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Jake Brennan (12:49)

Literally.

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Jake Brennan (13:45)

REI CO OP presents a perfect outdoor moment with the perfect gift. Picture this. You're ripping with your favorite favorite person. Bluebird skies, blower powder and frankly, you're skiing like legends.

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Jake Brennan (14:01)

Another laugh thanks to REI's curation. From lid to sticks. You nailed the gift.

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Jake Brennan (14:07)

How'd you know? Does it get more perfect than that? Give without guessing. Shop in store or visit rei.com. October 12, 1984 Brighton, England it was after midnight when English Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her husband Dennis returned to the Napoleon Suite at the Brighton Grand Hotel. Though she had spent all day at the Conservative Party Congress, Thatcher had no intention of going to bed. She planned to work well into the wee hours of the morning while bleary eyed members of her staff tried their best to keep up. Thatcher had served as prime minister since 1979. She was a divisive leader, to put it mildly. Especially critical of her policies were the Irish, who for years had been caught up in their own violent struggle for identity and independence. Many, like Jerry Adams of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the Irish Republican army, found Thatcher to be an abusive tyrant who regularly sanctioned discrimination, political censorship, even murder. Many artists in the UK's thriving new wave and ska scenes were dissenting as well, with songs like the Specials, Ghost Town and the Beats Stand Down Margaret Taking Direct Aim Tonight, however, it wasn't a song aimed at Margaret Thatcher Tonight, something far more deadly than a catchy melody was waiting to attack. It was nearly 3am Thatcher had just emerged from the hotel suite's bathroom when suddenly there was an enormous explosion from above. Thatcher felt her knees knees go weak as the entire building seemed to sway. The explosion gave way to a loud, ominous rumble. It was coming from many floors above her room, but it seemed to be getting closer and it was moving fast. Plaster from the ceiling shook loose and fell to the floor. Thatcher's team was scrambling now. Thatcher too, her husband Dennis, rudely awakened and stumbling around in a daze. The noise was getting louder, growing closer right above them now, the walls shaking, people screaming. And then one of the hotel's old Victorian rooftop chimneys came through the ceiling above them at an angle, slicing directly into the bathroom where only moments before Margaret Thatcher had been standing 24 days earlier. A member of the IRA had planted a hundred pound bomb under a bathtub on the sixth floor of the hotel. A spot strategically chosen as it was close to an old chimney stack. The timer was set to go off during Thatcher's stay and the explosion would compromise the chimney and cause it to fall, collapsing through all five floors below until it reached the Napoleon Suite with maximum momentum and kill Margaret Thatcher as she slept inside. The ploy would have worked perfectly if only the chimney hadn't veered off to an angle or if Thatcher had still been inside that bathroom. As it happened, Thatcher survived with hardly a scratch. Not so lucky were the more than 30 people inside the hotel who were injured and five more who lost their lives, including a 55 year old woman who was decapitated. A manhunt for the IRA bomb maker began immediately. But first the cops made a stop and launched London at the offices of Stiff Records, the Pogues record label, to arrest Shane McGowan. Because only nine days before the hotel bombing and the attempt on Thatcher's life, Shane and the Pogues had performed a show in that very same city, Brighton. A fact that the police were not willing to chalk up to a coincidence. And I'll tell you why. Shane McGowan sang rebel songs, songs that sympathized with Ireland's republican forces. Or so the thinking went on the part of the British authorities. Those stiff upper lip types who equated the Pogue's punk addled brand of traditional Irish music with criminal activity. They had a look no further than the first track on the Pogues debut album, a song called Trans Metropolitan. A song in which during the very first verse, Shane sings about getting drunk in the rosy parks of England and then going to where the spirits take us to heaven or to hell and kick up bloody murder. In the town we love so well and if that wasn't enough, again, this is some prim and proper random English police officer talking here. Just look at the vile lyrics in this same song. Piss, shite, poofs, whores, queer as bastards. This is the world of Shane McGowan, a drunken, politically motivated rabble rouser with rotting teeth and an attitude to match. He should be silenced by any means necessary. Or so went to thinking. Shane, meanwhile, couldn't care less about what the cops in London wanted to do to him. He dealt with worse. He'd already been censored by the BBC for repeatedly saying fuck live on air and he'd had the piss beaten out of him so badly by some thugs in the basement of a London club that he suffered a concussion and was unable to perform the following evening. If the cops wanted him, they could come and find him because right now Shane McGowan and the Pogues were on tour and Shane had more urgent problems than the cops. One problem in particular was riding on the tour bus with him, a horn rim, glasses wearing motherfucker who thought he was better than Shane. That guy Elvis Costello didn't actually think he was better than Shane McGowan, but Shane thought Elvis thought he was better than Shane McGowan because everyone around them, including Shane's own band, put Elvis on a pedestal, reminding Shane once again of his underdog status. Elvis Costello was the star assigned to a major label, not Shane. Elvis Costello was the angry young man bridging the gap between the punks and the new wave, not Shane. The only reason the Pogues were playing bigger venues, playing sessions for the influential BBC disc jockey John Peele, playing Channel 4, hiring a real manager and so on was because Elvis Costello hand picked them to open his tour with his band the Attractions in support of their latest album Goodbye Cruel World. But Shane knew that Elvis had an ulterior motive. Sure, Elvis liked the Pogues, but Elvis liked the Pogues bass player Cotto Reardon with her spiky hair and Sid Vicious sneer. Even better. Never mind that Elvis was 30 and Kot was just 19. It just rubbed Shane the wrong way watching the bespectacled star, the Pogues, meal ticket as it were, get all handsy with his friend and ban me. So Shane reacted in his own mischievous way. He and the guys in the band painted IRA slogans on Elvis's coats and tour bus and they drank all Elvis's booze and they even poured Circumstances sand into the keyboards belonging to the attraction, Steve. Naive. Still, Elvis refused to kick them off the tour. That's how bad he had it for Kot. He had it so bad that he signed on to produce the Pogues next record, their excellent sophomore album with the equally excellent title Rum Sodomy and the Lash. But despite that great record and the increased exposure it brought to the band, Shane couldn't shake the feeling that he was being looked down upon by big shot Elvis Costello. The tension between the two artists continued to build until Shane lost it while recording the song A Rainy Night in Soho for the Purgatory in Motion ep, which Elvis also produced. Elvis wanted to use an oboe in the instrumental break, perhaps inspired by the Beatles Penny Lane, but Shane insisted it should be a cornet and Shane wouldn't back down. He was the artist. This was his song. The only job Elvis had in Shane's mind was to put that artistry and that song on tape. And if he couldn't handle that, then big shot Elvis Costello could just fuck right the hell off. So that's what Elvis did. And he took Shane McGowan's spiky haired, Sid Vicious sneering bass player with him. But not before he got inside Shane's head by questioning his ability to pen a song so timeless that it would live on long after both of them were gone. Sure, Shane fancied himself an artist, and he was certainly that. He worked his side of the street quite well, but it was a small, dimly lit street in a dirty old town where not everyone was willing to walk. What about the world stage? What about writing the most universal kind of song? A Christmas song? Even better, a Christmas duet. Elvis Costello bet Shane McGown that he couldn't do it. What Elvis wasn't betting on was how all Shane had to do was think about the commons back in Ireland. His own private Christmas which lived rent free in his heart. And suddenly he was filled with an intense longing. The kind of longing found in the very best of Christmas songs. Shane McGowan then took all of that longing and put it into the greatest Christmas song ever written. We'll be right back after this.

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Jake Brennan (24:03)

Jason Disney asked me to do this podcast thing. I need some advice. You've got to have banger guests Walker and Leah, Daniel Deamer, Tim Simons, Adam Kofer. You're the one asking the questions how? Why have they better answer?

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I don't know anything epic.

Jake Brennan (24:18)

This season is just a God quest. I'm Aryan Samhadry. Welcome to the Percy Jackson and the Olympians official podcast, available wherever you get your podcasts and watch season two of Percy Jackson, streaming now on Disney and Hulu. Learn more@disneyplus.com whatson Kraft Mac and Cheese Is the Best Thing Ever. It's even better than pop music. You look just as natural enjoying us at age 13 as you do 55. Kraft Mac and Cheese Best thing ever. I should clarify here that Elvis Costello does not remember making a bet with Shane McGowan about whether or not he could write a proper Christmas song. Shane, on the other hand, swore as if it were yesterday that it happened, and he did so for the rest of his life. It really doesn't matter either way whether the challenge was indeed thrown down, or whether Shane simply made it up as a way to amplify his talent over Elvis's for the history books. In the end, the writing and recording of the Pogues song Fairy Tale of New York serves to underscore Shane's long held status as an underdog in 1987, Christmas music was having a moment. The compilation album A Very Special Christmas, produced by music industry mogul Jimmy Iovine, was released in October of that year to great acclaim. It featured modern covers of classic Christmas songs and Christmas carols by some of the biggest names in music at the time Whitney Houston singing Do youo Hear what I Hear and John Cougar Mellencamp singing I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus and whatnot. And this is also the album where we we were blessed with Run DMC's incredible Christmas in Hollis. But with that one exception, and maybe also U2's version of Darlene Love's Christmas baby please Come Home. The entire compilation is pretty much what you'd expect in terms of sentimentality and substance. And by the time Christmas had come and gone that year, A Very Special Christmas was certified quadruple platinum. Now imagine this. Just a month after that compilation was released. Around Thanksgiving of 1987, the Pogues dropped a new single from their forthcoming album. Their third, Fairy Tale of New York was their Christmas song, and in every way it was the exact antithesis of the songs on Jimmy Iovine's compilation. The song begins as a piano ballad, with Shane McGowan's battered voice slurring one of the greatest opening lines of all time. It was Christmas Eve babe in the drunk tank from the jump. This is a Christmas song with a wholly unique perspective, that of a drunk, a gambler, a guy who's down on his luck more often than not, trying to convince the love of his life that the days will get better despite the fact that they are behind bars together on Christmas Eve. And when the band comes galloping in with their hypercharged Irish folk music, so does the drunk's Love Lover, sung by the Englishwoman Kirsty McCall, Shane's duet partner. She's tired of hanging onto her man's broken promises and isn't afraid to tell him so first he's handsome and she's pretty, and then all of a sudden he's a bum and a punk and she's an old slut on junk. The song, co written by Shane and the Pogues banjo player Jem Finer, is funny. It's sad. Ultimately, it's cautiously optimistic without losing its sense of melancholy. Just like the best Christmas songs, it's also one of the most controversial, evidenced by one particular lyric, a slur that rhymes with maggot uttered by Kirsty McCall's character, a word so offensive that the BBC eventually started bleeping it out every time it was played on air. Shane's defense of the use of the word was quote, not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable. These are real fleshed out characters here, characters you'd be more likely to find in a novel than in a Christmas song. And I think it's what makes Fairy Tale of New York so great. Listening to it really does feel like the dialogue between Shane and Christie was ripped directly from a drunk tank in a New York City police station. In the face of much more popular artists offering up safe, sanitized covers of classic Christmas cheese, Shane, Jem, Christy and the Pogues delivered a masterclass in how to create something new and exciting and provocative. The song was a top 10 hit in the UK upon its original release. In Ireland, it went to number one and stayed there for five weeks. And when it came to the 1987 Christmas number one chart, the odds were on Fairy Tale of New York to win that by a landslide. This would be no minor achievement for Shane McGowan. In fact, it was quite the opposite. The song was featured on the Pogues third album, if I Should Fall From Grace With God, produced not by Elvis, who had successfully stolen Cat O'Reardon permanently from the band, but by Steve Lillywhite, known for his work With Peter Gabriel and U2, it was the Pogues biggest record to date. But that record, the creative act of making it and of making fairy tale of New York under the pressure of proving his worth to a rival singer songwriter, whether it was imagined or not, had an immediate and adverse effect on Shane McGowan. It was the middle of the evening when Victoria Mary Clark's phone began to ring. The Irish journalist wasn't expecting the voice on the other end. It was her boyfriend's landlady calling about her boyfriend, Shane McGowan. Something was wrong with him. Something so wrong that his landlady felt compelled to ring up his girlfriend in the dead of night. Shane's love of and sometimes over love of alcohol is well documented. He was rarely seen on stage or off without a pint, a bottle or a glass of wine in his hand. But it wasn't the drink that his landlady was concerned about. No. Lately he'd been taking loads of lsd. One day she found him in his room tripping his balls off, clutching a samurai sword and staring at a chair that he just slashed to pieces. Another time, he chased her to the stairway and threw his favorite guitar at her. Victoria quickly put on some clothes and made a beeline for Shane's flat. And when she arrived, she found him in his kitchen, his eyes bouncing around in his head. He told her he dropped 15, maybe 20 tabs of acid. He'd lost count. He was holding a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits, Volume 3, but he wasn't listening to it. He was trying to eat it. Blood was running down his face, just oozing from his mouth. And there was blood and bite marks all over the LP jacket. Shane was rambling. World War three was imminent. He knew it. Which is why he was holding an emergency meeting in his kitchen with the heads of the world's superpowers. And he, Shane McGowan, as leader of the Irish Republic, was demonstrating the cultural inferiority of America by eating a Beach Boys record. From there, things got even worse, if you can imagine. Shane kept taking loads of LSD and Ecstasy. He started using heroin too. And he was hit by a car more than once. He jumped from a moving taxi. He started fires. He was committed to a psychiatric hospital. He was released, relapsed randomly attacked a guy and was sent back to the psych ward. Again, he was released again, he relapsed again. He was knocking back 10, 20 acid tabs at a time. He missed shows, including dates opening for Bob Dylan. And when he did make it to the stage. He forgot the lyrics. He was drunk and high and 24 7. Finally, in 1991, during a tour of Japan, the band convened a meeting in a hotel room. It was there that the pogues informed Shane McGowan that they were firing him from the Pogues. To which Shane replied, what took you so long? This was a four year period of freefall that can be traced all the way back to the start, December of 1987, the week of Christmas, and to the crowning of that year's Christmas number one song in the uk. Because that year's Christmas number one was not the Pogues fairy tale of New York as had been predicted. Instead, it was the Pet Shop Boys who were the ones to reach number one. With Always on My Mind, the Pogues only made it to number two. Just like not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable, not all artists and songwriters get the chart topping recognition they deserve. Some of them are destined to be underdogs for life. Hey guys, real quick, there was this crazy story that we unearthed in the research for this Shane McGowan episode that involves the Pogues, Tom Waits and Elvis Costello drunkenly recreating the killing of gangster John Dillinger in a Chicago alleyway back in the 1980s. That sounds like fun. I mean, this is so on brand for us because it's got the legendary true crime figure John Dillinger, it's got icons, the music history, the Pogues, Tom Waits, Elvis Costello, and it also features one of the wildest impromptu pickup band performances that nobody ever saw. But here's the thing, we just didn't have enough time or space in our full episode to talk about this fully. But we do have time in this week's brand new mini episode of Disgraceland, which is part of the exclusive content for All Access members. If you're not a member of All Access and you want to hear why in the hell Tom Waits, Elvis Costell and the Pogues made a pub crawl that ended with a visit to a notorious alley. Just go to Disgracelandpod.com to sign up and listen to that today. All right, now let's get back to our story here. All about Shane McGowan. Autumn 2001 Jem Finer, the Pose's banjo player and co songwriter, knocked hard on the wooden door of a small, unassuming cottage. To his back, the Common splayed out in all of its natural, breathtaking wonder. County Tipperary was far from Dublin. Compared to a place like London, it was a whole other world. Here, life was slow and quiet at least on the outside. On the inside, behind the front door of that cottage, Jem could hear singing, yelling, bottles emptying and glasses clinking. He knocked again. Still nothing. He pulled a cell phone from his jacket and dialed. A number of it rang and then someone picked up. It was Shane. Many, many sheets to the wind. For folks sake, Jem yelled into the phone, Come open the fucking door. Seconds later, the wooden door swung open and there was Shane McGowan, the guy whom Jem and the others had fired from the Pogues some 10 years prior. The same guy who had started a new band, Shane McGowan and the Popes. But it continued to be plagued by junk cocaine, amphetamines and by a bottomless bottle. He looked haggard, perhaps worse than ever. He'd watched not one but two friends overdose in his flat back in the city. He'd been arrested after fellow Irish singer Sinead o' Connor squealed on his drug use to the cops. And he was pissed at Sinead when she did that, although he later came around and he actually thanked her. Sinead's squealing led Shane to kick heroin. He kept his other vices, though. He'd lost Victoria, his longtime girlfriend, at least for the time being. Sometimes it seemed like all Shane had was this place, the Commons. Jem, on the other hand, had something else to offer. He was there to ask Shane if he wanted to reunite with the Pogues for a handful of Christmas shows that year. Shane was all in. They booked dates for one week only that December. Glasgow, Birmingham, Dublin, Manchester, and three nights at the Brixton Academy in London. Demand was high, as were spirits, and for any fan of the Pogues, it was the best Christmas present they could ask for. More Christmases came and went, one in which Shane received 28 implants on a titanium frame to fix his bad teeth, an occasion so momentous that a documentary was made about it. And there was also the Christmas in which Shane reconciled with Victoria. Not to mention the one where the two finally tied the knot after an 11 year engagement. Christmas of 2022 was nearly spent in the hospital where Shane was laid up with viral encephalitis and inflammation of the brain. Doctors cleared him right before the holiday, but six months later he was back, hospitalized, this time with pneumonia. He was there from June to November, but just one day after his release he went into septic shock and six days later, on November 30, 2023, Shane McGowan was dead. He was 65 years old. Immediately after Shane's death, Fairy Tale of New York went straight to number one in Ireland. The band then reissued the single on 7 inch vinyl in hopes that a combination of sales and mourning for Shane would finally cement the song as that year's Christmas Number one. Once again, however, the Pogues were denied The Christmas number one in the UK on December 25, 2023 was not fairy Tale of New York, as many would have expected. Instead, that honor went to Wham's Last Christmas Christmas, which earned its first Christmas number one 39 years after its original release. Some thought that it was Shane McGowan's final wish to get a Christmas number one. In reality, he only cared if the song went to number one in Ireland. County Tipperary, the commons, the people, the culture. That's where his heart remained, even in death. Besides, everyone knew what his final wish was. It was right there in his will. Shane McGowan left behind $10,000 for an open bar tab at his favorite pub in Tipperary, where locals who packed the place after a funeral procession in the streets of Dublin saw crowds erupt into a spontaneous rendition of Fairy Tale of New York. It's a song that remains a standard of the holiday season even if it never hit the top of the holiday trail chart. As its producer Steve Lillywhite said, I love the fact that it's never been number one. It's for the underdog. In fact, it's for everyone, for those who find salvation, for those who fall from grace. I'm Jake Brennan and this is Disgrace. All right guys, Merry Christmas and thanks for listening to this episode of Disgraceland. This week's Question of the Week is an obvious one. What's your number one Christmas song? Let me know which Christmas song is your favorite and why. 617-90-66638 Leave me a voicemail. Send me a text if you to hit me up on the socials disgracelandpod.com all right, here comes some credits. Disgraceland was created by yours truly and is produced in partnership with Double Elvis. Credits for this episode can be found on the show notes page@gracelandpod.com if you're listening as a Disgraceland All Access member, thank you for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. And if not, you can become a member right now by clicking by going to Disgracelandpod.com membership members can listen to every episode of Disgraceland ad free rate and review the show and follow us on Instagram, TikTok, Twitter and Facebook Disgracelandpod and on YouTube@YouTube.com Disgracelandpod Rocka Rolla He's.

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