Dirty Old Town

"Dirty Old Town," in The Pogues' hands, transforms Ewan MacColl's folk standard about industrial Salford into something gloriously ragged. Shane MacGowan sings it through that famously slurred, broken-toothed snarl, and the contrast is the magic: a tender love-among-the-soot lyric delivered by a voice that sounds like it's been marinated in whiskey and cigarettes. The Pogues' Celtic-punk arrangement keeps the melody's aching simplicity — accordion, tin whistle, a steady acoustic strum — but injects a pub-band looseness, the sound of last call rather than a concert hall. The lyrics are pure working-class romance: meeting a girl by the gasworks wall, dreaming by the old canal, smelling spring on the smoky wind, then the sudden violent turn of wanting to chop the old town down "like an old dead tree." It's love and contempt for a place braided together, the ambivalence anyone feels toward where they're from. Culturally it became an anthem of Irish and British emigrant longing, a singalong in every diaspora pub. Play it arm-in-arm at closing time, slightly drunk, mourning and celebrating somewhere you couldn't wait to leave but can never quite shake. MacGowan makes the grime sound holy.