Taking a walk.

A lot of people can sing, but most people don't realize they can sing.

They don't know they can sing.

And if the idea of kind of doing it in anything like a you know, doing it in front of an audience is something that just phrases a lot of people.

What happens when punk rock energy meets the haunting melodies of traditional Irish music, you get the pogues.

One of the most colorful voices Spider Stacy, I'm buzz night and today I'm taking a walk.

We step into the winding streets of Spider's musical journey, where every stroll.

Sparks the story.

Every melody tells a tale, whether it's the call of the tin whistle or the roar of the crowd.

Spider reveals how walking through life's highs and lows fuels the magic behind the music.

Lace up those shoes.

This is one walk you won't want to miss.

Taking a walk.

So great to have you on.

Take it a walk, my friend.

Yeah, it's really good to be here.

Thanks for having it.

So we're virtual, but I do have to ask you our opening question.

Use your imagination however you like, Spider, I know your imagination runs wild, Who could you envision that you'd want to take a walk with living or dead?

And where do you think you would like to take that walk?

Well, actually, I know the answer to this one.

When we first moved to New Orleans, we moved to the part of the Tremee that's between North Claybourne Avenue and North Broad Avenue, which is the part of the Tremee that is was kind of really I guess well, some people didn't even sort of accept that it really was in the Tremee at all.

The part of the tree between Rampart and Clayborne, the sort of lower part is definitely the pretty sort of creole cottage kind of thing.

This other part above Playborne and above where they decided to put the I ten during the sixties, which was an act of urban vandalism, shall we say we that's a kind of more but a bit more sort of hard scrubble, I guess, certainly less green.

And when we moved there, we'd kind of we kind of like got the impression that we were pretty much like really the only white people living for you know, a good few blocks around, but we had no truck or or bikes.

Even at that stage when we first got there, so we were just we'd just walk around, you know, we didn't mind the heat, it was, it was all everything was new to us.

But then we noticed that very swiftly there was this old white guy living two blocks below us on the two thousand block of Saint Philip Street.

And we got talking to him and it turned out he was actually we were walking past it one day and he went and out like that and we were like, oh, you're English.

And his name was Tom Staggan.

He was from He was from South London and he had come over to New Orleans in about nineteen sixty eight.

He had been he had had an interesting life.

He had been like an all a pro wrestler and all in wrestler in England, which is a very different thing to your wrestling.

It's totally totally staged.

And he was one of the sort of ring villains, you know.

He was the baddie, the one that the old the old, the old ladies would all boo out and sort of throw stuff at It's only this kind of like little skinny guy.

But anyway, there you go.

Well, also he there was a big New Orleans jazz scene, the trad jazz scene, in England in the late fifthies, sort of studed in the early fifties in fact, and he was one of those guys.

He was he was really really he just loved old, old style, old school New Orleans jazz.

And he actually was booking a few New Orleans artists who were coming over to the UK in the sixties.

And one of these guys, I believe it might have been Walter Penny, said to him, you should come to New Orleans, and he did in about sixty eight and he just stayed there and he never left.

And we'd actually go driving around with Tom because when we first met him, you know, he was like getting on a bit.

He was in his late seventies and New Orleans, say, in the summer is not really kind of place to be walking around if you're a New late seventies because it gets cruelly hot.

But we're drive around with him and he would just like he was just a mine of information.

He'd be like, you know, you'd see some sort of like kind of like abandoned sort of looked like it might have been a cinema or something.

At one time he goes, oh, that that was rips.

That was rips, and rip was that's Domino's bodyguard, and he bought and this was his club, and he'd have all these stories about you know, about Rips Club and and you know, he lived in a house that was that was owned by Dave Bartholomew, who's as a legitimate claim to be definitely one of the founding fathers of rock and roll.

Of what the actual draft of the constitution if you like, and people to continue them out for and uh, and he just would just go around.

He knew, you know, because obviously by this point the New Orleans there were a lot of the places they'd be pointing out what places that were in fact no longer there because time and people dying and Katrina and everything so on and so forth.

But he knew like everything about the place.

And what I'd really like to do is actually I need I need.

I needed the use of a time machine is go back and wander around New or New Orleans with him, maybe say in the early seventies, and uh and and and see and see what that was like, because that's when a lot of these people, the guys that he sort of like had been booking and everything were still alive and everything.

So I'd say that would be that would be quite something to do.

He us is one of the one of the things he told us, just like, you know, Bourbon Street now nowadays is I mean, you know, people go to Bourbon Street to kind of have fun and everything, but it's a bit of a it's a bit of a terrorist trap.

Really.

It's a bit like like I say, Temple Bar in Dublin.

You know, like you go to go to Dublin and you know a lot of people go to Temple Bar and they don't think to sort of go outside that.

But actually, you know, real Dublin is more outside of Temple Bar than it is inside of it.

Save as with New Orleans and Bourbon Street.

But I mean, I remember when we first went to Bourbon Street.

The band back in the late eighties went to New Orleans, I should say, Bourbon Street in those days just wild, you know, not like it is now.

It's really really wild.

But I mean, I can only imagine what it would have been like twenty years prior to that.

He said that you would walk down if you walk down the street, the middle of Bourbon Street, so you were equidistance between the bars on each side, said the noise would just be deafening because there'd be just bands everywhere just playing really really hard, really loud.

There's a great because Jelly Roll Morton's autobiography when he talks about you know, if you wanted to play with with with the black musicians, you had to play really really hard because otherwise they weren't you know.

They was like, nah, no, you're not used to us.

Yeah.

Yeah, you'd be left in the dust.

You'd be left in the dust.

Yeah.

Yeah, those those guys play their instruments.

Yeah, what a great story.

Thank you for sharing that.

And we got the time machine all cranked up for you for sure.

Oh beautiful.

Yeah, get strap in as they say, right yeh.

But so we're going to talk about the tour, which I know you're super excited about, but I do want to ask you, do you recall the.

First moment in your existence that you knew you had this deep connection to music that would manifest itself to this day.

It's a funny thing, actually, because it's always something that I thought I would do, even though there was no kind of real reason for thinking that I might do it.

I didn't.

I didn't play any musical instrument until I joined the Pokes.

You know, I was in a punk band prior to the Pokes, but I was the singer, for want of a better word, yeah, the singer.

But it was always there, and it was always just it was always something I sort of like i'd kind of I kind of thought about, but more in the sort of abstract, if that makes sense.

And I think really the crucial thing for me, and I think for a lot of other people as well, was where punk Happened is seventy six seventy seven, and a lot of us really just got the idea.

You know that, you know, it doesn't actually matter if you like, if you've got no prior experience, that doesn't mean anything.

You can just start now and just and see where the journey takes you.

You know, because you don't possess a particular skill set right at the moment, it doesn't mean that you can.

You can't acquire it, as you you know, and there's nothing not being able to say, play the guitar or whatever is no barter actually starting a band.

You know, if you're going to be the guitar as well, start in the band.

Then learn to play the guitar and hopefully you'll be good at it.

I think that's what, you know, one of the brilliant things about it, one of the really beautiful things about that was just like people did discover this means of expressing themselves, which maybe they'd felt there was something that they couldn't do, and it was it.

Suddenly everything became very egalitarian, democratic, which I think was always is always very important.

I had Danny Field on the podcast, and.

There's another guy I'd like to take a walk with.

Oh, well he would.

I'm pretty sure we have a shot at that.

If you want to follow we could follow up, because he's a man who loves the stories, loves talking obviously about the days with everybody lou Reed the Ramones.

Walk around New York with Daddy Fields.

Yeah, yeah, Well he looks at the way the villagers now now and is you would expect.

He kind of looks around and goes, this is really not how I remember it, and I don't I really like it the way it is right now, you know, because I hear one too many of fill in the blank, you know, franchises that are in the neighborhood.

But so, what did the Ramones mean to you?

Oh?

The Ramones were really really important.

The Ramones really kind of they kind of switched me on it.

I was at a at a summer dance and kind of end of term dance at a at a local girls high school to where I grew up in Golders Green in northwest London, and and yeah, some I was aware of the Ramones.

I'd heard the remones.

This is I wasn't actually end of termined.

I suppose it was.

I suppose it would have been in like towards the end of term.

So I say, June seventy six something like that, and I'd heard the Ramones.

I'd kind of given up.

I'd rather given up and reading the music papers in those first crucial kind of first six months of seventy six because it was just kind of stuff had just got boring and I wasn't really really interested in reading about the people who was reading there.

Just as actually they I decided to stop reading them just as they started to get more interesting.

But I was kind of like occasionally obviously, like you know, I hadn't decided to cast them out of my life or anything, but I just stopped buying them.

But I did pick up one, you know, an M or a sounds every now and again, and so I was aware that there was something going on.

I was aware that there was this band, the sex Pistols, who i've for a while.

I picked up the idea that they were French.

I don't know where I got that from.

And I was aware of the Ramones and I heard I heard I Want to Be Your Boyfriend on the job on the John Peel Show on the radio one on the BBC.

He did, yeah, the late night show.

He was a very important guy, and that sort of it was a really kind of like cheap shitty transistor and it was it sounded good, but I couldn't really sort of get it.

It was too crappy a reproduction to really sort of like leaning, you know, just actually sort of get what was going on.

But sorry, back to the dance.

Somebody put on the singular blitz creed Bop and I knew immediately what it was and who it was, and it was just like, you know, one of those things when you just kind of like you just set bolt up right and you're like, what is this?

What is I mean, knowing what it is, but it's like, you know, it was just kind of like felt with this filled with this real sense of urgency and excitement and that kind of just it just kept going from there.

Really the beauty of a signature sound, right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, there are moments for me really were a very they they were the band that really did it for me, that kind of like moved me off the out of the starting blocks.

We'll be back and more the Taking a Walk Podcast in a bit.

Now.

We love recommending podcasts from time to time, and we have one for you if you're into music.

It's called gig Gab.

Labeled as the show for working musicians.

It's a fascinating and entertaining look behind the scenes as to what it takes to put a live band on stage.

It's hosted by Dave Hamilton.

If you're a fan of live music, playing it or watching it be played, be sure to check out gig Gab at gig gab podcast dot com or wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome back to the Taking a Walk Podcast.

But now, so we talk about a signature sound.

The sound of the Pogues, I mean it fuses you know, punk energy, traditional Irish music.

Can you share how that blend sort of came about and sort of the background on the experimentation with different genres.

It's kind of pretty simple really.

There was a time were Shane and I were round in a friend's house and she had an acoustic guitar and he just picked it up and he started bashing out on poor Paddy works on the railway but doing it, which is a song that I knew because we both had the same Dubliners album that it was on.

It was a kind of one of these cheap o label compilations, but you know, it was actually quite a seven Drunken Nights it was called, and it was a very good sort of like selection of Dublin Has songs in it.

So I knew this song.

Shane obviously knew that we'd listen to it together, and he just started doing it the way that we would do it a couple of years further down the line, and I just kind of like looked at him and this just sounds absolutely brilliant.

This is a really, really a great idea, you know.

And then we it was Shane and this guy Ollie Watts, who was the drummer in my band, The Millwall Shane source Uh, He and Shame were in a club called Cabaret Futura, which is not exactly a new romantic club, but it was this kind of like sort of more sort of outrey, kind of like, you know, kids dressing in really sort of like weird sort of imaginative clothes, kind of like kind of yeah, sort of post punk sort of thing.

But I know how you describe it, I just did and uh and they sort of but they colored Richard Strange, the guy that run it, and said, yeah, we've got this band.

We play Irish rebel songs and we're going to be playing here next week.

And he said, well, actually I can't fit you in next week, but that sounds kind of cool.

Why don't you let's let's say, why don't you come along a month from now and you can play then, so it never you know.

So we did this this set of Irish rebel songs, which I was singing, except I kind of lost my voice, probably through nerves on the day of the show, but I kind of did it anyway.

But there was never any sort of the only way that we've ever thought of doing those songs was to play them, you know, really sort of fast and hard, kind of as though you mean them.

And that just really sort of continued into the Pogues.

The idea was always to kind of do irish stuff, but play it really fast, play it with that sort of punk energy and everything.

And of course at the same time Shane was I mean, Shane had already been writing songs in his band, The Nips, and so he was a kind of tried and tested songwriter in that regard.

But then he just started coming out on this whole track, of this whole different track, of something of a different order entirely.

And we were just lucky enough that the especially when we acquired Andrew Rank and you know, it took us about four or five goals to actually get a settled drummer, but then when we did that, we had this line up and it just it was the alchemy in bands where you might think that certain parts, if you examine them in isolation, might seem to be somewhat extraneous, but in fact you can't take anything out of it.

You've got to have everybody in there because that's how it works.

That's how it works, or at least there's a crux of a core of people who need to be there for it to sort of really properly operate.

And we were very lucky that we kind of stumbled on that, or those are the people that joined the band.

So I love it.

Your tin whistle playing is.

Iconic And how did you first learn the instrument and had your approach evolved?

No, I the original idea was that myself and Shame were going to share singing duties, and in those days I kind of just wasn't up to it.

I didn't have the confidence to try and sing properly.

A lot of people can sing, but most people don't realize they can sing.

They don't know they can sing.

And if the idea of kind of doing it in anything like a you know, doing it in front of an audience is something that just freezes a lot of people.

And in fact, the way to get over that is just to open up and let and let fly.

One of the things I really like about Ireland is that is the notion is that notion that you know when you have a session in a pub and it's like, basically the idea is that everyone's going to get up and sing a song.

And it doesn't actually matter whether or not you're technically you know, a great singer or you're just not you know, it doesn't matter.

The important thing is that you get up and you and you do your song, and you will hear people singing and it's like, you know that guy there, old lady that the picture's got a really incredible voice, you know.

You just like they're just put themselves into it.

And I think I think a lot of people are actually capable of that and just simply don't it, which is a shame.

But in those days, I was definitely one of those.

I just kind of froze up the time.

There was a time later on in the band's story when we were asking me about the tin whistle.

Sorry, so Shane said, why len't you learn the whistle?

It's easy?

He said, it's not.

It's easy to sort of pick it up and maybe sort of play a simple tune on it.

I mean, I think the first thing I learned was Silent Night from the play in a day book.

They had all the relevant holes marked out, so learn Oh yeah.

But the thing with that is that you know, if you can actually achieve an instant result, which I could do, then it really does encourage you to go and sort of like try something a little bit more complicated.

One of the problems with the guitar was like I wanted to be able to play it now, not like have to sort of sit through all this business of like you know, cutting your fingers to shreds and sort of like forming them into our natural patterns that you know.

Yeah, I just didn't have the patience or the application much of I regret that.

There you go, the band's storytelling style.

It draws on you real world experiences but also Irish folklore.

How does one balance personal stories with sort of mythology and songwriting for applying a.

Bit of genius, I guess it's it's it's something that I think it lends itself readily to the imagination.

The blending of the of the every day with the not so every day.

It's like a natural state of the form.

Does that make sense to you?

The stories and the way that the stories are told, obviously they vary from some to son, but I think the in terms of like if you're writing, if you look at the work of a lot of the great Irish writers, particularly sort of like the poets and the play rights, there's a lot of the kind of magical stuff in there interwoven with the every day that the everyday objects can actually can also have a sort of some kind of extra significance attached to them, some kind of extra power attached to them.

I think Ireland is a place that's very full of this kind of law, this kind of this kind of I hesitate to use the word supernatural because it creates the wrong impression.

I'm thinking more of the sort of smaller, quieter forces of nature, but that at the same time it's best not to sort of disturb them.

So maybe under sets I'm talking about the supernatural.

But I think it's it's something that has been that has been held on to, and I think it's probably something you find in a lot of particularly like rural communities all over the world.

In Ireland in contrast to maybe other European countries, certainly, it seems to be sort of closer to the surface.

So it's something that is a it's something that comes naturally.

I think it's a tricky one as well.

It's a tricky you know, I feel a certain you know, I'm not Irish, I don't have that upbringing.

So I'm here A lot of it is I'm just going by sort of stuff I've picked up and stuff i've sort of and there's a certain amount of conjecture, but there's also a certain amount of just like you observe and you listen and watch and yeah.

You know, so tell me how excited you are to be hitting the road coming up here in the fall.

These these shows that we've been doing since I was first approached by to do the what turned into the Red Roses for Me show at Hackney Empire, which is originally just going to be in a little folk club over the road, and it just blew up into something entirely different.

Everything is kind of you know.

The first show was great, and we did Dublin which was fantastic.

The tour we've just done the UK for the Rummy in the Lash I think was one of the most in many ways, one of the most enjoyable I've ever been on, just simply because we've got all these all these fantastic artists, both musicians and singers.

I think we're really really doing justice to the songs.

I think they're being played in a way that really brings sort of brings back the sort of the fire and the fire and the fury that they kind of need being done by people who, you know, in many cases, people who actually sort of grown up with the band.

I mean, like Darren Lynch from lancam who's going to be one of our guitarists on this tour, was saying, you know when he was like getting who was learning the when we were rehearsing sorry, when we were rehearsing for Rumsordomy in the Lash, and he was saying, you know, like, I've known your band since I was seven years old.

I've been playing these songs since I was about seven years old, and I never really actually realized just how complex, how complicated they are, because we've got all these weird arrangements, weird sort of little chords that just pop up here and there were people don't necessarily expect them to be, but they are there.

But the point was that he'd been, he'd been he'd been the fan of the band since he was seven.

And that's kind of true about particularly with regard to the Irish musicians that we've got along with us.

They've been fans of the band since they were kids.

I think that's sort of like you see that in the in just the sheer enthusiasm that they bring to it.

I mean, the playing is stupendous, the way that I mean, we're really lucky that we're really lucky.

One thing that Island's just had this extraordinary outpouring of really superlative talent talent over the last sort of studying about maybe ten years ago or whatever.

And they're all people who really love the pokes.

So that's that's really sort of like work to our advantage.

But you know, when you get somebody like like Lisa O'Neill saying A Rainy Night in Soho is just you know, there's a there's a part in that where the song there's a breakdown, and we have another one of the artists we've got with us as a her name is Iona Zadjak.

She's Scottish.

She's a beautiful singer, but she also plays the Celtic heart.

Ah My shame would have just exploded if he had If if he had seen this, he would have you know, he wouldn't have been able to contain himself because he would have loved it.

But there's a bit in in a Rainy Night where it all drops down and it's just Lisa's voice and Iona's played the harp.

She's you know, And this first of all happened at rehearsals, and then it was happening actually at the shows as well, where other people play, would be kind of like we'll be looking at each other sort of going, I'm not crying, you're crying because it just it's it's so sort of like, oh, you know, it's very very powerful.

I'm really excited to be bringing it.

I could talk about it all day long.

I think people are really in for a true.

Oh I love it.

That's so great.

So I want to close.

So how do you see your own musical identity evolving now compared to the early days of the Pogues.

Well, I mean, I think as far as I'm concerned, but keep on, keep on doing this kind of for a few more years, and and then I guess in time, time will take its toll, and then it will be time to say, all right, enough is enough.

But you know, but for the moment, this is this is so good, This is so much fun that I really don't want to stop doing doing it just yet.

We've still got to do Foo from Grace as well, you know, and A's the others, So please don't stop.

I do my best, not too.

Yeah, Spider, thank you so much, it's so great to give you.

I'm taking a walk.

It's an utter and I've really enjoyed myself.

Thank you very much.

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