostwriting

 

© Spiral Tower Press

 

Rab Foster, the pseudonym under which I write fantasy – and usually the sweaty sub-genre of fantasy known as sword-and-sorcery – fiction, has just had a second short story published this month.  Entitled The Ghost Village, it appears in issue 8 of the magazine Whetstone from Spiral Tower Press.

 

Described by editor Jason Ray Carney as straddling ‘the line between folk horror and sword and sorcery’, The Ghost Village was inspired by Thailand’s San Phra Phum or, as they’re known in English, Thai spirit houses.  These are the miniature buildings you see outside nearly every Thai home and business, held aloft like bird-tables on wooden pillars, fragranced by smouldering incense sticks and often garlanded with flowers.  Their raison d’être is to provide accommodation for the spirits residing on the premises and to keep those spirits contented, so that they don’t move into the human building and cause ghostly high-jinks there.

 

Once, when I was in the northern Thai city of Chiang Mai, I was passing a construction site.  An old building had just been demolished and a new one was about to be built there.  Nearly everything in the area had been flattened and a digger was prowling around, removing the last of the rubble.  But remaining untouched and intact in the middle of the site were a pair of spirit houses.  Apparently, it’s a bad idea to destroy spirit houses and render their inhabitants homeless.  So even Thai developers who wouldn’t think twice about bulldozering an old human property need to exercise caution in how they treat the miniature dwelling next door to it.

 

 

I had long wanted to write a creepy story about Thai spirit houses, but was wary of penning something that used Thai people’s religious beliefs and cultural practices for a cheap scare.  As someone who’s lived long-term in Asia and Africa, I find stories that have Westerners blundering into ‘exotic’ – shorthand for ‘less civilised’ – countries where they run foul of some local deity, myth or piece of folklore extremely patronising.  Basically, they steal a bit of someone else’s culture to use as a monster or some other source of horror.  So, it made sense to me to take the basic concept of spirit houses – flesh-and-blood people maintaining a second house where beings from the incorporeal world can reside – and put it in a fantasy context instead. Then I could build up my own mythology around it.  What I ended up with was Rab Foster’s latest published story, The Ghost Village. 

 

For more information about Whetstone magazine, click here.  And issue 8, which contains my story and a dozen other works of short fiction and poetry, can be downloaded here for free.

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The return of Paul McAllister

 

© Bindweed Anthologies

 

My writing career has seen some unexpected pseudonymous comebacks in late 2023.  Last month, I revived the pseudonym Steve Cashel for a Scottish-set crime story entitled The Folkie, which was published in the online magazine Close 2 the Bone.  Steve Cashel was a penname I’d used a couple of times in the past, most recently in 2011, for short stories that were set in Scotland and had non-horrific and non-fantastical plots.

 

Now Winter Wonderland 2023, the latest in a series of biannual anthologies from Belfast’s Bindweed Magazine, features a short story of mine called The Magician’s Assistant and the name on it is another pseudonym I used in the past and didn’t expect to use again: Paul McAllister.

 

In fact, I only used Paul McAllister once and that was a long time ago indeed.  In the mid-1990s I had a short story called The Darkness Under the Earth published in issue 97 of the venerable Northern Irish literary magazine The Honest Ulsterman, or HU as it was sometimes abbreviated to.  I’d heard that the magazine folded in 2003, but apparently it’s been revived and is on the go again as an online publication.

 

© The Honest Ulsterman

 

I suspected that my real name, Ian Smith, was too boring and non-descript to stick at the top of a story.  Besides, the well-known Scottish writer Iain Crichton Smith, who wrote in both English and Gaelic, was still alive then.  I’d known Iain Crichton Smith slightly, as he’d been the writer-in-residence at Aberdeen University during the last two years I’d studied there, and wanted to spare him the embarrassment of having my work confused with his…  As The Darkness Under the Earth was set in Northern Ireland and was being submitted to a Northern Irish publication, I figured I should stick a vaguely Northern-Irish-sounding name on it and decided on Paul McAllister.

 

In fact, The Darkness Under the Earth was only the second piece of fiction I had published, and it was the first piece to appear in a magazine that paid its writers.  Not that The Honest Ulsterman paid them lavishly.  I received a cheque for five pounds.  Also, I was a bit put-out to discover that the editor had sneakily made the cheque payable to ‘Paul McAllister’, not ‘Ian Smith’, which made it impossible for me to cash.  That cheque now resides in a box somewhere as a historic artefact.

 

Seeing as The Magician’s Assistant was set in Northern Ireland, was a straightforward story based on a couple of incidents I remembered from my childhood there, and had none of the usual horror or fantasy shenanigans I normally write about, I thought when I submitted it to Bindweed Magazine it would be fun to dust down the name of Paul McAllister and attribute it to him.  And hey presto.  Paul McAllister is suddenly back in print.

 

Containing 163 pages of fiction and poetry described as ‘experimental, offbeat and one of a kind’, Winter Wonderland 2023: Bindweed Anthology can now be purchased as a paperback at Amazon US, UK and Canada.  For details of how to read it on Kindle, click here.

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How Terrance left a stamp on me

 

From downthetubes.net

 

If you were to draw up a list of great children’s authors of the 20th century, you’d no doubt end up with names such as Roald Dahl, Alan Garner, Tove Jansson, Clive King, C.S. Lewis, Astrid Lindgren, A.A. Milne, Philip Pullman and Rosemary Sutcliffe.  But you probably wouldn’t think of including Terrance Dicks, who passed away in 2019 at the age of 84.

 

Dicks made his name on television as a scriptwriter and script editor.  He was involved in TV shows like The Avengers (1961-69), Moonbase 3 (1973), Space 1999 (1975-77) and much-maligned ITV soap opera Crossroads (1964-88), and also in a raft of TV adaptations of classic literary works that the BBC broadcast on Sunday evenings and included Great Expectations (1981), Beau Geste (1982), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1982), Oliver Twist (1985), David Copperfield (1986-87) and Vanity Fair (1987).  But his most famous TV work was with the BBC’s long-running science fiction / fantasy show Doctor Who, which kicked off in 1963 and has recently celebrated its 60th birthday with a series of TV specials featuring Scottish actor David Tennant, returning to the role of the Doctor after 13 years, and Rwandan-but-also-Scottish actor Ncuti Gatwa making his debut in the role too.

 

Yet I suspect it was as a writer of books, not TV shows, that Dicks left his greatest legacy.  For he had a huge but unsung influence on the reading habits of British kids during the 1970s and 1980s.

 

Dicks served as script editor on Doctor Who from 1970 to 1975, when the title character was played by Jon Pertwee as an imperious, cape-and-bowtie-wearing, vintage car-driving, karate-chopping man of action.  He also contributed the occasional script to the show during the tenures of Pertwee’s immediate predecessor (Patrick Troughton) and successors (Tom Baker and Peter Davison).  However, it’s for his role as novelist-in-chief for Target Books’ Doctor Who series that I believe Dicks is most important.  The Target series turned most of the Doctor Who TV adventures from the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s into neat, collectible paperbacks, with attractive and colourful covers that were often courtesy of fantasy-artist Chris Achilleos.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

 

Back then, the BBC seemed disinterested in repeating past episodes of Doctor Who.  And if you were a fan of the show, as I was, there were no such things as whole-season box sets, Internet streaming or BBC iplayers, or indeed, DVDs or even video cassette tapes, to allow you to catch up with missed episodes.  And you often missed them, because the show was broadcast early on Saturday evenings, and Saturday was a school-free day when you’d be out of the house doing stuff.  Plus, there were many episodes you hadn’t seen because they’d been broadcast before you were even born…

 

It didn’t help that the BBC wiped many of the early episodes featuring the first two Doctors, William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, assuming that the tapes served no financial or cultural function and only took up unnecessary space in their storerooms.  Considering how the BBC has made millions since then selling the show and its memorabilia to worldwide audiences, they must be really kicking themselves about destroying those episodes now.

 

So, in those days, if you were a ten-year-old wanting to experience past adventures with past Doctors, your only option was to buy the Target novelisations, the majority of which were penned by Dicks in his simple, no-nonsense, fast-moving prose.  Admittedly, I think their quality tailed off a bit in later years as demand for them increased, and the backlog of un-novelised adventures grew greater, forcing Dicks to churn them out at a faster rate, but some of the ones he wrote in the 1970s were great and, even without the TV show behind them, would have stood up as excellent children’s books in their own right: for example, The Auton Invasion (1974), The Abominable Snowmen (1974), The Terror of the Autons (1975), The Three Doctors (1975), The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Talons of Weng-Chiang (1977).

 

The only problem with Dicks’ books was that they tended to make the stories seem much more spectacular on the page than how they’d appeared on the screen.  One of Dicks’ paragraphs, coupled with a child’s imagination, could conjure up incredible settings – teeming utopian cities, vast gladiatorial arenas and huge bustling spaceports.  Whereas on TV these were really poky little BBC studio-sets, bare and shaky and obviously low-budget.  Meanwhile, the immense alien deserts, wastelands and battlefields evoked by Dicks’ prose were invariably, on TV, a big quarry outside London where the show seemed to do 80% of its outdoor filming.  Years later, when you finally got to see those old TV episodes that you’d previously only known through reading the novelisations, they disappointingly looked a bit rubbish.

 

At ten years old, and as a budding writer, I decided to follow Dicks’ example and write my own Target Books Doctor Who novelisation.  I made up my own TV adventure in my head and then wrote it as a book, by hand, in a hundred-page jotter.  I even added my own black-and-white illustrations every dozen pages or so.  The cover (again drawn by me) showed a giant, gauntleted fist grabbing hold of planet Earth.  The book was called Bloodlust of the Sontarans.  The Sontarans were war-like, potato-headed aliens who at that point had appeared on the show a couple of times to menace Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker’s Doctors.  When it was relaunched in 2005, the Sontarans were reintroduced during the Doctor-ship of David Tennant and one of them, played by Dan Starkey, even became a semi-regular character while Matt Smith and Peter Capaldi occupied the lead role.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

 

Two years later, I decided to produce my second Doctor Who novelisation, and for this one I became positively hi-tech.  My parents had given me a typewriter for Christmas, so with that I banged out about 130 paperback-sized pages and then taped them together.  There were no illustrations in this volume, but I drew a colourful, hopefully Chris Achilleos-style cover showing Tom Baker getting his head fried by a futuristic brain-washing machine.  This I titled Destruction of the Daleks and, yes, it featured the show’s number-one villains, the demented, eye-stalked, kitchen-plunger-waving, Nazi pepperpots, the Daleks.  The premise of this novel was that the Daleks had started to be killed off by a newly evolved virus and were going to extreme lengths to locate a cure for it.  I was peeved when, several years later, the BBC seemed to nick my idea and used it as the basis for an official Doctor Who TV adventure, Resurrection of the Daleks, which starred Peter Davison as the fifth Doctor.  I should have sued.

 

As I said, I’m positive Dicks’ books got a lot of kids (who otherwise would have been glued to their TV sets all the time) reading, even if it was the TV connection that got them to open the books in the first place.  And as I’ve suggested in the previous two paragraphs, he was also a big influence on kids who wanted to become writers themselves.  Decades later I still write stuff, and get the occasional thing published, and when I use certain words I find myself reminded of Dicks, who originally showed me how to use those words in certain ways.  For example, ‘croak’ instead of ‘said’, to describe a raspy voice – that came from Dicks using it in reference to the Daleks, who regularly ‘croaked’ the word “Exterminate!”  Or ‘wheezing’ or ‘groaning’ to describe a particular type of sound, like the one made by the Doctor’s space / time-ship, the Tardis, when it was materialising or dematerialising.

 

I ended up with a row of colourful Target / Doctor Who novels on my bookshelf.  I assumed it was just me who was geeky enough to possess such a collection, but then one day in the late 1980s I happened to be in the Edinburgh flat of one Dougie Watt, whom I knew fairly well back then and who is now a novelist and historian.  I noticed a similar row of Target books on his bookshelves too.  However, as Doctor Who was definitely not considered cool in those days, and labelling yourself a Doctor Who fan was about as damaging to your street credibility as announcing that you took a shower once a month or your all-time favourite musical act was Rick Astley, I tactfully pretended I hadn’t noticed them and avoided Who-shaming my friend.

 

After being relaunched in the 21st century, Doctor Who has had many established writers of books, comics, television and films falling over themselves to write either TV-show episodes or spin-off novels for it: for instance, Dan Abnett, David Bishop, Eoin Colfer, Jenny Colgan, Frank Cottrell Boyce, Paul Cornell, Neil Cross, Richard Curtis, Neil Gaiman, Mark Gatiss, A.L. Kennedy, Jamie Mathieson, Michael Moorcock, Patrick Ness, Kim Newman, Simon Nye, Robert Shearman and Toby Whitehouse.  In addition, the three ‘showrunners’ who’ve helmed ‘Nu-Who’ so far, Russell T. Davies, Stephen Moffat and Chris Chibnall – Davies is currently back in charge – all made their names as writers originally.  So it’s a writers’ show through and through.  And I suspect that reading Terrance Dicks’ books back in their childhood helped a good number of those people find their calling as writers.

 

Meanwhile, Russell T. Davies, if you’re reading this and fancy commissioning a script for the next season of Doctor Who with the title Bloodlust of the Sontarans, give me a call.

 

© Target Books / Estate of Chris Achilleos

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The gallus John Byrne

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

According to my well-worn copy of the Collins Pocket Scots Dictionary, the word ‘gallus’ means ‘self-confident, daring and often slightly cheeky or reckless.’  Furthermore: “In Glasgow, the word is often used approvingly to indicate that something is noticeably stylish or impressive…  The word was originally derogatory and often meant wild, rascally and deserving to be hanged from a gallows.”

 

So, self-confident, daring, cheeky, reckless, stylish, impressive, wild and rascally?  ‘Gallus’, then, is surely the ideal word to describe the work of John Byrne, the Scottish artist, playwright and screenwriter who died at the end of last month aged 83.

 

Byrne’s art was bright, bold and always good fun.  When depicting human subjects, which it usually did, it wasn’t afraid to tip into the realm of caricature.  I suppose he could be accused of being a little narcissistic, seeing as his most common subject for portraiture was himself – a retrospective of his work in 2022 exhibited no fewer than 42 self-portraits – but then again, if you’re an artist with an interest in the human visage, your own visage, the one that stares back at you from every mirror, is the most readily available material to work on.  Also, Byrne happily treated his own features to the same caricature he did with other subjects, and didn’t flinch from detailing the ravages of time as he passed from youth into middle and then old age.

 

I particularly like this grizzled and extravagantly moustached self-portrait, which has a skeleton attempting a Muay Thai-type kick against his forehead, presumably in response to the sizeable cigarette he’s smoking.  Incidentally, a nicotine yellowness seems to tinge his white whiskers in places.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

His sense of humour is also apparent in Red and Unread, a portrait of actress Tilda Swinton, who was his partner from 1990 to 2004.  At first sight, it looks like Swinton is dancing a hornpipe in a traditional sailor’s outfit.  Then you notice the large stack of papers her posterior is resting on and the much smaller stack below her right foot.  Byrne meant the big stack to represent the scripts she’d turned down during her career, and the little stack to represent the scripts she’d agreed to do.

 

From National Galleries Scotland / © Estate of John Byrne

 

I wonder how differently Byrne’s own career would have gone if a commission he received in the late 1960s had worked out.  His early work caught the eye of the Beatles and they asked him to create the cover of their next album, to be called A Doll’s House.  Alas, A Doll’s House eventually morphed into 1968’s The White Album and Byrne’s cover was set aside in favour of the famously plain, white one designed by Richard Hamilton and Paul McCartney.  At least, a dozen years later, Byrne’s composition was used on the cover of a Fab Four album, the 1980 compilation The Beatles Ballads.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

 

However, shortly afterwards, plenty of other album-work came Byrne’s way, thanks to the patronage of various Scottish musicians: Gerry Rafferty, both solo and with his band Stealers Wheel; Billy Connolly, who started off as a musician who did a little comedy between songs and ended up as a comedian who did a little music between routines; and Donovan.  I particularly like this cover for the eponymous 1969 album by the folk-rock band the Humblebums, a partnership between Rafferty and Connolly.  This contains the song Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway, which I mentioned in my previous post about Shane MacGowan.

 

© Transatlantic Records / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Actually, Billy Connolly was a subject who, over the years, would be depicted several times on Byrne’s canvases.  Just three months ago, a mural based on a painting Byrne made of a now bespectacled and white-haired Connolly, and placed on the end of a building in Glasgow’s Osbourne Street in honour of the comedian’s 75th birthday, made the headlines.  Developers want to build a new block of 270 students’ flats on the site and plan to cover up the much-loved mural.  Aye, students’ flats.  I’m sure they’ll look lovely.

 

From twitter.com/Lost Glasgow / © Estate of John Byrne

From arthur.io / © Estate of John Byrne

 

Like the Glaswegian artist and writer Alasdair Gray, Byrne was a man of letters as well as one of images and he wrote for the stage and screen.  Perhaps he got a taste for stage-writing while working as a designer for Scotland’s legendary 7:84 theatre company during the early 1970s.  His best-known plays were the Slab Boys trilogy, whose instalments were first performed in 1978, 1979 and 1982, based on Byrne’s experiences working in a carpet factory near his hometown of Paisley after he’d left school in the 1950s.  In 1979, the original Slab Boys also became an episode of the BBC’s Play for Today (1970-84) drama-anthology series, with Gerald Kelly, Joseph McKenna and Billy McColl as the titular slab boys relentlessly flinging jokes, patter and insults at each other in an effort to prevent their work – having to grind and mix colours in a factory basement – from driving them crazy with boredom.

 

For television, he penned 1987’s tragi-comedy series Tutti Frutti, which helped make a star of Robbie Coltrane.  Coltrane plays Danny McGlone, drafted in to sing for an aging Scottish rock ‘n’ roll band called the Majestics after their original singer, Danny’s older brother, dies in a car accident.  The Majestics are truly on their last legs, thanks to their delusional guitarist Vincent Driver (Maurice Roëves), who believes himself to be ‘the iron man of Scottish rock’ but whose personal life is a vicious shambles, and the uselessness of the band’s shifty manager Eddie Clockerty (Richard Wilson).

 

At least Danny finds solace with another new band-member, guitarist Suzy Kettles (played by an also-up-and-coming talent at the time, Emma Thomson).  As Danny gradually falls for Suzy, the Majestics go from bad to worse and to beyond worse, with in-fighting, humiliation, depression, knifings, suicide and dental violence – Danny ends up taking a drill to Suzy’s abusive ex-husband, who’s a dentist.  Despite the show’s darkness, Byrne’s witty writing makes it hilarious.  Tutti Frutti is surely the best thing BBC Scotland has ever produced.  Looking at the channel’s woeful output nowadays, it’s probably the best thing it ever will produce too.

 

© BBC / Estate of John Byrne

 

A Byrne-scripted follow-up to Tutti Frutti, 1989’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, wasn’t as well-received as the previous show, though it did acquaint him with its star, Tilda Swinton, who’d be his partner for the next 14 years.

 

Meanwhile, reading the obituaries for Byrne, I’ve only just discovered that he also wrote scripts for the comedy sketch show Scotch and Wry, which showcased the talents of comedian and actor Rikki Fulton and featured such memorable comic characters as insufferable and incompetent Glasgow traffic policeman Andy Ross, aka ‘Supercop’ (“Okay, Stirling!  Oot the car!”), and unremittingly miserable Church of Scotland minister the Reverend I.M. Jolly.  Scotch and Wry ran for two full seasons from 1978 to 79, its popularity then spawned a series of specials that were broadcast every New Year’s Eve until 1992, and it became a Scottish institution.

 

And no doubt this Hogmanay, I’ll be raising a glass to the memory of the creative powerhouse that was the gallus John Byrne.

 

From wooarts.com / © Estate of John Byrne

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I’m sad to say, he must be on his way

 

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Yakagami

 

It was not a great surprise that on November 30th Shane MacGowan, singer, songwriter, musician, raconteur and front-man of much-loved Anglo-Irish folk-punk band the Pogues, breathed his last.  The highs of his musical and song-writing creativity had always been offset by the lows of his industrial-strength alcohol and drug consumption, and that consumption had famously taken a toll on his health.  Plus, he’d been wheelchair-bound since 2015, when an accident outside a Dublin recording studio resulted in him breaking his pelvis, and he’d spent much of the past year in hospital suffering from viral encephalitis.  The writing had been on the wall for poor old Shane for a long time.

 

Then again, it was absolutely miraculous how long that writing had remained on the wall before the cantankerous old bugger took any notice of it and died.  Indeed, back in the 1990s, the prospect of him making it to even the age of 40 had looked doubtful.  This was when his drunkenness, drug-taking and general unreliability led to him being ejected from the Pogues.  Also, late in the decade, he’d developed a heroin habit so severe that his pal Sinead O’Connor felt compelled to report him to the police before he killed himself with an overdose.

 

Yet in 2017, he celebrated his 60th birthday.  I remember thinking at the time, Wow, six words I never expected to hear together in a sentence: ‘Shane MacGowan’ and ‘celebrated his 60th birthday’.  As a 60th birthday-bash, MacGowan was honoured with a do at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, where some of his most famous compositions were played and sung by a series of notable musical icons and talents like O’Connor, Carl Barat, Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie, Glen Hansard, Cerys Matthews, Glen Matlock and Imelda May.  (Bono was at it too.)  There can’t have been a single dry eye or lump-free throat in the building when, near the end, the birthday boy himself was wheeled onstage to sing Summer in Siam, from the 1990 Pogues album Hell’s Ditch, with his old mate Cave.  He then brought the event to a close with a solo rendition of the venerable Scottish folk song Wild Mountain Thyme.

 

McGowan was not at the top of his game for terribly long.  He appeared on the first five Pogues albums from 1984 to 1990 and on two albums by Shane MacGowan and the Popes in 1994 and 1997, and that was really it.  But during that period his songwriting skills were extraordinary.  On one level, his lyrics were shot through with a grim, unflinching realism, documenting the miseries that his characters, invariably Irish ones, had to endure: poverty, violence, oppression, imprisonment, addiction, homelessness and heartbreak.  Tempering these were mentions of the things that offered their existences some fleeting rays of sunshine: their faith, music and song, enjoying a flutter on the dogs and horses, good company and good booze-ups.

 

Thus, 1987’s Fairy Tale of New York manages in its four minutes to encompass dying old men, drunk tanks, icy winter winds, broken dreams, violent domestic rows, being bedridden on a drip, winning on a horse that ‘came in eighteen to one’, the songs The Rare Old Mountain Dew and Galway Bay, ringing church bells, the New York Police Department choir, Frank Sinatra, singing drunkards…  That’s a lot more ground than your average Christmas song covers.

 

© Stiff Records

 

At the same time, and despite his popular public image of slurring befuddlement, MacGowan was a fiercely intelligent type who littered his songs with references to Irish history, literature, religion and myth.  For instance, The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn, from 1985’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, alludes to the hero of the ‘Ulster’ cycle of Irish mythology in its title and name-checks the following in its lyrics: famed Irish tenor John McCormack, famed Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, IRA man Frank Ryan who led a contingent of Irish soldiers to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, legendary and (literally) legless Dublin beggar and robber Billy in the Bowl, and County Tipperary parish Cloughprior, which is noted for its 15th-century church and cemetery.

 

Meanwhile, Streams of Whiskey from 1984’s Red Roses for Me is about a dream where MacGowan meets the late Irish writer and hellraiser Brendan Behan, who once described himself as ‘a drinker with writing problems’.  Its chorus could be MacGowan’s manifesto: “I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing.”

 

I loved the Pogues and enjoyed much of MacGowan’s later music with the Popes, even though I knew that, being a Protestant from a Unionist community in Northern Ireland, he probably wouldn’t have liked me very much.  Mind you, I’m sure there were some staunch members of my family who reciprocated the feeling, viewing him as an unseemly Irish-Republican rabble-rouser.   He once told an interviewer: “I felt ashamed that I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA, so the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt.”  Later in life, while an invalid in Dublin, he sometimes had former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams drop by to visit him – “He’s a very easy man to talk to,” was MacGowan’s comment.  Then again, he’d been known to wear a Union Jack-patterned coat and, if you’re to believe his widow, the journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, he watched The Crown (2016-23) avidly and shed tears at the deaths of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Diana.  A Northern Irish Proddy I might be, but those are things I wouldn’t countenance doing.

 

In the summer of 1995 I was in New York when I learned that Shane MacGowan and the Popes were performing at a local venue.  So I bought a ticket.  The gig saw a mightily-inebriated MacGowan manage to sing all of two songs.  He spent another fifteen minutes sitting at the edge of the stage clutching his head while the Popes played a couple of instrumentals.  Then he disappeared.  The band did a few more instrumentals, then followed their leader’s example and exited too.  The crowd rioted.  McGowan did not look like a man who had much of a professional future ahead of him.  Or indeed, much of a future.

 

Yet he was in better form three years later when I saw him, with the Popes again, at the Fleadh outdoor music festival at London’s Finsbury Park.  At least, he remained standing and remained singing for the entire set, even if he did have the dazed air of a man who’d just been returned to earth after being abducted and probed by aliens.  And it was touching how, when the performance was done, the crowd kept chanting, “Shane-o!  Shane-o!  Shane-o!” until, finally, a big, appreciative grin spread across his bleary features.

 

And he was better still the next time I saw him, in the early noughties.  He and the rest of the Pogues’ classic line-up – James Fearnley, Jem Finer, Cait O’Riordan, Andrew Ranken, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, the late Philip Chevron and the late Darryl Hunt – had got together for a Christmas tour and they made an appearance at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I was living at the time.  Admittedly, MacGowan’s voice was weaker than it’d been during the glory days of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, but he seemed to raise his game whenever Cait O’Riordan sang onstage with him.  And their rendition of Fairy Tale of New York, with O’Riordan taking the place of Kirsty McColl, who’d died four years earlier, was rather wonderful.

 

The whole event, shameless, nostalgic cash-in though it was, was rather wonderful in fact.  Well, with a combination of the Pogues, Christmas and a few thousand boozed-up Geordies, how could it not be wonderful?

 

© Pan Books

 

In the meantime, in 2001, MacGowan and his missus Victoria Mary Clarke had published a book called A Drink with Shane MacGowan.  A rambling mixture of memoirs, anecdotes, opinions and philosophy related by the great man and recorded and edited by Clarke, A Drink… is very entertaining, fascinating in parts and knowingly hilarious in others.  I particularly liked the bit in it where MacGowan theorises why Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was such an existentialist misery-guts – it was because he was the only man in the whole of Ireland who liked cricket.  Mind you, I suspect there’s some artistic license in MacGowan’s claims that he was drinking, smoking and betting on the horses when he was five years old.

 

Here’s a list of my ten favourite Shane MacGowan songs – ones he wrote and / or ones he sang.

 

The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn (from the 1985 Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash).  Glasses of punch, whiskey, ghosts, banshees, angels, the devil, midnight mass, rattling death-trains, pissing yourself, getting syphilis, kicking in the windows of Euston taverns and decking “some f**king blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids…”  Yes, this is the song that truly sets out the Pogues’ stall.

 

Sally MacLennane (from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash).  Equally rousing and elegiac, this is the perfect song for bidding adieu to an old friend: “I’m sad to say, I must be on my way, so buy me beer and whiskey cos I’m going far away…  FAR AWAY!”

 

© Pogue Mahone / Warner Music Group

 

If I Should Fall from Grace with God (from the 1988 Pogues album of the same name).  And this is the perfect go-wild-on-the-dance-floor song for Pogues fans.

 

Thousands are Sailing (from If I Should Fall from Grace with God).  Written by Philip Chevron, this paean to the millions of Irish people who migrated to North America in the 19th and 20th centuries receives much of its power from MacGowan’s vocals, simultaneously wistful and exultant.  It just didn’t sound the same when, minus MacGowan, the Pogues performed it in the 1990s.  Those who dismiss the band as propagandists for Ireland and all things Irish should note the disdain for the mother-country expressed in the lyrics: “Where e’er we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees, from fear of priests with empty plates, from guilt and weeping effigies.”

 

Down All the Days (from the 1989 Pogues album Peace and Love).  A tribute to the severely-palsied Irish writer Christy Brown, who had to “Type with me toes, drink stout through me nose, and where it’s going to end, God only knows,” this also contains the memorable lines, “I’ve often had to depend upon the kindness of strangers, but I’ve never been asked and never replied if I supported Glasgow Rangers.”

 

What a Wonderful World (a 1992 duet with Nick Cave, available on the 2005 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album B-Sides and Rarities).  MacGowan and Cave’s amusing, but still tender and respectful, version of the Louis Armstrong classic is the song I want played at my funeral.

 

God Help Me (from the 1994 Jesus and Mary Chain album Stoned and Dethroned).  Considering what MacGowan was going through at the time, this melancholic, low-key collaboration with the usually abrasive, feedback-drenched Scottish alternative-rock band the Jesus and Mary Chain is probably aptly titled.

 

That Woman’s got me Drinking (from the 1994 Shane MacGowan and the Popes album The Snake).  This features one of the best choruses ever: “That woman’s got me drinking, look at the state I’m in, give me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bottles of gin!”

 

Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway (from The Snake).  Gerry Rafferty’s rumination on a relationship that’s gone wrong is reworked by MacGowan and the Popes in their own inimitable manner.  I wonder what Rafferty thought about the subtle change made to the lyrics at the very end of his song.  The Rafferty version simply concludes, “Her father didn’t like me anyway.”  The MacGowan one concludes, “Her father was a right c*nt anyway.”

 

Fix It (from the 2010 Alabama 3 album Revolver Soul).  You hardly hear MacGowan on this effort from celebrated London blues-country-electronica-trip-hop-acid-house outfit the Albama 3.  Here and there he spectrally moans one simple, plaintive line.  But his spirit infuses the song, making it rueful yet ultimately soaring.

 

And no, I haven’t put Fairy Tale of New York on this list – because I’ve heard it so many times I’m now a bit sick of it.  After the sad news of November 30th, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s this year’s Christmas number one.

 

© Elektra / Wea

Posted on

Rab Foster puts his boots on

 

© Schlock! Webzine

 

The horror, science-fiction and fantasy fiction ezine Schlock! Webzine has just made its December 2023 edition available.  This contains the first instalment of a two-part story written by Rab Foster, the pseudonym I use when I pen fantasy fiction.

 

Entitled The Boots of the Cat, the story is about the adventures – or misadventures – that befall a handful of mercenaries attached to a military outfit called the Legion of Beasts.  Their legion has been sequestered in the middle of a city that’s less than welcoming to them, both climatically (because it’s raining incessantly) and attitudinally (because the place is bourgeoisie and snooty), and inevitably conflict arises between them and the locals.

 

As the story progresses, the influence of a certain, popular fairy tale becomes more and more apparent.  And no, despite the title The Boots of the Cat, that fairy tale isn’t Puss in Boots.

 

For the next month, the first part of The Boots of the Cat can be read here, while Schlock! Webzine’s home page can be accessed here.