long story, but worth the effort...(from David Stubbs):
I REMEMBER "reviewing" The Pogues album If I Should Fall From Grace With God in 1988. I made no secret of the fact, among those who cared, that I loathed The Pogues as a musical proposition. (NB recent exception among their ranks: Jem Finer, whose recent albums I commend to anyone with an interest in the recent, strange liaison between folk and the avant garde). Loathed 'em, I did. Cod-folk masquerading as rootsy authenticity - where we needed black/white steel in the hour of postmodern chaos, here were this bunch providing wet soil. And, in the lax editorial era of the time, this was all the excuse MM's mischievous reviews editor of the time needed to commission me to pen 600 or so withering words on their upcoming LP.
Simple enough - all I needed to do was turn up at MM Towers on Thursday evening - I'd taken a day off looking after my young brother-in-law Jasbir, just 13 at the time, who'd been staying with us - pick up the advance cassette, listen to the scrofulous, pox-addled thing then turn round a derisive Phillipe the next morning that would put these drunken, jigging charlatans in their place.
Duly, I turned up at the Maker offices that evening, young bro-in-law in tow, popped the cassette in my bag, then went on to Euston, where I was charged with seeing the little feller onto his train back to Birmingham. Then, back home, whereupon I rummaged in my bag and realised to my horror that I'd accidentally plonked the cassette in one of Jas's carrier bags. On the phone at once to Birmingham. 'Hello? Jas? Look through your bags - you'll find a cassette by a band called 'The Pogues'? Yes - the Pogues. See it? Found it? Brilliant. Now. Can you fetch down your tape player from your room and, like - play it me over the phone? Good lad."
Problem solved. Dutifully, he played the thing over the phone (fortunately, I had a press release with the track listing), and I was able to attend, albeit not via the ideal sound system, to their latest skirlings. A wave of relief came over me, followed by one of hubris. I couldn't be arsed to sit with a receiver in my ear listening to this fiddly-diddly nonsense for 40 odd minutes. It had been a long day and I had my first drink of the evening had been unpardonably delayed. Resourcefully, therefore, and after just 10 seconds of the opening track, I produced my own hand-held tape recorder. It'd be a simple matter to tape these cod-Oirish sonic excrescences, unwind with a much-deserved flagon of ale, get up early, listen to the tape and pen my derisive Philippic first thing in the morning. So I duly resolved to do and so I did.
Awaking the next morning at the crack of 10.15 am, in a strange room which turned out, after a few minutes to be my own, I slithered out of bed and, mindful of my deadline as ever, reached for the tape recorder, Old Trusty, which had cost me a princely £15 and played back the tape. To my astonishment, the sound that greeted me was a flatline of hiss, more entertaining than The Pogues album from an abstract/avant garde perspective, doubtless, but decidedly not the actual Pogues album as such. Old Trusty had let me down.
With two hours until deadline, the bro in law back in school and no means of acquiring another tape, I was in something of a quandary. I had no choice but to compose a 600 word review of The Pogues album based on having heard the first 10 seconds of the damn thing over the phone. The review I spun from this fragment of a sow's earlobe, long on general, disparaging remarks about The Pogues, short on anything remotely appertaining to the actual album, duly ran - weekly deadlines were tight.
And, I got away with it - just. The editor, Allan Jones, an ardent Pogues fan himself, peered over his half-moon glasses in my direction at the next editorial meeting and remarked with asperity on a tendency for recent reviews to be long on general points but short on specifics. He cited my Pogues review as an example. I blushed manfully, took the small rap on the wrist with a penitent nod and watched with relief as the water of this incident passed on under the bridge.
Except . . . except . . . that a certain august MM colleague of mine, in whom I had confided the details of the whole affair, but who had somehow come to labour under the misapprehension that the entire editorial staff were in on what had happened, merrily spilled the beans to the editor the next lunchtime in the Oporto. I shan't mention this august colleague's name for fear of embarrassing him - let's just call him Rimon Seynolds to protect his identity - but as I popped into the pub that lunchtime, reporting for staff duties, I was faced with the editor glowering machetes at me and Rimon Seynolds sitting next to him, rubbing his chin, confessing, "I think I might have made a bit of a gaffe, David." And so he had. I had visions of being thrown out of the window like the typewriter that had suffered the same fate at the hands of the great man some years earlier. Fortunately, he stayed his hand, perhaps recognising the folly of Youth - a lesser man might have banished me to the Ipswich Gazette, to a lifetime of reviewing the Edgar Broughton Band et al at the local Corn Exchange.
As for The Pogues, If I Should Fall From Grace . . . proved to be an overall critical and commercial success, perhaps the zenith of their career and a reminder, both chastening and strangely heartening, to this reviewer, of the Power Of The Press.
― henry s, Saturday, 10 November 2007 17:38 (eighteen years ago)