The Pogues: Red Roses For Me (red vinyl) [WARNER]

Why you'll love it

This 40th anniversary edition pairs the 2013 remix with recycled red vinyl. It's the record that first fused traditional Irish music with punk energy, with "Transmetropolitan," "Streams of Whiskey" and "Dark Streets of London."

This edition

• 40th anniversary edition
• Red vinyl
• Recycled vinyl
• 2013 remix
• Pressed in Germany
• Remastered

About the album

In 1984 the London music press was full of synths and shoulder pads, and then along came a gang of London-Irish punks with a banjo, an accordion and a tin whistle. Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy, Jem Finer, James Fearnley, Cait O'Riordan and Andrew Ranken played old Irish songs as if they'd just been written, and wrote new ones that sounded centuries old.

Stan Brennan, who had run the Rocks Off record shop and managed MacGowan's earlier band The Nips, produced. MacGowan's originals, "Transmetropolitan," "Dark Streets of London," "Boys from the County Hell" and "Streams of Whiskey," are wild, tender gutter hymns, while the band tear through traditional favourites like "The Auld Triangle," "Waxie's Dargle" and "Greenland Whale Fisheries." Melody Maker heard all the motion, intensity and vigour of the early folk revival in it.

The cover was shot in the JFK Hall at the London Irish Centre in Camden, with the band lined up beneath a portrait of John F. Kennedy and MacGowan's foot in a cast. Turning up to your own album photo in plaster is a level of commitment we've never quite managed to get from staff on stocktaking day.

Also at Kops: more The Pogues on vinyl · browse Folk

Tracklist

Listen

On Warner, a reissue of the 1984 album.