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To many people a band such as the Pogues seem as Irish as you can't get without being actually carved from the Blarney Stone. Like U2 and Guinness, all are very much products of the Emerald Isle, born of its forty shades of green. Well you can forget all the shamrocks and shenanigans both of the band s mentioned are very much the product of the London post punk scene and whilst we are on the subject most of the black stuff sold in pubs on this side of the water was probably brewed in London as well. Anyway, I mention that not to undermine either band in anyway, music is about attitude and feeling rather than a birthright requiring a particular town name on a birth certificate, it matters not where you come from geographically but its where your heart is musically that counts. They say that no matter where you go in the world, it doesn't take long to walk into a bar and find an Irishman singing, singing about going home. The difference with the Pogues is that if you walked into a bar and heard them singing in the early days, they would have been singing about smashing the place up and picking a fight. The Pogues evolved slowly like mould on a piece of bread from a number of punk bands including the wonderfully named Nipple Erectors and the Millwall Chainsaws around the close of the seventies. Punk had out lived its shelf life in many peoples opinions by then and many musicians were looking to take that punk spirit and use it to push into new directions, New Romanticism and Goth being just two of the scenes that would be created by this exodus of energy. At the time Shane MacGowan was becoming more interested in the Irish folk music and recruited some old acquaintances to breath a new life into these traditional formats. The results was a band that played Irish folk inspired music with a punk mentality and after only a couple of years the band had toured as the support to Clash, the band that inspired MacGowan in the first place, signed to Stiff records and released this highly acclaimed debut album, "Red Roses for Me" The ragged trousered ranters had arrived.

The opening number "Transmetropolitan" has an opening refrain that would lull even the folk purists into a false sense of security. The wash of an accordion and a strummed guitar ease you in but there is a growing drone in the background that grows and finally breaks in a wave of attitude as the rest of the band kick in and MacGowan lays out his tale of hooliganism and rabble rousing. The Pogues have the

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