The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Shane McGowan: The Intimate Outsider In tribute to the incomparable Shane McGowan, who has died, I present this chapter from my 2010 book 'Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland.' Shane was one such, though not for any usual reason. JOHN WATERS Shane McGowan, ‘Fecker!’ The last thing any of us had imagined was that the leaden, desperate ejaculations of our drunken uncles might be turned into gold. Perhaps nobody, in all the history of traffic between  the two islands controversially known as ‘the British Isles’, has done as much to make the native Irish feel inadequate as a shambling songster called Shane McGowan. With his band, The Pogues, McGowan, a young London-Irishman claiming connections to County Tipperary, did something with Irish music that was unforgiveable. In fairness, McGowan did his best to camouflage himself in a way that would undersell his arrival, and avoid provoking the congenital ire and resentment of the native. His gap-tooth grin and incoherent speech

Very very few miss the chord! Better than the TAPS?!

  Pride? It's Accordion Awareness Month! In the spring of 1975, The Who were recording another album. They had not had a hit single in three years. Their lead guitarist and main songwriter was thinking of moving on. Goodness, he was about to turn 30! Paul Sexton wrote on November 29, 2022 , “After the film version of his musical epic  Tommy , Pete Townshend found himself disillusioned with The Who, and felt that the band had reached a natural conclusion. But he was urged to persevere, not least by his guru Meher Baba, and the album was completed to considerable acclaim and success.” He gave the band all the songs he had — except one. Sexton wrote, “The number was called  Squeeze Box , and Pete admitted in his autobiography  Who I Am  that he wrote it entirely for his own amusement, and didn’t even include it among the batch of songs he presented to Roger Daltrey for consideration for the upcoming album project. The man who persuaded Townshend that he should do the song, with the ba