Where We Once Watched The Robots Landing

Almost two decades ago a friend of mine came up from London to visit, when I rented a room in a house not far from where I live now. My friend A.N. was about to go to India, and we went out got drunk and ended up back at the house listening to music, eventually sticking The Pogues on, and talking drunken rubbish, praising the lyrics of Shane McGowan for being both a realist and a romantic, and being able to paint pictures with words and all that kind of drunk music bloke stuff. This song was the one for me at the time- brilliant musical backing and Shane's lines about 'whiskey on Sunday and tears on our cheeks' and how it's 'stupid to laugh and useless to bawl about a rusty tin can and an old hurley ball'. What we couldn't understand though was why in the final two lines Shane suddenly lurched into science fiction B Movie territory- 'where we once watched the robots landing, and the broad, majestic Shannon'. Made no sense at all. Quite liked the image of robots crawling out of the river Shannon, but didn't fit with the rest of song. We got drunker and moved onto other topics. Blah blah blah.

A few weeks later I got a postcard from A.N. at the Taj Mahal describing sights seen and places been, and right at the bottom of the postcard in tiny handwriting- 'P.S. It's row-boats, not robots.'

14 The Broad Majestic Shannon.wma

Lorca's Corpse Just Walked Away

I had a 'when did I put this on my mp3 player?' moment in the car this morning-The Pogues' mournful, stirring and elegant (not a word usually associated with the Pogues) tribute to Federico Garcia Lorca. Starting with a military drum beat and building slowly, while Shane sings about Lorca's murder at the hands of Genral Franco's falangists during the Spanish Civil War. Lorca was an internationally acclaimed poet and playwright, outspoken critic of Franco and fascism, and a leading light of the Spanish Generation of '27. Franco's men took him at some point in August 1936 from a friend's house and along with three others shot him at Fuente Grande on the road betweenViznar and Alfacar. His body was buried somewhere in the vacinity, and despite recent attempts has not been found.

In Shane's hands the lyric is full of drama and symbolism, and some insensitivity ('the faggot poet they left til last, blew his brains out with a pistol up his arse') but there's no doubt where Shane's sympathies lie, and at the end when the killers come to mutilate the dead and terrorise the town, Lorca's corpse gets up and walks away. History lesson over- Lorca's Novena is from The Pogues' Hell's Ditch album, produced by Joe Strummer.

The Pogues - Lorcas Novena.mp3