U2 cover The Pogues as Shane MacGowan tribute album takes shape

What is on the Shane MacGowan tribute album

The Songs Of Shane MacGowan lands on 13 November.

It is a fairly loaded choice of song. Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah appeared on Hell's Ditch in 1990, the last Pogues album to feature MacGowan before he left the band.

Handing it to Dublin's biggest export is the kind of neat circularity that tribute projects rarely manage, and it swerves the obvious move of going near the Christmas song everybody would have expected.

The album takes its title from a project MacGowan himself had long envisioned.

The guest list reads like a wish list drawn up in a very good pub: Bruce Springsteen, Hozier, Tom Waits, The Libertines and the late Glen Hansard, all alongside U2.

MacGowan died in November 2023 at the age of 65. At least 50% of all artist royalties from the record will be donated to the Dublin Simon Community.

It is the sort of detail that tends to get buried in a press release and probably shouldn't be.

Given how much of MacGowan's writing lived among people the rest of the country had stopped looking at, it is about as fitting a beneficiary as the project could have picked.

The Edge on 'the truth of him'

U2 guitarist The Edge offered a lengthy tribute to the late singer, and it is more thoughtful than the standard rock-star eulogy.

"Shane MacGowan was full of contradictions, and that's where the truth of him lived," he said.

"He could be precise about what mattered and gloriously careless about everything else.

"If that sounds like a kind of performance, maybe it was. But as Oscar Wilde put it, 'a mask tells us more than a face.'"

The Edge went on: "The crooked grin, the wildness, the old-Ireland inflections, they weren't disguises so much as signals.

"A way of placing himself in a lineage that ran from the pub storyteller to the punk stage.

"Somewhere between John B. Keane and The Clash, he found a voice that felt both ancient and completely of its time."

On the songs themselves, he added: "He pulled together threads that shouldn't quite fit.

"Folk tradition, political memory, gallows humour, romance, and made them sound inevitable.

"His songs sound like they have always existed. He dissolved himself into them and, in the process, created the Shane MacGowan myth.

"The details of his life barely surface, but you learn exactly what he cared about. And that's the point."

Where to hear it in Ireland

The U2 cover is out now on streaming services, with the full album following on 13 November. As per RTÉ Entertainment.

Expect it to be inescapable on Irish radio from roughly the first week of December onwards, for reasons everybody reading this already understands.

It caps a strong stretch for Irish music on the international stage, from Fontaines D.C. announcing fifth album Dopamine Chamber to NPR handing two weeks of US airtime to Irish acts.