Pick a team, any team

Following on from that last post about Harry Kane, I thought I'd pick an England men's XI from the 21st century. I'm not a master tactician, and I tend to just go with 4-4-2. It may not be formationally perfect, but hopefully they'd make it work.

I'll then pick a further 12 players to make up a squad. 

Here goes

Goalkeeper: Jordan Pickford

Seaman was a great keeper in the 90s, less so in in the 2000s, and Pickford, for all his frailties at club level, has mainly been great for England.

Right back: Kyle Walker

To me, an obvious pick. A really superb defender. Will get his dues when he retires.

Centre backs: Rio Ferdinand and Sol Campbell

Well, it's not going to be Ferdinand and Terry, is it? Ferdinand was the best centre-back in the world for a while, he took defending to a different level, was great in two World Cups. Sol was also absolutely world-class from the late 90s through to the early 2000s.

Left back: Ashley Cole

Of course.

Right midfield: David Beckham

A great player who mainly played really well for England.

Central midfield: Jude Bellingham and Declan Rice

These two are both among the best in the world at the moment, and have played their best in major international tournaments

Left midfield: Raheem Sterling

The best player at Euro 2021. Not a guaranteed pick, but adds pace and finishing, at his best.

Forwards: Harry Kane and Wayne Rooney

I think these two would make it work.

Squad:

12 more squad members - 2 goalkeepers, 4 defenders, 4 midfielders, 2 attackers (maybe with some crossover)

Keepers: Seaman, Paul Robinson

I'd go for Robinson over Joe Hart. Robinson was cut off too early for England. Hart given too many chances.

Defenders: John Stones, Gary Neville, Kieran Trippier, Luke Shaw

Some tricky choices here. Of course, there's John Terry, who'd be in on merit, as he was one of the best centre-backs in the world, but I think you've just got to keep him and Ferdinand apart, and Ferdinand was much better, at his best. Terry would be a bad vibe. Another centre-back? Harry Maguire has mainly been good for England, but I'd go for the flexibility Walker and Trippier have, with Neville and Shaw being the next best specialists.

Midfielders: Bukayo Saka, Paul Scholes, Frank Lampard, Jordan Henderson

There's a logic beyond mere provocation in not picking Gerrard. He just didn't work for England. The potential of early Gerrard was like nothing else. I remember feeling his absence from 2002 was the biggest deal of all. But England underperformed and mainly played drab football for most of the Gerrard years. Sterling, Saka, Bellingham, Rashford, Foden, have bought more fluency and joy to an England shirt than Gerrard and Lampard ever did.

Henderson rather than Carrick, Phillips or Barry. Hargreaves might be a good choice. Joe Cole and Hargreaves were England's best players in 2006. 

Lampard, though it's not saying much, strikes me as the most flexible and least egotistical of Gerrard, Scholes and he. Scholes' ego was more like a self-critical perfectionism. Still, a great player ... starting to be unconvinced. Maybe Gerrard is a better swap for Bellingham. Fuck it. I'm going to include both....

so Gerrard (with extreme misgivings that I've doomed the team to a malfunctioning 0-0 and defeat in penalties in the quarters)

no Foden or Rashford

and the only back-up striker (obvs Sterling and Saka are also forwards in a way) is

Ballon d'Or winner

Michael Owen

obviously, though an interesting detail is that, where a host of top-class league goalscorers - Wright, Ferdinand, Cole, Fowler, even Sutton and Le Tissier - never brought their best for England in the 90s, this century, players with merely ok league records - Crouch, Welbeck, Defoe - have really good England goal scoring records. And Daniel Sturridge was maybe the most talented. 

Here's the story of the Harry Kane

You can compare Harry Kane to two other major 21st century English footballers - David Beckham and Steven Gerrard (my next post will be a combined England men's XI and squad of the century, by the way).

The comparisons to Beckham are fairly straightforward - they went to the same school, are solid, good-natured Essex boys with an astonishing gift for ball-striking, an underrated football brain, they became England captain at a young age, stayed in the role for a long time, led by example, were unfairly pilloried for a heartbreaking World Cup exit, stayed at the club they loved for a long time before a big money move to a giant of Europe where they continued to thrive.

They both speak with a slight impediment which brought undue mockery and was misperceived to be the absence of shrewdness. They are both highly excellent, rather than brilliant, footballers. They're not willo-the-wisp magicians, but they produce countless exceptional exciting moments.

The differences are obvious too. Beckham's ridiculous good looks made him something beyond football, a true megastar, brought him into philosophical conflict, at times, with the football world. He sought stardom and still has it on a vast scale. Harry Kane is all football. We don't know much about him beyond football. He's married with kids, half-Irish, likes American football, no one's really ever said anything bad about him as a person (plenty of football fans don't like him, mind, but that's just football ...). He seems wilfully pleasantly boring (on the Spurs Amazon series from a couple of years ago, you could tell he was popular, pleasant, could be sharp-witted).

The other big difference, of course, is that David Beckham had won everything with Man Utd by the time he left, and Harry Kane has not won anything. This is where the comparison to Steven Gerrard comes in. Yes, Gerrard won plenty of cups at Liverpool, including one of enormous personal and team glory, but, playing for Liverpool, and England, Gerrard did not historically improve the performance of the club, and that is, or should be, a major check on the plaudits he receives. They won the league before, they've won the league since, they did not win the league with. They usually finished around 4th. 

Kane did improve Spurs. They had their best league seasons for more than 30 years with him in the team. They reached semi-finals and finals, even the Champions League final. But they didn't win anything, and they started, in the last few years, to move further away from winning anything. I felt they should have sold him a lot earlier than they did. It was clear they had reached the limit of Kane-team potential. He scored 30 goals in a season and they still didn't win the league or anything else. You couldn't expect him to score 40 goals in a season. They needed to reshape the team in a different form, which is what is now happening.

Does it affect Harry Kane's status that he has never won anything? Yes, of course. The point of football is to win matches and then competitions. Liverpool should have won more when Gerrard was playing for them, they're Liverpool for goodness sake, Spurs should have won ... something ... when Kane was playing for them. Spurs do, historically win things, nowhere near as many as Liverpool, but more than West Ham and Leicester. And they had opportunities. The cruel current reality of the magnificent Harry Kane's record-breaking, consistently excellent career is that he has not seized the moment when the moment came. He missed chances in the 2018 World Cup semi, he started well but faded in the 2021 Euro finals, he played excellently but missed a penalty in the 2022 World Cup quarters. He didn't play well in the 2019 Champions League final or the 2021 League Cup final. However much I and others love and admire Kane, that's the stark reality. 

He has gone to Bayern Munich to win things, is breaking all goalscoring records, and yet, it might still not work out. Bayern win the title every year, but this year Bayer Leverkusen also look indomitable. Bayern are one of the best teams in the Champions League, but still, the chances are they won't win it. 

Harry Kane could score 60 goals this season, score a hat-trick in the deciding game of the German league season and the Champions League final, not to mention the Euros, and yet, if he misses a chance in the last minute of each which means Bayern/England don't win, it is still reasonable to see him as a player who doesn't grasp his moment. It seems almost comically fated to go that way.

2023 Albums and Songs

Time for my list. I've held my nerve, seen off the competitors, and am ready to strike - one of the latest, greatest and Phil de Freitest end of year lists.

I, of course, love the lists. I love the professional lists, and everything they get wrong, god damn them, but particularly I love being on twitter and seeming non-professional music lovers' personal lists, where no one can possibly get anything wrong. 

Pouring over other people's recommendations can be a double-edged sword, as it can point you in in the direction of various albums you hadn't paid much attention to throughout the year, and that's great, but also, you can start to doubt the provenance of your own taste, when most of the albums you love were also on other people's lists. Is this what I really think?

Well, yes, it is. Nothing near the top of my list has newly infiltrated. These are 100% legit my favourites throughout the year (there are a few much lower down which are December discoveries, but I can live with that). 

For me, this has been a great year for music. I always make an end-of-year list of some description, but sometimes (like last year), I just, somewhat grudgingly, throw together 10 or 20 in no particular order. This year, I can honestly say, the top 7 albums might well have been Number 1 in their own right if they'd been released in 2022. I've loved them all, and all of them I came close to considering my favourite. 

And, beneath that top tier, there's a whole chunk of more excellent albums I've derived significant enjoyment from. I'm going to list everything I liked at all and I feel I've got some grip on (that does end up being 100 funnily enough). 

Anyway, let's get cracking.

1. The Ballad of Darren - Blur

Considering I've said I like the Top 7 pretty much equally, maybe I could have chosen something cooler than Blur as Number 1. But my stats tell me I listened to this album all the way through way more than anything else, and, yes, it is definitely, right now, my favourite.

It may not contain Blur's greatest ever songs, but it's the first Blur album which has no songs I dislike. I have loved lovable mockney pop scamps Blur for 30 years even though my main taste in music for the last 25 years has been sad-old-man music. Well, this is Blur's sad-old-man album, and they do it right. This is the most singer-songwriterly album Damon's ever done, the most evidently autobiographical, and yet it could be nothing but a Blur album, and it's all of Blur at their best.

Its critical and commercial impact led me to briefly hope that this was it for good now, that Blur were back as a full-time concern, but of course, Damo's knocked it on the head again, as he does. Probably for the best, both for sanity and career management. Blur manage to manufacture genuine excitement every time they return. I do worry about where they can go from here, though. How can they top this when they're in their 60s? Maybe they'll make an album of songs that sound like Country House ... really commit to the Country House vibe ... or the Crazy Beat vibe ...

2. Black Rainbows - Corinne Bailey Rae

Of all the albums that I don't reckon have had their just desserts in the year-end lists, this one stands out. It had top-notch reviews when it came out, but has been slept on in the end, even though it is a brilliant, bold album. 

This album is especially impressive when you consider Corinne Bailey Rae seemed for ever earmarked as "nice, easy listening, inoffensive" even though her interviews suggested there was scope for a lot more. And then she went and did it. It's a clever, funny, surprising, moving, wide-ranging album, but always listenable. The most punk soul album of the year.

3. Javelin - Sufjan Stevens

It might have been tricky to judge this album on its merits, so overwhelming was the tragedy surrounding it, if it wasn't so obviously brilliant. Also, and this is going to sound dumb as shit, Sufjan is, at last, for me, not the States guy. Remember how after 'Illinois' it genuinely seemed possible and desirable that he would do an album for every state and, for a long time after that, every album he put out was, disappointingly, not another state. 'Carrie and Lowell' evened the score, but now, with 'Javelin', he has released more masterpieces that are not about a state than masterpieces that are about a state. That is, unless you think Michigan is a masterpiece, which would be fair enough, but I don't. So Sufjan is no longer the States guy, he's the "three perfect albums" guy.

4. Multitudes - Feist

I have a funny feeling this will be the one I will still be listening to regularly in a couple of years. 

5. Blomi - Susanne Sundfor

This album is weird and wild but also contains several obviously beautiful songs. Old-fashioned beautiful songs.

6. Heavy Heavy - Young Fathers

Irresistible, joyous music. I mean, I resisted Young Fathers for quite a while, but not this one.

7. why does the earth give us people to love - Kara Jackson

I think the only reason this is as low as 7 is because the title track is my Number 1 song of the year, and so that slightly, slightly unbalances the album, and has made me, at times, want to skip a couple to get to that song. The song 'why does the earth give us people to love' starts like a dirge, then gently moves through various stages of memory and grief, yet as it becomes more spritely, becomes yet more devastatingly sad. 

The whole album is great, her voice is hopefully going to be around for years, but that song, phewee.

8. sundial - noname

Look, I don't approve of lower case, but there's been some really strong lower case works this year. This album keeps your attention all the way through.

9. The Answer is Always Yes - Alex Lahey

I'd really recommend this for lowkey tuneful, no frills, guitar pop. Courtney Barnetty but more tuney.

10. Cousin - Wilco

Wilco are probably my all time favourite band, and this is my favourite album of theirs for 15 years or so. It's not an all-time classic, and it's not like the other Wilco albums in the meantime have not been good, but this one I just immediately felt attuned to, could pick out the tunes, enjoy the details etc. It's tricky for bands who keep on and don't take a break, I imagine. Far easier, in a way, to do what Blur do and dip in and out. The National are another band I loved almost as much as I loved Wilco, but this year's two National releases suggested to me that they had no more tricks that would grab my attention. So, this excellent album, their 13th, by Wilco deserves some real praise.

11. My Back is a Bridge For You to Cross - Anohni and the Johnsons

I still feel like I haven't fully unlocked this album. It's got some real dark power.

12. Desire I Want to Turn Into You - Caroline Polachek

13. Everything Harmony - Lemon Twigs

If you haven't heard Lemon Twigs and you like classic 70s soft rock, check em out.

14. Weathervanes - Jason Isbell

I really love all these. I can imagine this being my favourite album of a bad year. Seriously. This album is tight, has no bad songs and several memorable ones.

15. The Great White Sea Eagle - James Yorkston, Nina Persson and the Second Hand Orchestra

Fence forever! No bad Yorkston albums. Nina Persson is a great twist on the theme. I listened to this yesterday (it came out near the beginning of the year) and thought it should be higher, but never mind.

16. Rat Saw God - Wednesday

17. Lucky for You - Bully

I had the Wednesday and the Bully album back-to-back on my playlist for a few months, so I can't separate them really. Rat Saw God has slightly better pop tunes.

18. the record - boygenius

aah, you know it is good. not strong enough is definitely strong enough. i think i thought i'd like it more than i did initially but then have ended up liking it more in the end that i thought i had. i really think the last song Letter to an Old Poet is bad, though, and put me off the album for a while. unless it's a joke, a quasi-AI version of self-referential lyrical and vocal tropes, and i can't understand why it would be that. this has topped the aggregated critics' list. i place it a somewhat churlish 18th.

19. Chaos for the Fly - Grian Chatten

This is a beautiful album. I like Fontaines DC but I prefer this actually. He really does justice to his own voice here.

20. Time Ain't Accidental - Jess Williamson

21. Joy'all - Jenny Lewis

The previous Jenny Lewis album, On the Line, was, for me, a career high, and this didn't quite top it, but it's still a really enjoyable album which I've listened to more than most. Each Jenny Lewis album, you wonder if it will be one that make her a star, a big star, but, of course, none of them ever quite do. 

22. Jaguar II - Victoria Monet

Tunes. This ones got some tunes on it.

23. The Last Rotation of Earth - BC Camplight

24. Heaven - Cleo Sol

25. Nothing Lasts Forever - Teenage Fanclub

Can't go wrong with Teenage Fanclub. Even so, I have found myself loving this one pretty much more than any of theirs since Grand Prix

26. I DES - King Creosote

27. Albion - Harp

This guy, who is Tim Smith formerly of Midlake, who authored one of the greatest albums of all time, I only wish all the best things in the world for. This album only came out a couple of weeks ago, so still not sure. It's woozy, odd and beautiful  and has songs named after places in Sussex.

28. The Greater Wings - Julie Byrne

29. Irish Rock N Roll - The Mary Wallopers

An album that didn't quite land for me, for some reason, was False Lankum by Lankum, despite all its acclaim. This album's not subtle, but it's got a lot of oomph, and I preferred it.

30. Seven Psalms - Paul Simon

Good, this guy. You should check him out.

31. Shadow Kingdom - Bob Dylan

And this one. Not really an album, and not really from this year, but Shadow Kingdom has such a distinct character and tone, it kind of felt like a studio album when it was released. Also, when he first performed it, not a single one of the tracks on Shadow Kingdom was among my 50 favourite Bob Dylan songs. Genuinely. So it really did feel like listening to something new and uncovering some fresh magic. Throughout his career, when you think you know what the great ones are, he nudges you to say "and these ones, these are great ones too, if you hear them a bit differently".

32. Fountain Baby - Amaarae

33. ROACH - Miya Folick

34. Strays - Margo Price

35. Folkocracy - Rufus Wainwright

This is a covers album, but it's a really interesting selection under the broad banner of "folk", it's a very well-crafted album, and Rufus enlists all manner of surprising famous friends to make something that is really rather grand.

36. Valley of Heart's Delight - Margo Cilker

37. Keeping Secrets Will Destroy You - Bonnie Prince Billy

38. The Age of Pleasure - Janelle Monae

I don't know, Janelle Monae's done a lot of amazing things in the meantime, but The ArchAndroid made you think she might be the new Stevie Wonder, and it's not quite turned out that way. But there are some fun songs on this.

39. Jenny from Thebes - Mountain Goats

40. Let There Be Music - Bonny Doon

Bonny Doon are the band that accompanied Waxahatchee on my favourite album of the century, St Cloud, and this has musical echoes of that, and it's really very up my street. Can't wait for the next Waxahatchee album, too.

41. Cracker Island - Gorillaz

All those gorillaz must be cross that Blur came along and stole their thunder, because this is one of the best Gorillaz albums going.

42. Sundown - Eddie Chacon

Perhaps Eddie will look with some rancour at the sales and acclaim that inferior albums have received, but I expect he says to himself "jealous minds (jealous minds) never satisfy ..."

43. The Window - Ratboys

44. That. Feels. Good! - Jessie Ware

I think my expectations for this album were a bit high. It's good but I'm not sure it soars.

45. Angels & Queens Pt 2 - Gabriels

46. GUTS - Olivia Rodrigo

Upper case less of a scourge than lower case. This album is really good. It is for kids though. And I'm 45. I genuinely don't believe the middle-aged male critics making it one of their favourite albums of the year. 

47. Kassi Valazza Knows Nothing - Kassi Valazza

48. The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We - Mitski 

God strike me down for being such a dick, but Mitski is the most 7/10 artist in history. All her songs are 7/10 on all her 7/10 albums. 7/10 is a good score. I enjoyed this album somewhat, but I do not really agree with the fact that Mitski, in an era when most indie singer-songwriters can't break even, broke out.

49. Tim - The Replacements

Don't know why I've included this, or put it 49. It's an excellent remastering of a classic 80s album. I listened to it a lot. It sounds great. Perfect. 49.

50. I've Got Me - Joanna Sternberg

51. Happy Ending - Hifi Sean and David McAlmont

This is great. Easy to forget, whenever David Mc releases anything new, that you've the chance to listen to one of the greatest pop singers there's ever been. Every note a treasure.

52. Live at Bush Hall - Black Country New Road

Found this quite moving. Good luck to them.

53. Water Made Us - Jamila Woods

54. The Price of Progress - The Hold Steady

Still holding steady. Still writes long wordy lines better than almost anyone else.

55. Bless This Mess - U.S. Girls

U.S. Girls has released her last three albums at the start of the year, and they tend not to be the year's critical round-ups, even through they're really pretty good, so I would advise U.S. Girls to release her next album in October.

56. Turn the Car Around - Gaz Coombes

57. maps - billy woods and Kenny Segal

I did also quite enjoy Armand Hammer's We Buy Diabetic Test Strips. That will have seemed like a non-sequitur, but is not.

58. Cat Power Sings Dylan: The 1966 Albert Hall Concert - Cat Power

This is pretty brilliant, especially the first half.

59. Infinite Spring - Superviolet

A late discovery. Really up my street.

60. I Am Not There Anymore - The Clientele

61. Crying, Laughing, Waving, Smiling - Slaughter Beach, Dog

62. Wait Til I Get Over - Durand Jones

63. My 21st Century Blues - Raye

Still in the territory of albums I really enjoyed, and the numbering still doesn't feel completely random. 

64. Theatre of the Absurd Presents C'est la Vie - Madness

Bien.

65. Joan of All - Sarabeth Tucek

66. Race the Night - Ash

67. All of This Will End - Indigo de Souza

68. You're the One - Rhiannon Giddens

69. i/o - Peter Gabriel

70. I Inside the Old Year Dying - PJ Harvey

71. Late Developers - Belle and Sebastian

Still B and S, after all ... a really excellent Belle and Sebastian still feels within reach, but this isn't it.

72. Zach Bryan - Zach Bryan

When I was really into it, I used to consider whatever line there was between alt-country (super cool) and country (lame as fuck) and not always be sure I knew the difference. This extremely successful Zach Bryan album is country, though it sounds quite alt-country, but there's something in the homespun wisdom and the school of hard knocks and the lack of irony, I guess, which tells you where the line is.

73. Lahai - Sampha

74. Sea of Mirrors - The Coral

75. When Horses Would Run - Being Dead

76. Lankum - False Lankum

77. First Two Pages of Frankenstein - The National

78. All of This is Chance - Lisa O'Neill

79. Cartwheel - Hotline TNT

A lot - a lot - of the indie these days is kinda fuzzy, shoegazy, which is never quite my thing. However, I will say to this one's credit, I listened to it directly following on from Teenage Fanclub, coincidentally, and there were similarities, and that is never a bad thing.

80. Yard - Slow Pulp

81. In My Mind There's a Room - Mull Historical Society

82. Dead Meat - The Tubs

83. Hackney Diamonds - The Rolling Stones

84. THE WAEVE - THE WAEVE

Of course, Blur and the Pipettes is good. Of course.

85. Fuse - Everything But the Girl

86. Natural Disasters - Bethany Cosentino

87. Intimism - Nicky Wire

Nicky's singing much better than he used to, and this has some pretty affecting bits.

88. DK1 - Das Koolies

There are some pretty cool bits, but they are not the Super Furry Animals.

89. Paranoia, Angels, True Love - Christine and the Queens

This album's 96 minutes long. I think that was a mistake.

90. 10000 gecs - 100 gecs

Probably a lot of fun to make. Wouldn't be surprised if these two become massively successful doing something slightly different to this.

91. Paint My Bedroom Black - Holly Humberstone

92. Look Over the Wall, See the Sky - John Francis Flynn

93. I Killed Your Dog - L'Rain

94. Oh Me Oh My - Lonnie Holley

95. She Brings Me Back to the Land of the Living - Cian Nugent

96. Mercy - John Cale

97. We Use Diabetic Test Strips - Armand Hammer

98. Radio Songs - Dave Rowntree

99. Messy - Olivia Dean

100. Laugh Track - The National

And, on my least favourite album ...

I didn't like the Lana Del Rey album with the interminable title and the interminable running time. I've listened to Lana Del Rey a fair amount down the years, but have realised, with significant self-reproach, that was wasted time. Lana Del Rey is like WWE to me - something where there is a conceit, and, while others are able to see through the conceit to something they assure me is meaningful, noble, entertaining and beautiful, I can only see the conceit. No doubt it's how lots of people feel about that other auteur of stylised Americana, Wes Anderson. I love Wes Anderson, though, and his films are not 4 hours long. 

Every artist has a long album in them, and every artist should be forgiven one hour-plus album every five or so. But all of LDR's recent albums are well over an hour, apart from Chemtrails Over the Country Club, which was the only one I was close to liking. 

It's always worth giving an artist a chance, but not too much of a chance...

I'm just going to name 10 songs. Harder to pick out songs, for some reason.

1. why does the earth give us people to love - Kara Jackson

2. alyosha - Susanne Sundfor

3. The Narcissist - Blur

4. Will Anybody Ever Love Me? - Sufjan Stevens

5. not strong enough - boygenius

6. Younger and Dumber - Indigo de Souza

7. Now and Then - The Beatles

8. The Greater Wings - Julie Byrne

9. Last Rotation of Earth - BC Camplight

10. Nothing Matters - The Last Dinner Party

I went to three big outdoor shows, and will treasure in particular

Thunder Road 

Under the Westway

That's Entertainment

The Rat

Maps

These were the music videos on youtube I watched many times:

The Only Living Boy ... (isn't that the most poignant thing ...)

Fairytale ...

Get Back

The Weight (70s)

The Weight (2010s)

Isis

(oh yeah, classic rock for me ...)

Next year will hopefully see new albums by Nick Cave, Gruff Rhys, Vampire Weekend, Joanna Newsom, Paul Weller, Waxahatchee, Laura Marling and, who knows, maybe Dylan, Tom Waits and the Walkmen. Joni Mitchell? Why not ...

My favourite books I read this year were (no order):

The Heat of the Day - Elizabeth Bowen

The Ballad of Peckham Rye - Muriel Spark

Small Things Like These - Claire Keegan

A Different Drummer - William Melvin Kelley

Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members - Ray Padgett

Old God's Time - Sebastian Barry

The Wren, The Wren - Anne Enright

Harlem Shuffle - Colson Whitehead 

Western Lane - Chetna Maroo 

and Fantastic Mr Fox. Still perfect. While Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator is a mad bag of bad nonsense.

Favourite films watched (no order):

Aftersun

Decision to Leave

The Quiet Girl

Women Talking

Oppenheimer

Flora and Son

Killers of the Flower Moon

May December

Asteroid City

Rye Lane

And actually, I just watched Maestro yesterday, and it was much better than i thought it would be. People have been a bit funny about it. It's a beautifully made and acted film.

The Bear was the best TV, Tom Waits and Iggy Pop on 6Music the best radio. 

There. Finished.

The Measure

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I could have been someone

Shane MacGowan

It may be that this blog is drawing to a close, though I've thought that a few times before. Since the last post, it's been a few months, I've had a few ideas, but just not been bothered to take the time to inadequately express something small. So, maybe this is something of a last hurrah. Probably not, but maybe.

I am drawn back to write about Shane MacGowan, inevitably. I've written a few times about Shane MacGowan before, particularly in December 2020. This will expand on some of those thoughts and will become self-indulgent. There's been a huge outpouring of warmth at his death, as you'd have expected. He meant a lot to many people. He meant a lot to me.

I knew a little about the Pogues in the 80s. I think they were well-liked by one or more of my siblings, or my cousins. Then MacGowan became a figure of some dark tabloid fascination in the 90s, without my really diving deep into his music. I liked That Woman's Got Me Drinking by The Popes and paid some attention to Haunted, his duet with Sinead O'Connor. Of course, there was always Fairytale of New York, I perhaps knew one or two others, not much else. He was in the gossip pages of the NME fairly often, for good or bad.

In around 2000, I started to investigate the Pogues further, and was bowled over in particular by Rainy Night in Soho. I also became fascinated by Haunted (originally a Pogues song, then rerecorded in the 90s). I think it is one of the most personally significant songs I've ever listened to, in fact. It is the most blatant example of the juxtaposition of the conventionally (if you can ever describe Sinead O'Connor as conventional) beautiful with the apparently ugly, for the purpose of creating a greater beauty. It really defines that idea. It told me a lot, in a very clear way, about what music I loved and why I loved it. 

It just seems to be something in music some of us love, and some of us don't. Some fly from the first sign of ugliness, some have no choice but to embrace it, I listened to it over and over again, waiting to be thrilled by the moment when Shane bursts in ..."you got a way of walking..." Both of them are utterly angelic, in their different ways, on that song.

And over the last 20-odd years, I've listened to the Pogues more and more - to songs which seem to me to be obvious classics - like Springsteen, or Dylan. Sally McLennane, Sick Bed of Cuchulainn, Streams of Whiskey, Body of an American, If I Should Fall from Grace With God, Fiesta, A Pair of Brown Eyes, Summer in Siam, The Old Main Drag, London Girl etc. I'd sing gleefully, raucously along to them when I was working down in the shed and had lost any sense of inhibition, during lockdown. I can sing them well, actually.

I was too young to properly experience the Pogues in their prime (oddly, the only time I saw Shane in the flesh was when he strolled out to do Dirty Old Town with Babyshambles, of all people, at Benicassim in 2006). How thrilling and life-enhancing they must have been for the London Irish and for everyone they struck a chord with. Especially as it was the 80s, and so much or rock music was so clueless and misguided in the 80s. To be one of the very few bands, like the Replacements on the other side of the Atlantic, that figured it out and set the template for the decade to come - how to take the best from punk and also from their own traditional forms, to make something fierce and beautiful and timeless. The Pogues are a paragon. I love the fact that they were the biggest influence on the Walkmen. You wouldn't think to hear it. But it's true, pure rock'n'roll. 

Like Dylan's, the songs sound like redrawings of fundamentals, they borrow from what already exists, yet still manufacture something unique, something which seems obvious yet no one had ever thought of before.

And then there's MacGowan the man. A man not separate from his music. A music not separate from its man. 

I suppose my interest was piqued by his incongruities and the superficial similarities of our biography. The name. The ears. The ... departure from conventional beauty norms. The London public schoolboy. Loving The Jam. The Irishness, of course, the London Irishness. 

But I'm not like Shane McGowan. I'm not brilliant or wild. The two famous people who I've identified with most strongly, actually the only two I've felt I'm made of the same fundamental stuff as, are Shane McGowan and Wayne Rooney. But they're both brilliant and wild.

When Wayne Rooney emerged, I wished he'd been 8 years older than me, rather than vice versa, as I'd have known how to play football as well as I could if I'd had his example, his physical template, to follow. I'd have played like him (obviously much worse, but like him ...)

But I'd never really have wanted to be like Shane MacGowan, I suppose. The forces against living like that were too strong, too formative.

Alcoholic is one word. Addict is another. People like to use those words these days, to denote the illness, the tragedy. To visualise a different, better person not trapped in the cycle of abuse. Still, there is a place for a word like "drinker". A more dignifying, romantic, word. There remains a place for that.

Some people are drinkers. Maybe there was some point in time when that wasn't what they were, but that time is too far gone to be relevant. Shane MacGowan, a drinker, made it 65. My father, Paddy McGaughey, a drinker, made it to 70. Decent efforts under the circumstances, in both cases.

I thought about MacGowan a fair bit in my dad's final years. I certainly, cliche though it is, thought about him as the protagonist in Fairytale from New York. I was having a drink with him on Christmas Eve 2009 and I think we were both thinking "won't see another one".

I drank with him a lot between 1996 and 2010 because that was the thing to do, and I got to understand him (and, by extension, people like him) pretty well. It was always cordial, but not always smooth.

Was he like Shane MacGowan? In some ways, perhaps. MacGowan was clearly brilliant as a boy from the Irish countryside who won writing competitions and won a scholarship to a leading English public school. I suspect he had sucked up most of the lore and literature that fed into his greatest songs while he was still in his teens. Perhaps his brilliance was not entirely gone too soon, who knows, but certainly he was unproductive, compared to his promise, after the age of 30. 

My father was also, by accounts including his own (!), brilliant as a child and a young man from the rural edge of an Irish city who took himself to England at 18. Those meetings in Paddington pubs we shared in my early adulthood featured plenty of regrets and disappointments (on both sides) but also plenty of signs that what gifts had once been abundant was still there, just in a reduced form.

It is, needless to say, complex. I never wished or considered that my father would stop drinking, nor that he would seek to extend his life beyond the natural course such a lifestyle took him. It was a luxury I had to think that way, I suppose. I was a peripheral, pretty undamaged part of what wreckage there was. I could afford to respect his attempts to hold on to dignity, to not seek pity, to, really and truly, enjoy the drink and the barstool and the chat, to be true to himself, and accept the consequences.

Sometimes. Sometimes it was irritating. On my own behalf, "irritating" on my mother's behalf and his later partner/carer's, on my older siblings' behalf, on anyone's behalf who was was caught in the crossfire. Irritating to assume the role of confidante and forgiver. I remember sitting in the McDonald's at Marble Arch in 1996 (so probably one of the first adult-to-adult drinks we'd had), thoroughly vexed and saddened. I can't remember exactly what it was. Just disappointment mainly. I got over that moment. I never really felt that bad about the whole business again. I always protected myself and was my mother's son, above all.

In the end, all the mayhem and pain gets mostly forgotten, even forgiven. MacGowan's bandmates, who had to kick him out of their magnificent band, love and honour him. The church was packed for my father's funeral and the revelling went into the night. It sticks in the craw of some, I suppose. They say, don't romanticize the disease, the ruin.

But these are great songs and these are drinking songs, nearly every one. Funny, ruinous, pathetic, beautiful. There is no separation.

If I was to choose 12 Shane MacGowan/Pogues songs for each day of Christmas, I'd go with with ...

A Rainy Night in Soho (a perfect song, a song that should be Number 1 for 20 weeks)

Sally MacLennane

Summer in Siam

Haunted (with Sinead O'Connor)

The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn

Turkish Song of the Damned

The Body of an American

Pair of Brown Eyes

The Broad Majestic Shannon

Streams of Whiskey

Fairytale of New York

The Parting Glass

But really, almost all the early Pogues songs are good to great. There was something bulletproof about that sound, that voice and that pen for a few years

Farewell Shane MacGowan, you figurehead (hero is definitely the wrong word) for us somewhat Irish people, us London people, us people who love rock'n'roll and history, who love lines that scan like magic and make you laugh, us unconventional-looking men, us unconventional singers, us fans of The Jam and of Murder Ballads, us McGs, for people who drink and people who know people who drink and still see the beauty in it. Maybe it could have been different. Maybe better. Maybe not.