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And Finally Artist News Gigs & Festivals
“What does the Pogues’ ‘farewell’ mean?” Wonders a Pogue
By CMU Editorial | Published on Friday 3 September 2010
So, earlier this week The Pogues announced that they would stage their Farewell Christmas Tour this December, leading some to wonder if this was The Pogues last ever public outing, or just their last Christmas-themed venture, or maybe the end of Christmas as we know it.
Members of the band seem similarly confused. Well some of them do. Given Shane MacGowan doesn’t seem ready to disband his band again just yet, guitarist Phil Chevron was a bit confused when the Farewell Tour was announced. So much so, he took to the band’s website to declare the tour’s name a shameless marketing trick designed to confuse fans into thinking the band were splitting and this was the last chance they’d have to see them live.
Calling the tour a “marketing ploy” by others in the band he wrote on the band’s site: “This claim does not come from me and I will neither be supporting it nor discussing it”.
But, alas, one of those “others” did force Chevron to discuss it a bit by coming to the defence of the ‘Farewell’ word in the tour’s name. Founding member Peter ‘Spider’ Stacy clarified: “This is the last Christmas tour for the foreseeable future. That’s not to say we won’t be showing up at festivals here and there, or maybe even the odd gig around the UK and Ireland and certainly in Europe. But we’re tired of dragging our weary, freezing carcasses around these drowning islands every December, so we’re going to give it a rest before you get tired of it, too. Go and see The Libertines. They’re the best”.
So, confusions resolved. But Chevron wasn’t completely happy with Stacy’s response, returning to the message board to say: “As you can see, opinion is not uniform on the matter. Spider is using the royal ‘we’ here”.
Stacy fired back: “Using the royal ‘we’? God forbid a band member would come on these pages and do something like that!”
With fans now worried that, even if the ‘Farewell’ on the tour poster didn’t really mean ‘Farewell’, that intra-band disputes online might lead to a ‘farewell’ anyway, Stacy returned online one last time to write: “Don’t get yer kecks in a twist. Take a deep breath and flick back a couple of pages and read slowly. Does it say we’re splitting up? No it doesn’t. And sorry to disappoint but there’s absolutely no internal arguments going on, spirits are high in the Pogues camp”.
So, that’s that resolved then. And with that, farewell.
