A Rainy Night in Soho, one of the best-loved songs of the late Shane MacGowan, is attracting new admirers on both sides of the Atlantic this summer, almost 40 years after it was first released.
Bob Dylan sang it in Phoenix, Arizona, on the opening night of his Outlaw Musical Festival tour in May, and Lisa O’Neill has been singing it on the reformed Pogues headline tour of Britain, with autumn dates in the US and Canada, marking the 40th anniversary of their album Rum Sodomy and the Lash.
“It’s the only time Dylan has played a Pogues song, and it was a beautiful tribute to the late Shane MacGowan”, wrote Andy Greene in Rolling Stone magazine a day after the Phoenix concert.
Bruce Springsteen closed his sold-out concerts in Kilkenny and Croke Park with the song last summer. Six months earlier Catholic priests lifted their ban on secular songs at church funerals for Nick Cave’s rendition of the song – not from a choir stall or nave, but from the high altar of the St Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, at MacGowan’s funeral Mass in December 2023.
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Born in Kent, just outside London, to a Tipperary mother and a Dublin father in December 1957, MacGowan was one of “the first generation of the 1950s mass emigration out of Ireland” cited by Bob Geldof in a recent Irish Times interview as the drivers of British rock and pop music in the 1970s and 1980s, alongside Elvis Costello, Johnny Lydon, Kevin Rowland, Morrissey, Johnny Marr, George O’Dowd (Boy George) and Liam and Noel Gallagher of Oasis.
“Oasis could never have existed, been as big, been as important, been as flawed, been as loved and loathed, if we weren’t all predominantly Irish,” Noel Gallagher said last year.
Between annual holidays in Ireland, MacGowan moved from semi-rural Kent into London in his early teens, immersing himself in the nascent punk music scene and maturing quickly as a songwriter. He called London the “sweet city of my dreams” and he sang about his dreams of standing with his lover “by the banks of the Thames” on Albert Bridge between Chelsea and Battersea. He called his lover “the measure of my dreams” and sang that he stepped into her arms on a rainy night in Soho when “the wind was whistling all its charms”.
A Rainy Night in Soho was released in 1986 at around the time that Christy Moore was warning that year’s renewed wave of young Irish emigrants, via Jimmy McCarthy’s song Missing You, about the tougher side of life in London “where the summer is fine, but the winter’s a fridge/Wrapped up in old cardboard under Charing Cross Bridge”.
Earlier Irish emigrants differed from the sons of that 1950s first generation who grew up in Irish communities in London, Manchester and the English midlands. Dominic Behan’s claim in McAlpine’s Fusaliers that “what keeps me here is the rake o’beer, the ladies and the crack” betokens the bravado of an entrenched navvy rather than the chutzpah of a Manchester-Irish Gallagher brother or of Kevin Rowland’s Come On Eileen.
[ Shane MacGowan 1957-2023: A life in picturesOpens in new window ]
Paul Brady’s Nothing But the Same Old Story, from his 1981 album Hard Station, features an exiled Irish part-time musician who has “built a hundred houses” and “pulled half a million pints of beer” but who suffers verbal abuse at work and condescension at parties.
Van Morrison name-checked London’s bohemian Ladbroke Grove, but he also sang: “I got messed up round somewhere called Notting Hill Gate/I lived there for a while, but I moved out/and when I moved out I was in such a state”.
And the blind man who sings a song in Irish about “a long-gone Irish girl” in Mark Knopfler’s 1979 paean Portobello Belle recalls the blind poet Anthony Raftery whose 18th century poem about beautiful Mary Hynes was memorialised by William Butler Yeats in The Tower (1928) and in his 1923 Nobel Literature Prize lecture.
The wistfulness and nostalgia of MacGowan’s Soho song may best be recaptured by a more recent Irish emigrant to London, Dubliner Imelda May. In her self-penned Kentish Town Waltz on the otherwise upbeat 2001 album Mayhem, she sings: “Do you remember we traipsed around/From pub to pound shop through Kentish Town?”
And in the chorus, she adds: “But we stuck with each other with all our might/We pulled it together and held on tight/And I’m glad for us, yeah I’m glad mo chroí/But it’s nothing to anyone ‘cept you and me.”
