Play it Again, Shane

I first head the Pogues courtesy of a crucial mixtape.

My childhood friend Charlie (who also goes by Keith ... it's a long story) was sent off for a semester abroad somewhere in the U.K. during my freshman year of college in 1985. During the course of same, Charlie sent me a care package filled with a trove of Anglophillic ephemera. Amidst distressed issues of Melody Maker and NME and a fetching Peter & the Test Tube Babies t-shirt, he'd included a mixtape of the tunes he was hearing and getting excited about. On that tape, he included large swathes of It'll End in Tears by This Mortal Coil (wrongly credited by Charlie as Cocteau Twins ... yes, I realize there's an argument to be waged there), the Jesus & Mary Chain (wrongly credited by Charlie, again, as Psychocandy, which was, of course, the name of their debut LP) and various other tracks by the Stranglers and the afore-cited Peter & the Test Tube Babies. Side two of the tape, however, was rife with selections from the album below, the Pogues' debut long-player, Red Roses for Me.

While my dorm-mates in Huffman Hall were pointedly less than enthused about my giddily frequent, high volume airings of the offerings on side one (despite it being the mid-point of the `80s, the majority of the student body of Denison University still tenaciously adhered to a steady diet of yawnsome classic crapola like Van Morrison, the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Goddamn Dead), the pugnaciously robust folk-punk of the first Pogues album won a surprising amount of converts. As such, while many extol the merits of the more expansively produced Rum, Sodomy & the Lash or the hackneyed warhorse that was Should I Fall from Grace with God (featuring the laboriously overplayed "Fairytale of New York"), my heart still belongs to Red Roses for Me.

Happy St. Patrick's Day!