Live At the Brixton Academy by Simon Parkes

Author:Simon Parkes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books

‘AND THEN I WENT AND GOT MORE PISSED THAN SHANE MACGOWAN’

Looking back over my years at the Academy, I must have seen it all in terms of debauched partying: from the bands that took the most obscene amounts of drugs to the ones who got the most obscene girls. But I can say with absolute certainty that when it came to a pure riotous, drunken melee, there was nothing more visceral and hardcore than The Pogues.

They were one of the first bands to truly embrace the Academy and make it their natural home. The band had blown me away when I first saw them years before up at the old Town & Country Club in Kentish Town, but from the late 80s on, it was the Brixton Academy to which they returned each year to throw their annual London shindig.

There was no band quite like The Pogues. The exuberant Irish stomp of their rhythm section, the raging punk spirit of their delivery, and of course Shane MacGowan’s swaggering gimleteyed poeticism up front. I loved their ferocious energy and always looked forward to their Academy shows, though I knew my liver would ache for days afterwards.

In 1989 the band were at their absolute peak. It was that golden era when they’d just had a massive hit with Kirsty MacColl in ‘Fairytale of New York’, and put an album in the Top 10, but before MacGowan went completely off the rails and pulled the whole thing apart. That year we had them booked with The Chieftains as their opening act. As expected, the show sold out almost immediately, and the whole team at the Academy was geared up with excited, slightly nervous energy to welcome them back. You could always count on some trouble with Shane and the boys, that’s what made them great. But you didn’t always count on the Troubles …

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