loading...
Canwest News Service
Paul McGuinness is making good on his promise to create a new strain of Irish music with the Popes, the band he co-founded with Shane MacGowan of the Pogues in the early 1990s.
McGuinness, a Dublin native now living in London, has an endless curiosity when it comes to music. He has seen enough during his travels – both with MacGowan and on his own – and on the streets of his native Ireland to make some well-informed decisions about the direction of the Popes, of which he is the lone original member.
“This album isn’t necessarily Irish music,” McGuinness said of Outlaw Heaven, his band’s second full-length since MacGowan’s departure near the turn of the millennium. “But it has a huge amount of Irishness in it.”
Everything from country to soul to traditional Celtic music worms its way on to Outlaw Heaven, an intoxicating mix that builds its sound around McGuinness’s weather-beaten voice.
He sounds a good deal like MacGowan (the infamous rabble-rouser and legendary drinker) but McGuinness claims to have very few problems with booze or drugs these days. His heroin addiction proved to be a lengthy battle, but McGuinness said he put it to rest three years ago during a nearly five-month stint in a North London prison.
“I cleaned up in there and had a good look at the situation I was in. In the end, I began to see the whole thing as a very positive thing. While I was in prison I managed to have a good look at myself and saw how lucky I’d been and that I was abusing my good fortune.”
McGuinness wrote the majority of Outlaw Heaven while behind bars awaiting trial; he was later acquitted. McGuinness spent many of his days in a “cockroach, mice-infested cell” for up to 23 hours a day. During his off time, he worked on songs with a guitar borrowed from the prison priest.
Upon release from Pentonville Prison, McGuinness’s first order of business was re-forming the Popes, whose biggest hits were more than a decade-and-a-half old and sung by the long-departed MacGowan. It took three years to assemble everything, the most difficult part being the search for bandmates with whom he wanted to spend months on the road.
Mission accomplished, the group leader says. “I’ve got an album I love and a band to die for.”
The current lineup (drummer Will Morrison, guitarist Charlie Hoskyns, bassist Laurie Norwood, multi-instrumentalist Fiachra Shanks and fiddler Ben Gunnery) is traversing Canada at the moment, a trek that includes the band’s first Victoria stop on Friday at V-Lounge.
McGuinness knows their arrival will entice longtime fans of both the Pogues and the Popes, but he warns fans not to expect “a Pogues sound-alike band.” He loves the group dearly, as evidenced by the multiple appearances of Pogues co-founders MacGowan and Spider Stacey on Outlaw Heaven, but he’s eager to strike out on his own. And he has the blessing of MacGowan, who is in “great shape” and beating his longtime addiction to alcohol, according to McGuinness.
The goodwill of his “true friend” is all the endorsement McGuinness needs to continue onward and in a new direction with the Popes.
“The Pogues broke the mould,” he said. “They took Irish music to a new level and gave it a whole new meaning. But going out and playing Pogues-type material is not for me.”
McGuinness says he has come full circle in terms of his appreciation of traditional music. For years, he could barely stand the sound of a tin whistle or bodhran, key instruments in Ireland’s history. But after all he has been through, there’s something sentimental about the soundtrack to his childhood, despite the hardships associated with it.
“When I was growing up there in the late ’50s and early ’60s, Ireland was very different. It was a bit like a Third World country, really. To be Irish, there was a certain amount of an inferiority complex going on, and it wasn’t until I left Dublin and began to live in London that I really began to appreciate how fab it was to be Irish.”
Victoria Times Colonist
loading...
Who knows.
Please continue discussion on the forum: link