Latest news with #ThePogues'
Perth Now
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Bob Dylan joined by Billy Strings for cover of All Along The Watchtower
Bob Dylan performed 'All Along the Watchtower' with Billy Strings. During his latest set at Willie Nelson's 'Outlaw Music Festival Tour' in Spokane, Washington, on May 22, the music legend performed a fresh rendition of his 1967 hit at the piano with the 32-year-old bluegrass rocker on acoustic guitar. At another stop on the tour, Dylan performed 'Mr. Tambourine Man' live for the first time in 15 years. Near the end of his set, on May 13, he dusted of his 1965 classic. The evening ended with another surprise as Dylan covered The Pogues' 'A Rainy Night in Soho' to close off the 13-track setlist. Dylan also performed 'Forgetful Heart' for the first time since 2015 and many more live rarities. Earlier this year, two pages of Bob Dylan's lyrics sold for more than half a million dollars. The 83-year-old singer was the subject of a sale from Julien's Auctions in Nashville, with over 60 items - including photos, music sheets, a guitar, and art work - going under the hammer, generating almost $1.5 million in both in-person and online bidding and sales. And the typewritten two pages of Dylan's drafted lyrics to 'Mr. Tambourine Man' accounted for one third of the total sales, with the winning bidder agreeing to fork out $508,000. The yellow sheets of paper also included the folk legend's handwritten annotations to the three drafts of the 1965 songs. The next highest-selling items were a 1968 oil-on-canvas painting created and signed by the 'Lay Lady Lay' singer in 1968 and a custom 1983 Fender guitar which he had owned and played, which went for $260,000 and $225,000 respectively. All but 10 of the lots were from the personal collection of late music journalist Al Aronowitz, and his son Myles told the New York Times newspaper he'd found Dylan's lyrics while searching through 250 boxes of his father's "remarkable" collection over a period of several years.
RTÉ News
24-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Happy birthday Bob! A guide to Dylan's best narrative songs
Analysis: To mark Dylan's birthday this weekend, a decade by decade guide to the songs showing the master storyteller's narrative strengths With the recent release of the Timothée Chalamet -starring biopic A Complete Unknown, Bob Dylan's popularity has undergone a resurgence lately. While the film tells the true story of Dylan's rise to fame, it leaves out one crucial fact: Dylan himself is a master storyteller. Dylan's career is defined by stratospheric highs, interminable lows and endless reinventions. He's been a folkster, a country rocker, a born-again bible-beater and even a singer of nursery rhymes, both traditional and original (1990's Under the Red Sky, an album written for his youngest child at the time). And he's still going. Dylan has been on the Never-Ending Tour ever since 1988 (covering The Pogues' A Rainy Night In Soho lately). He's only took a single year off touring since and that was 2020, when the entire world ground to a halt. Even still, it was the year Dylan released his album Rough and Rowdy Ways, which ranks among his finest. Beyond his divisive vocals (memorably described by Haruki Murakami in his 1985 novel End of the World and Hard-Boiled Wonderland as sounding "like a little kid staring out the window at the rain"), Dylan's entire discography is defined by his rich literary style. His lyrics are witty, intelligent and often narrative. Over the past 60 years, Dylan has penned strange and sometimes difficult to follow stories – for which he was eventually awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature. Although controversial at the time, the award was entirely deserved. Here's a list featuring a single song from each decade showing Dylan's narrative strengths and abilities. 1960s Honourable mentions: Desolation Row, Talkin' World War III Blues, Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands In this song, which is criminally absent from A Complete Unknown, Dylan gives an account of the real-life murder of a black barmaid by a wealthy young white man. Literary critic and leading Dylan scholar Christopher Ricks counts it among Dylan's finest songs, referring to his subtle invocation of biblical imagery. An angry, embittered, and deeply political song, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll builds to the reveal of the murderer's punishment: a mere six month's imprisonment. 1970s Honourable mentions: Hurricane, Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, Black Diamond Bay, Romance in Durango Co-written with clinical psychologist and theatre director Jacques Levy, Isis tells the story of a mysterious graverobber and his troubled marriage. The song is set in an unfamiliar land, with sloped pyramids "embedded in ice" and harkens to fantasy and myth like Lovecraft's The Quest of Iranon or the Odyssey. Like the Odyssey, Isis tells the story of an ambitious man separated from his wife, recounting his adventures and journey home. The song is a true epic, accompanied by one of Dylan's finest vocal performances. Isis was released during a particularly strong narrative period for Dylan; the album on which it features, 1976's Desire is packed with stories of thwarted love, doomed people and miscarriages of justice. 1980s Man In the Long Black Coat Dylan is unusually candid in his discussion of this track in his memoir Chronicles: Volume One, describing the song as his version of Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line: "a song he'd always considered to be up there at the top, one of the most mysterious and revolutionary of all time, a song that makes an attack on your most vulnerable points". Man in the Long Black Coat tells a story familiar to folk standards like Black Jack Davy – a woman leaves her partner for a mysterious interloper – but Dylan conjures a unique sort of menace that sets it apart. Highlands Honourable mentions: Handy Dandy, Tryin' to Get to Heaven A nearly seventeen-minute track, Highlands demonstrates Dylan's novelistic command of dialogue. The song comes to life during a conversation between the speaker of the song and a waitress in a Boston restaurant around the six-minute mark. The conversation reads as an allegory for Dylan's sometimes contentious relationship to the press: the speaker, by various means, attempts to deny the woman's requests of him, echoing Dylan's sometimes difficult interview style. His dialogue is clipped and sparse, recalling the work of Cormac McCarthy, while retaining a wry knowingness that is all his own. 2000s Ain't Talkin' Honourable mentions: Mississippi, Tweedle Dee & Tweedle Dum, Thunder on the Mountain A song in which Dylan's speaker wanders through a seemingly corrupted idyll. As a narrative, the song is sparse. As an allusive poem, the song is as dense as Dylan has ever managed – managing to reference Wild Mountain Thyme in the same breath as biblical apocalypses. A bubbling sense of unease haunts the song, which ends up feeling like a snapshot of a cold, dead world bereft of light and good. 2010s Tin Angel Honourable mentions: Tempest, Scarlet Town Of all the songs featured here, Tin Angel is perhaps the most direct in its storytelling. It also feels familiar; Dylan is replaying his old tricks here, returning to the narrative of the runaway bride. But this time, there is progression – the spurned husband confronts his wife and her new lover. The dialogue is again the highlight: Dylan conjures three distinct character voices, interchanging between the three in a climactic argument. The resolution of the song is as grim as Dylan has ever gotten. Listen with the lights down low. 2020s Murder Most Foul Dylan's longest track to date (thirty seconds longer than Highlands), Murder Most Foul is a challenging song: 17 minutes, no chorus, and a sparse arrangement of hushed, meditative piano and percussion. Named after a quote from Hamlet, it finds Dylan retelling the assassination of JFK. The song later introduces late radio DJ Wolfman Jack as a character, imagining conversations between Kennedy and Wolfman in the afterlife. The song is at once an elegy, a conspiracy, and a masterpiece.
Sunday World
16-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Sunday World
Shane MacGowan's sister and widow delighted by Bob Dylan's cover of Pogues' classic
Fans have shared clips of the performance online with one describing it as "the most beautiful thing I've ever heard' Shane MacGowan's sister Siobhan and his widow Victoria Mary Clark have both hailed Bob Dylan's cover version of The Pogues' classic 'A Rainy Night in Soho' that he performed live this week. Dylan took to the stage during the opening night of Willie Nelson's Outlaw Music Festival Tour, which the American rocker was co-headlining. The iconic singer and song-writer sat down at the piano at the close of his gig at the Talking Stick Resort Amphitheatre in Phoenix, Arizona, on Tuesday, IrishCentral reports. It was the first time he performed the song, which was originally written by MacGowan, who died in November 2023, live. Fans have shared clips of the performance online – with one describing it as "the most beautiful thing I've ever heard." Bob Dylan News in 90 Seconds - May 16th A delighted Siobhan posted on social media that it would have meant the world to her brother. "When I was a kid I listened to the constant sound of @bobdylan playing in Shane's room," Siobhan wrote. Victoria Mary Clark said her husband "spent hours and hours and hours listening to Dylan and watching footage of him and he was very grateful for the mutual respect." The US star had invited The Pogues to open for him during his North American tour in the autumn of 1989 but MacGowan infamously collapsed at London's Heathrow Airport, leaving the rest of the band to fly out to California without him. We need your consent to load this Social Media content. We use a number of different Social Media outlets to manage extra content that can set cookies on your device and collect data about your activity. Please review your details and accept them to load the content Rolling Stone reported afterwards that MacGowan missed all the Dylan shows but was forgiven when Dylan last played in Dublin in November 2022 when MacGowan was special guest at the concert at the 3Arena. During the gig, Dylan only addressed the crowd once, to send a greeting to "one of our favourite artists', Hot Press reported. "We hope he makes another record soon," Dylan said, adding: "'Fairytale Of New York' is close to all of our hearts and we listen to it every Christmas..." MacGowan joined Dylan and his entourage at the InterContinental in Dublin after the gig as, according to friend and manager Joey Cashman: "Bob was very keen to meet up with Shane when he was in Dublin and his people were on a fair bit trying to set it up. "There's a lot of respect there and Dylan was the one who booked the Pogues to open for him back in the day, even though Shane didn't actually make it,' he told the Irish Sun at the time. "I have a theory that Dylan didn't realise Shane never made it out to the States because the band were so good without him. "That tour was crazy and I became good friends with Dylan's son Jesse along the way. "Dylan had his people get in contact and Shane was reluctant because he wasn't feeling well but then he decided he wanted to go, he couldn't miss out on the chance. "We went to the hotel and let reception know that Shane had arrived. Bob was downstairs within ten minutes. "So we had a meal in his hotel on Sunday. It turned into a late one." Last year, the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, hosted the "They Gave The Walls A Talking" exhibition, which was on loan from EPIC: The Irish Emigration Museum in Dublin. Dedicated to the legacy of The Pogues and MacGowan, it was the first time an exhibit dedicated to someone other than Dylan was featured.
Perth Now
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Perth Now
Bob Dylan dusts off Mr. Tambourine Man for first performance in 15 years
Bob Dylan performed 'Mr. Tambourine Man' live for the first time in 15 years. The music legend performed at Willie Nelson's 'Outlaw Music Festival Tour' on Tuesday (13.05.25) and near the end of the set he dusted of his 1965 classic. The evening ended with another surprise as Dylan covered The Pogues' 'A Rainy Night in Soho' to close off the 13-track setlist. Dylan also performed 'Forgetful Heart' for the first time since 2015 and many more live rarities. Earlier this year, two pages of Bob Dylan's lyrics sold for more than half a million dollars. The 83-year-old singer was the subject of a sale from Julien's Auctions in Nashville, with over 60 items - including photos, music sheets, a guitar, and art work - going under the hammer, generating almost $1.5 million in both in-person and online bidding and sales. And the typewritten two pages of Dylan's drafted lyrics to 'Mr. Tambourine Man' accounted for one third of the total sales, with the winning bidder agreeing to fork out $508,000. The yellow sheets of paper also included the folk legend's handwritten annotations to the three drafts of the 1965 songs. The next highest-selling items were a 1968 oil-on-canvas painting created and signed by the 'Lay Lady Lay' singer in 1968 and a custom 1983 Fender guitar which he had owned and played, which went for $260,000 and $225,000 respectively. All but 10 of the lots were from the personal collection of late music journalist Al Aronowitz, and his son Myles told the New York Times newspaper he'd found Dylan's lyrics while searching through 250 boxes of his father's "remarkable" collection over a period of several years. He noted: 'He never threw anything away." The journalist had previously claimed Dylan had written the original drafts in his New Jersey home after splitting from girlfriend Suze Rotolo. According to the auction house,Al wrote in a 1973 article: "Bob Dylan wrote 'Mr. Tambourine Man' one night in my house in Berkeley Heights, N.J., sitting with my portable typewriter at my white formica breakfast bar in a swirl of chain-lit cigaret [sic] smoke, his bony, long-nailed fingers tapping the words out on my stolen, canary-colored Saturday Evening Post copy paper while the whole time, over and over again, Marvin Gaye sang 'Can I Get a Witness?' from the 6-foot speakers of my hi-fi in the room next to where he was, with Bob getting up from the typewriter each time the record finished in order to put the needle back at the start.(sic)" He later 'found a waste basket full of crumpled false starts" and though he was about to take them to the trash, he took out the "crumpled sheets, smoothed them out, read the crazy leaping lines" and then put them in a file.
Telegraph
24-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Pogues' Jem Finer: ‘Shane MacGowan could be maddening but inspiring'
When are The Pogues not The Pogues? That's the question plaguing Jem Finer, one of the Irish folk-punk band's founding members, as he strides around Hampstead Heath, his little dog Bonzo trotting on ahead. He has lived nearby for 'almost 31 years, exactly,' he tells me. It matters because this May, the band will embark on its first headline tour in 10 years with the glaring absence of Shane MacGowan, the group's riotous frontman, who died in November 2023 and with whom he co-wrote Fairytale of New York. 'I wouldn't call it The Pogues,' says Finer, who these days is more paterfamilias than punk in his navy cords and peacoat. 'But I still haven't figured out what I would call it'. With MacGowan gone, the amiable 69-year-old will take the stage with Spider Stacy, and James Fearnley. 'I don't feel comfortable, the three of us, [all] original members, calling ourselves [The Pogues].' A US tour in September will follow the UK dates, which are being billed as a celebration to mark 40 years since Rum Sodomy & the Lash, the band's breakthrough second album, which was hailed for reviving Irish music. MacGowan 's absence makes this tour 'more poignant' – and also possible. 'This probably wouldn't be happening in this way if Shane was here, so it's what it is,' he adds, referring to MacGowan's poor physical health. Finer appreciates the irony in The Pogues' enduring Irish image (their look was equal parts 'Brendan Behan and typical Irish granddad', to quote MacGowan). 'Most of us weren't actually Irish,' says Finer, who plays various instruments including the banjo, mandolin, and the hurdy-gurdy – a medieval mechanical violin, and his latest passion. Of the original line-up, only Chevron was Irish by birth, although MacGowan, who was born in Pembury, Kent, had Irish parents. That said, it would be 'very negative' to stay within one's own experiences, adds Finer. 'Especially now when there is so much xenophobia. That would be caving into those who say the only good thing is our thing'. 'From the Irish point of view, the band had a big effect on the young Irish community in London. They went from being slagged off for being Irish to being something cool,' he adds. The odd thing was being a group of 'young, predominantly middle-class people', and singing sea shanties or songs about people working on the railway. 'Sometimes people would say, why are you doing that? But I think it's perfectly fine to do that. You're not saying, I am a sailor, or, I'm working on a railway. They're valid stories about people who are being subjugated to quite sh-t conditions and the songs keep something alive.' There was also an irony in Finer making it as a musician at all. Born in Stoke-on-Trent in 1955, he graduated with a degree in computer science from Keele University and no clue what to do. His father, Samuel, was a giant of post-war British political science, winding up as a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. 'I was always told I was tone deaf. I'd tried to play guitar, but couldn't,' says Finer. That changed after moving to London in 1977, where he squatted with friends in Burton Street, just south of Euston, and met MacGowan. Everyone played music. 'One friend thought it was funny when I said I couldn't play. They gave me a guitar. Someone wrote out some chords and one thing led to another,' he adds, notably a West End New Romantic club called Cabaret Futura, when the band that would become The Pogues played their first gig in early 1981. Life with The Pogues was 'by turns wonderful, ecstatic, thrilling, boring, horrible, oppressive, heartbreaking. It was a whole life in itself. It was like a family of weird brothers and occasional sisters.' While MacGowan was self-destructing via drink and drugs, Finer was struggling to balance rock star life with being a young, married father of two. 'For a long time, it was very difficult. Marcia, my wife, and I, we'd always had this idea that we'd both be doing our own thing, but supporting each other and being around.' The couple met in early 1981: they had both enrolled on a course to learn to teach English as a foreign language back when Finer was juggling odd jobs. Their daughters, Ella and Kitty, were born in 1983 and 1985. Marcia went on to become a visual artist. I wonder if having a young family kept his own rock star antics in check. 'I'm not a saint. I've always enjoyed having a few drinks and I particularly enjoyed smoking dope in vast quantities and spent decades quite stoned, but I wouldn't say I had any antics. My family was the most important thing, and I would have stopped being in the band if that had been necessary. And there were times when I offered to stop. Somehow we got through it. I wouldn't say without…,' he pauses. 'There are probably scars.' By 1991, MacGowan had become so unreliable that the band sacked him, but Finer's close friendship with the singer would last for the rest of his life. 'Shane could be maddening. He could take a few weeks to finally get around to doing something but once we got down to working he was always funny and inspiring and a generous collaborator,' he says. Breathing space from The Pogues' eventual breakup, in 1994, sent Finer in other directions, not least on a quest to compose a piece of music that will last for 1000 years. Longplayer began playing 25 years ago, at the dawn of the millennium, and Finer hopes it will continue until the end of the year 2999 with one proviso: 'I'm not taking any steps to ensure it carries on after I'm dead – I only want it to carry on for as long as the people want it to.' This stops the project from sliding into the realms of vanity, he believes. He traces the impetus back to being unnerved aged five, on learning that his grandfather had written an autobiography. 'All I could imagine was that if you were writing a book about your life, you'd have to be sitting constantly writing, and all you could be writing [about] was that you were writing about the act of sitting writing. It was this horrible nightmarish loop. Longplayer is maybe some way of making sense of that weird conception: an autobiography. I've made something that marks every instant.' Longplayer works by applying precise rules to six short pieces of music. Six sections from these pieces – one from each – are playing simultaneously from a computer. It can be heard via a live web stream, or at its London base, in a lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf, where Finer has a studio. To mark the project's 25th anniversary, the music will be played at the Roundhouse, in Camden, next month for 1000 minutes. People can watch shifts of six to 12 people, reading from a graphic score, playing the music from 7.20am until midnight. 'In terms of mortality, Longplayer gives me optimism,' he says, by way of justifying the project. 'The idea of something that has this longevity built into it.' He is writing a song that encapsulates the rules you need to know to play Longplayer 'because songs are their own time capsules that can go on for hundreds of years' – regardless of what the band that is playing them is called.
