Gig played on 18/12/06

Can the artist become a victim of his art, a prisoner of his own world view? Or does the art only reflect the life? If Ian Curtis' music hadn't so exhaustively chronicled the terrain of depression, might he have found it easier to escape it? If Kurt Cobain hadn't shackled his muse to drugs, disgust and the ugly full stop of suicide, might he be alive today? And if the young, bright, talented Shane McGowan hadn't found himself so fascinated with low-life and alcoholism, might he have avoided becoming a character from his own songs?

Impossible to answer, but during the wistful bar room ballad "A Pair Of Brown Eyes", the fact that McGowan slurs the words "So drunk to hell I left the place, sometimes crawling, sometimes walking" only increases their pathos. The fact that it's such a beautiful, insistent tune allows it to survive what is, frankly, a vocal mangling - just. It's a disservice to the other Pogues, a formidable set of musicians capable of rowdy pace or melancholic languor, that they must lurk in McGowan's shadow.

Particularly when they put in more effort than he can muster. He regularly stumbles to the back of the stage, seems to forget his own words to "Irish Rover" and when he surrenders vocal duties to Spider Stacey for "Tuesday Morning", it's hard not to notice how much more tuneful it sounds. Unfortunately, it also sounds pub band formulaic: the shambling, unpredictable charisma of McGowan is what lifts the best of these songs.

Which is why when McGowan pulls himself and the songs together, there are moments of magic among the squalor. On "Rainy Night In Soho", everything seems to magically click, and for a moment one sees in the imploring McGowan the heartbroken romantic, rather than the shambling drunk. And although the version of "A Fairytale Of New York" falls apart shortly after the first chorus, for a moment it's rowdy, gutsy energy almost justifies its tiresome reputation as best Christmas song of all time.

But for every one of these moments there is an interminable, incoherent stream of between song babble, or a moment when a bleary McGowan looks suddenly surprised to find himself alive, let alone on stage. And admiration shuffles aside to let in pity, something McGowan would once surely have deplored. The glamour of self-destruction has rarely looked like such a lie.

by Jaime Gill