Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues

In the 1980s and ’90s the Pogues inspired an entire music genre—Celtic punk—with their combination of original punk-rock song mixed with traditional Celtic music played by British musicians celebrating their Irish heritage. Fearnley was an original member of the Pogues—short for “pogue mahone,” or “kiss my arse”—and his book is less a traditional history of its career then a relentlessly detailed and paced view of the band’s first nine years, from its formation in 1982 by Fearnley and lead singer Shane MacGowan to the band having to fire MacGowan in 1991 for his increasingly self-destructive behavior. Fearnley celebrates how MacGowan was the band’s fiery engine in its first years, a charismatic front man and songwriter whose “carriage, his contours, the attitude he copped, from which he did not break, were simultaneously authentic and artful.” But even while the band was achieving recognition and support from stars like Elvis Costello and Bob Dylan—and almost constant touring—MacGowan slipped into a haze of drugs and alcohol that Fearnley unflinchingly recounts. “I couldn’t understand how anyone could let himself become so bereft of responsibility for anything and yet write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening pity for the human condition.” Fans of the Pogues—which occasionally reforms and tours—will be moved by this brutally honest account of a still much beloved band. [em](May) [/em]