Boot hill foot tappers biography sample
The Men They Couldn't Hang. The Men They Couldn't Stop Gigging. Call them Cowpunkabillies, call them the hottest live act in the country, just don't call time when they're drinking.
In 1984, 17-year-old Elvis Costello obsessive, Richard Balls, was in the audience at the Lower Common Room, at the University of East Anglia, excited to catch his first Attractions gig. Then the support band walked on. “I had no reference point for what I was watching,” Richard recalls. “I’d never seen or heard anything like it before. Some bands were starting to emerge then - The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Boot Hill Foot Tappers – that kind of roots stuff, but this was next level. You’ve got Spider (Stacy) smashing a beer tray over his head and Cait (O’Riordan) who looked like she might jump into the audience and hit somebody. And Shane was just out of it, wandering about the stage, sitting by the drum-kit. That was my introduction to The Pogues.” Richard subsequently caught The Pogues at the Hammersmith Palais promoting Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and at Brixton Academy, during the If I Should Fall From Grace With God tour. He bought their records, went to gigs, was your normal Pogues fan. Then in 2012, researching a book on Stiff Records, Richard contacted Shane MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke. He hoped to interview Shane about the label that signed The Pogues. It was organised through Shane’s friend Paul Ronan. That interview proved tricky, but Richard was fascinated with Shane. When Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story was published, he offered to write MacGowan’s biography. “He’s not against it,” Paul Ronan told him. So, in 2018, Richard started accompanying Paul on trips to Shane’s home in Ballsbridge. A reporter once compared interviewing Shane MacGowan to tracking a snow leopard. “It’s like wildlife photography,” Richard laughs. “You’re there for hours and you might get five seconds of footage. There were times when it was it was maddening, I wasn’t trying to interview him with the clock running, because you just can’t do that.” Instead, Richard sat in Shane’s Dublin flat, watching Sergio Leone, Scorsese and Peckinpah movies, waiting for a win Sleeve Notes The Pogues in full live effect — can there have been a more life-affirming experience? In a live scenario, there were / are few more rabidly energising experiences. Any discussion about the Pogues inevitably focuses on the unique compositional gifts of rabble-rouser in chief Shane MacGowan, but The Pogues were a band after all, and this live recording from Leysin, Switzerland in July 1991 amply illustrates their strong ensemble playing and devastatingly effective in-concert presence. The Pogues coalesced in the Spring of 1981 in London. The main instigator of the band was one Shane MacGowan, who was already something of a 'face', having emerged at the time of Punk as one of the era's most recognisable scenemakers. He featured in a photo spread in the New Musical Express, in a legendary incident at a Clash g .
Live is Life, as Opus gurgled in their delightfully Teutonic manner recently. You might have been less than one hundred per cent delighted with the song as an example of the very pinnacle of composing perfection, but it did have one fairly valid point to make — playing to an audience is still a reasonably good way to have a fun evening. And vice versa, a band that treat gigs with the delight they deserve is likely to be worth going to see.
However, the art of playing live is damn close to a lost art these days, as a quick scan through the columns of your local rag will confirm. There are precious few bands that do more than stand still and exude menace (Gothic or otherwise), or take great chunks from the Metal Poser Annual 1973 and reproduce them in all their Spandex glory.
So when somebody like The Men They Couldn't Hang come along to galvanise a crowd — yes, even the cynical hard-bitten seen-it-all-before London crowds — into action, it's both welcome and unexpected. Their enthusiasm is infectious, their sense of humour impeccable and their stage antics exhausting without being cretinous. In short, they're a damn fine live band.
They have been into the studio, true, and recorded an album and a clutch of singles, but these have done little more than reiterate their on-stage sound with occasional artificial bolstering and tightening added where the spotlight of the studio exposed gaps. They may be about to change that, with a Nick Lowe-produced seven-inch soon to be taped, but at the moment their meatier is very definitely the sweaty beer-fuelled hothouse of pubs, clubs and colleges.
So to keep the conversation on the right lines, we met in the bar of a London pub. All the menfolk of the Men were there — four of the five in other words, because bassistette Shanne wa The Pogues • Streams Of Whiskey — Live In Leysin, Switzerland 1991