5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: Spider Stacy of the Pogues

Name  Spider Stacy

Best known for  Playing tin whistle and singing with the Pogues. 

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Current city  London. 

Really want to be in  Happy where I am right now; I’ve a lot of planning and organizing to be getting on with. But if I could be somewhere else right now I’d like to be in Marseilles eating bouillabaisse.

Excited about  I’m very excited about these Pogues tours we’re doing now—taking these songs out on the road with this superlative assembly of singers and musicians, mainly from Ireland but also including the incredible Nadine Shah, who hails from the North East of England, Holly Mullineaux from the ultra-cool South London band Goat Girl, and your own Jim Sclavunos from the Bad Seeds, has been an astonishing experience, far beyond anything I could have ever imagined. I want to take this everywhere, people need this in their lives. 

My current music collection has  Been inundated by a flood of genius from across the Irish Sea. A whole mythos is being created; its titular deities are Lankum, Lisa O’Neill, John Francis Flynn, the Mary Wallopers, and Junior Brother. The walls of this reality have ruptured! Lord only knows what else is out there…

And a little bit of  Stick In The Wheel, Goat Girl, Nadine Shah, and Prince Far I

Preferred format  Vinyl ideally but anything really… I do like a cassette. And streaming is a sin but it’s SO EASY.

5 Albums I Can’t Live Without: 

This question…the one that’s impossible to answer. There are some records that I love but which I don’t really ever need to listen to again but that doesn’t really get us anywhere… 

1

The Modern Dance, Pere Ubu

I could as easily have gone with Datapanik in the Year Zero, which was an EP they released just after this album (I think). Punk unlocked something in my head and I started making connections between types of music I’d previously only been peripherally aware of, the crazy mosaics of sound on the left field. But this album did something else besides. It pointed to a dislocation, a deracination, in the human condition – the sound almost of us being separated from ourselves. I’m aware this is really pretentious as well as being entirely subjective but just wait until I start talking about the Slits. 

2

Cut, The Slits

There was all the boys, the Pistols and the Clash, the Damned, the Jam (oh my god, what a fucking band!) yada yada yada… and then there were the girls. The women. Siouxsie, the Slits, the Raincoats, X-Ray Spex, Dolly Mixture… I could go on. One of the key tenets of the revolution, in my head anyway, was that testosterone was to be no longer granted primacy—the oeuvre was estrogen, something people lost sight of (or preferred not to see). Cut is one of the best records ever made and one of the reasons it’s so good is because it’s the Slits that made it. It explodes with joy and a slick, wry darkness that never takes itself seriously even as it does. ‘I went up and down / like a demented train’; who would reasonably do otherwise. 

3

The Livelong Day, Lankum

This isn’t my favorite Lankum album, I love them all equally. But this is the one where they hammered open all the cylinders and containers, dragged everything out into to the light and then pushed it all back underground as it started to decompose. It’s hard to overstate the importance of this band, the magnitude of their achievement. But just listen to the magnitude of their sound; dense, fibrous drones, the sound of the Earth churning through the raw wound of Radie’s voice in “The Wild Rover,” the Orcish warband march of “The Pride of Petravore,” the bittersweet sadness of lives passing too swiftly in “The Young People”… everything they do is perfect, which is why we’ve stolen Daragh Lynch off of them for the Pogues forthcoming U.S. tour, so he can nail down that heavy, heavy rhythm guitar.

4

Blue, Joni Mitchell

One Joni Mitchell, there’s only one Joni Mitchell, there’s only one Joni Miiitchell, there’s only one Joni Mitchell (to the tune of “Guantanamera,” obvs). Thus concludes my review of Blue by Joni Mitchell. 

5

All of This Is Chance, Lisa O’Neill

I’m not going to go on too much about Lisa O’Neill, I won’t be able to stop and I don’t have the right words anyway. Lisa on the other hand always has the right words; “feathered friend dig up and resurrect me / I long to live among the song of birdies / a lawless league of lonesome, lonesome beauty / skies and skies above duty.” She is also an extraordinary performer and can go from the wild ecstasy of the wheeling flight of birds to the despairing anguish of the forlorn and forgotten almost in the same breath. Having her along with us on this tour is a joy and an honor.

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