"There's all sorts of stories about us, and the myths are mixed up with the facts. Fellows would be telling me things that are supposed to have happened which didn't happen. All the good ones, you can't tell. You might offend somebody."

RONNIE DREW (THE DUBLINERS)

Monday in autumn. London, King's Cross. Four scruffily besuited characters are gathered together in the front room of a tiny tenement flat. Musicians of sorts, they are setting out for their first collective appearance.

Just as they are about to leave the building, a fifth and final figure appears. Although his face is familiar, half the party haven't seen the stranger for some 18 months, and eyebrows are raised at his inappropriate apparel. Clad in black jeans, thug boots and a ripped leather jacket, he resembles a desperate hangover from 1977. He's welcomed all the same, and the five make their way down the street, round the corner and into a small saloon on the Gray's Inn Road.

Inside, the entourage hastily assemble a drum kit, unveil an accordion and dive for the bar. Three hours later, the establishment, now filled with 60 or so people, exudes the vague scent of inspired inebria. The band eventually stumble on stage, pick up their gear, pull up two mikes and it's "One, two, three, four..."

Pogue Mahone developed at a time when Irish music was neither profitable nor fashionable.

Easter 1981 and, as the charts glossed with Ultravox, Visage and Linx, it was impossible to escape the cheap sound of synthesizers and whole-sale rumble of salsa. Shane MacGowan, proto-punk and face around town, had had his fill of London's gutless cocktail.

"There weren't any bands playing real music, emotional music that you could dance to or laugh to or cry to," he recalls. "It was either faggots with synthesizers, people buggering around with African music or wankers playing cranked out r 'n' b which had been going on for so long on the London pub scene that there wasn't anybody inspiring doing it any more."

Shane and his friend Jem Finer had lately joined a group that was going nowhere; he played bass and Jem guitar. They acted as backing band for a schoolteacher who wrote her own songs and whose relative affluence afforded the use of a studio for rehearsals. The drummer, Ollie, had an alter outlet known as The Millwall Chainsaws.

The Chainsaws were a seldom-seen punk band fronted by Shane's long-time ally and soul-kick Spider Stacy.

Like Shane and Jem, The Chainsaws lived in Burton Street, King's Cross, and since they didn't have their own guitarist Shane often filled in; his singular three-chord stance perfectly suited their own. They also shared an increasing passion for Irish folk music.

"Shane would go round singing all this stuff and after a while I got used to him and started to know the words and tunes," says Spider. "And we'd go back to his place, drunk, and listen to Irish records that he'd borrowed off his dad or bought himself."

Their impromptu interpretation of Dubliners songs became a common sound in the north London pubs, but more often than not they were greeted with requests to leave. One Monday that April, Shane and Ollie were down at Richard Strange's Cabaret Futura, a street-level poseurs' club frequented by the likes of Richard Jobson and the rising Soft Cell. Feeling the benefit of a night's drinking, Ollie marched up to Richard Strange and said: "Oi, Richard! We're in a band that plays Irish rebel songs - give us a gig here next week." Strange, ever keen to encourage individualism, immediately agreed. Two weeks later The New Republicans took to the boards.

Lining up as Ollie (drums), fellow Chainsaw Matt Jacobson (bass), a former New Bastard called John (guitar) and Shane (guitar, vocals) they blasted their way through a shambolic set; Spider, having lost his voice the day before, just stood on stage wondering who'd stolen his beer. Songs like 'The Patriot Game' and 'The Bold Fenian Men' were new to the raincoat-chic audience, but their reaction was favourable if uncertain. Up front, the band provoked a more definite response. "There was a group of about 20 drunken squaddies who took exception to the songs and started pelting us with chips," remembers Shane.

"I don't think it was all that serious but it was reasonably alarming at the time." Spider remained oblivious to the hostility, but candidly admits, "I was so completely arseholed I wouldn't have known if they'd been throwing hand grenades." Eventually the management stepped in to pull the plugs on The New Republicans for the first and last time.

Thoroughly enjoying their performance and the instinctive crowd reaction, Shane was keen to turn the band into a going concern. The Chainsaws were renowned for their terminal apathy and only managed three skirmish-style rehearsals and a kitchen room demo over the next six months.

It was Jem Finer who shared MacGowan's enthusiasm. "In October of 1981 Shane was still warbling on about The New Republicans," says Jem. "So I asked him if he wanted someone else to play guitar and he said that he didn't know but he'd ask the others. Then a couple of months later he asked if I still wanted to play guitar, and a few weeks after that he invited me to his place to learn some songs. So everything took a remarkably long time."

By this stage, Shane was writing new material and the first original they attempted was 'Streams of Whiskey'. Inspired by the Celtic spirit of Brendan Behan and Flann O'Brien, the song was the ultimate in romantic impetuosity: 'I am going, I am going any which way the wind may be blowing/I am going, I am going where streams of whiskey are flowing.' It summed up the free trade essence of Shane MacGowan.

When they had mastered a sufficient number of songs, they agreed that the best way to practice would be by busking. On several occasions they took their guitars to Finsbury Park tube station and played Irish, country and rock 'n' roll to indifferent travelers. "We weren't into the busking trip," says Shane. "We just did it for the money."

But their enterprise was less than viable. "Once we tried to go to Covent Garden and had an audition for the Piazza at 10 o'clock one morning," recalls Jem. "We played there for about half an hour with three people watching, one of which was a drunken Irishman who kept coming up to Shane and asking him to play 'Carrickfergus'. At the end of it the man from the Piazza sneered and said, 'Very few people have come here and failed what we like to call The Covent Garden Seal Of Quality. I'm sorry, you have failed.' I think it was at that point that we gave up busking."

In June 1982 they were ready to recruit a full line-up and auditioned a King's Cross neighbour, Andrew Ranken, on drums. Andrew clicked immediately, but he also sang in a cajun r 'n' b band, The Operation, and his loyalty lay with them. What's more, he was just about to go on a summer holiday which he wouldn't forfeit for anything. A few weeks later, Dexy's Midnight Runners had their third coming: with three-piece strings and evergreen washed-out dungarees, the Celtic sold ones unleashed the years loudest refrain with 'Come On Eileen'.

"Suddenly there was all this press about Dexy's and all that Celtic thing and it just seemed like a really bizarre coincidence," says Jem.

"We just thought these blokes had come up with a watered down version of what we were doing," says Shane. "We thought they should have stuck to soul which they were good at." Towards the end of the summer, while MacGowan and Finer sought an accordion player, Shane remembered that a former flat-mate, James Fearnley, could play piano. Jem consequently turned up on James' doorstep, presented him with an accordion, and said, "We thought if anyone would be able to play this, it would be you." Taken aback, James was less than convinced about the band. "I'd never played accordion before, and I didn't really go a bundle on the idea. I thought that it would just be another folk group."

Nevertheless, he agreed to give it a go and spent September rehearsing with Shane and Jem; they showed him the songs and he learnt to play according to them. Meanwhile, 'Country' Jem had swapped his guitar for a banjo, an instrument which was equally foreign to him. "The way that I learnt was entirely influenced by trying to play Irish music in a country style of banjo playing," he says.

By this time, John Hasler had been roped in on drums and, less than a month after James and Jem first picked up the accordion and banjo, MacGowan and Finer asked Justin and Vicki Ward to give them a date at The Pindar Of Wakefield in King's Cross. The band was duly booked for October 4. 1982.

Three nights before the big event Shane telephoned Spider Stacy to tell him that - 18 months on from The New Republicans - they had another gig. But by the eve of their debut they had yet to come up with a suitable name. Among the suggestions were The Men They Couldn't Hang and The Noisy Boysies, but they couldn't agree on either. Sitting in a pub that night, Spider suggested to Shane that they should christen themselves 'Pogue Mahone' elementary Gaelic for 'Kiss my arse'. The name stuck, and Pogue Mahone it was.

Shane MacGowan was born in Kent, on Christmas Day 1957, but his childhood passed in his mother's Tipperary home, not far from Nenagh and the call of the rippling Shannon. His mother, Therese, came from a typical Irish family: the rare auld stock. Her father had died when she was three so she grew up in her grand-parents' farmhouse, which housed a huge family of 14 people and, although there wasn't much money, their home was rich in music, dancing and the Gaelic tongue.

Therese was a talented singer and traditional Irish dancer. She commanded an extensive range of songs and regularly won prizes at fleadh-ceoils, the music festivals which were a characteristic part of country life. She was also exceptionally handsome and it wasn't long before she was drawn to the bright lights of Dublin, where her raging beauty quickly secured a modeling career. It was in the city that she met and married Maurice MacGowan, who came from a middle class but not affluent Dublin family. He was a literate man forever reading and writing, and particularly keen on poetry, and although his voice was no match for Therese's he shared her love of music. His taste ranged from jazz and blues through the country sounds of Hank Williams and Johnny Cash to old Dublin ballads like 'Waxies Dargle'.

Liking Irish music was, says Shane, as natural as liking the sound of his mother's voice. "When I was really little, I was brought up by the people in Tipperary who knew millions of songs. It was real gut-level stuff, music that's been handed down from generation to generation."

There were a dozen people living in the family farmhouse, and almost every night the neighbours would gather in to sing and play traditional music. "Listening to and singing Irish music was a part of life. I had an auntie who played concertina, an uncle who played accordion, cousins who played banjo and tin whistle. So it's perfectly natural for me to sing Irish songs, I've been doing it since I was a kid and the feel of it is no problem. It was something I never thought about."

When he was six, Shane's parents took him to England, and he and his younger sister, Siobhan, were brought up in central London. "Even at that age, it was a sharp contrast from the country in Ireland. I used to know bits of Gaelic because my mother speaks it fluently, but once I hit the city I forgot it; I became immersed in the society of London. On the other hand, because there's an Irish scene in London you never forget the fact that you originally came from Ireland. There are lots of Irish pubs, so there was always Irish music in bars and on jukeboxes. I had an uncle who ran a pub in Dagenham, and I stayed there a lot of the time. Then every summer I would spend my school holidays back in Tipp."

Besides an inherent love for Irish music and the blues, Shane went through the usual pop phase. "In my early teens I liked heavy metal, which was good, but you soon get sick of it. Then when I started going to discos I got heartily into soul and reggae."

He was a brilliant scholar and at 14, his flair for poetry and prose secured him a place at Westminster. But instead of flourishing in a top public school, he "just buggered around and got kicked out after one year." He spent numerous teenage hours wandering around Piccadilly but, unlike so many rootless kids, Shane was never too far from home.

When he left school, he worked as everything from being a shelver in a supermarket to a porter at the Indian Embassy. At the same time England was being blitzed by economic recession and, before long, the children of Boom, Beatles and Backing Britain were bristling with anger, frustration and sheer Boredom.

At 18, MacGowan became a barman in The Griffin Tavern, Charing Cross, and a regular on London's pub-rock scene where he witnessed the likes of the anarchic Pink Fairies and blistering r 'n' b from the 10lers and Dr. Feelgood.

On June 15 1976, while waiting for the 10lers, he encountered The Sex Pistols. Already infatuated with the glam narcissism of The New York Dolls, the Pistols blew him away. Their searing energy and frozen nonchalance epitomized the disaffection of a generation.

"Seeing The Sex Pistols changed my life - it changed loads of people's lives. There was a band that just got up there and made a really horrible noise and didn't give a shit. They were all our age and had dyed hair and wore brothel creepers, and it was just a question of, 'Yeah, Fuck it. I hate everything and they're actually doing it.' I thought they were brilliant; the best group I've ever seen." Shane chopped off his hair, jacked in his job and watched the world turn dayglo. For 12 break-neck months there was action, excitement and round-the-clock kicks.

"The whole scene was based on gigs at places like the ICA and going to nightclubs that stayed open all night, taking loads of speed and drinking Pernod - as opposed to going out to a disco with your mates, drinking beer, getting in fights and picking up some bird. The punk scene was completely asexual so you'd get both sexes hanging around together, not doing anything except staying out all night and dancing. Like the best place going at the start was Louise's, which was originally a lesbian club in Soho; that was the first really good nightclub."

"One thing that's got to be pointed out about the original punk scene, though, is that it was extremely elitist, like mod in the early sixties. The whole thing was basically created by the beginning of 1977 and anyone who got into it after that was just a Pile of shit, in terms of the way that people thought. Half of it was working class disco kids and the other half was art students, there was a genuine working class thing in it - that's why it got so big in the end - but it was the hip working class. "Initially it was all about style and about fuck, literally fuck everything, 'Fuck it - I don't care. I don't care if they drop the bomb, I'm still going down to Louise's in my new pink brothel creepers.' But it was incredibly elitist: if you walked into a club wearing the wrong thing you'd be laughed out of the place; you'd have to leave the country!"

In October of 1976, a girl called Jane (later to reappear as a Modette) turned Shane into a mini-legend. "I was up the front at this Clash gig in the ICA, and me and this girl were having a laugh, which involved biting each other's arms 'til they were completely covered in blood and then smashing up a couple of bottles and cutting each other up a bit. Anyway, in the end she went a bit over the top and bottled me in the side of the head. Gallons of blood came out and someone took a photograph. I never got it bitten off - although we had bitten each other to bits - it was just a heavy cut."

"But I got into The Evening Standard and that made me a 'face' from then on. People used to stop me in the street and say, 'You're the guy who had his ear bitten off, you're great man. 'Cos that's what it turned into. It's like the old story about the bloke who catches the fish, he says that it weighs this much and it's that big and within a couple of day's it's a whale."

Shane O'Hooligan was ubiquitous: behind the reputed Rock On record stall in Soho Market by day and up front at every gig by night. Struck by the vibrant honesty of The Jam, he swore to their importance when he created his own one-off fanzine, Bondage. He quickly formed a group with his friend Shanne Bradley, and it was she who named them Nipple Erectors.

On December 1, 1976, The Pistols swore at Bill Grundy on tea-time TV, and punk went provocatively public. By the time it had been neutered and mass produced enough for the King's Road tourists, punk was over.

"It started as an expression of originality," says Shane, "but within a year people were getting into it as a kind of cattle involvement. Like loads and loads of punks crowding into halls to see The Ramones or Clash. I'm not knocking those people but the whole point was to be yourself; a complete individual."

"Speaking as one of the great trendsetters of the movement," he laughs, "the minute that anybody turned up looking a bit like you then you'd change. But in the end there were loads of people walking around with anarchist signs and hair, spiked out dyed green, and wearing leather jackets, Doc Martens and jeans, just like Sid." The Nipple Erectors immortalized their distinctive rockabilly clout on 'King Of The Bop'/ 'Nervous Wreck'. The single was produced by Stan Brennan, Shane's employer in the Soho record store Rocks Off, and the band attracted a considerable amount of attention before shortening their name to the less controversial Nips.

"We were a no bullshit group. We just used to get up, whatever state we were in, and without all the posing that a lot of other people did. We never gave all this 'I'm An Artist' shit; we were always in touch with the audience. It sounds corny but it's true."

The Nips built up a loyal following on the London circuit and issued three singles 'All The Time In The World', the notable pop ballad 'Gabrielle' and the Paul Weller-produced 'Happy Song'/'Nobody To Love'. They also recorded a live LP, casually titled 'Only The End Of The Beginning'.

They had a legendary reputation for line-up changes and, by the time they disbanded, had been through four guitarists and more drummers than anyone cares to remember. "The only people who were in The Nips from the beginning to the end were me and Shanne. The rest of them lasted as long as they lasted and then we kicked them out. It wasn't set out like that but that's the way things happened. In the end we had a really good group - James Fearnley was the guitarist - and we didn't break up properly 'til the end of 1980."

With the calm borne of perspective, Shane says of punk: "It wasn't a revolution like everyone makes out; it was just a change of style. At the time we thought, 'This is it, we've got it sussed,' but we were just a bunch of teenagers and the dreams disappeared like smoke out of an opium pipe. So at the end of the day you were left with a load of old brothel creepers, a lot of hair gel, a couple of bottles of crazy colour and the dole. That happened to loads of people, some got out of it and others didn't. Lots of people I know from that time are dead and I just happen to be one of the lucky ones at the moment."

But he states, "it was the best thing that ever happened to me, it completely changed my life at a really important stage. If it hadn't been for punk, I'd probably be some drunken shithead barman running my own pub."

After the brief excitement of the 2-Tone ska movement, Shane's interest in the club scene was temporarily revived by the celebrated dance world of Blitz and Spandau Ballet.

"The whole thing was about making the band part of the atmosphere, which could only work on a small level in London. It was a hip elitist scene which was a bit like punk. In fact, I'd known all the people who were involved in that club scene from the punk days; it was the same crowd."

"I thought that Spandau Ballet were a great band whenever I saw them - which was only two or three times, because they only played live about six times before they had a hit record. So for a while, because I wasn't doing anything else, I got into that. But it soon tapered off, and then the whole scene went down. It was appalling." It was at this point that Shane MacGowan was drawn back to his Irish folk roots. "The music that I felt naturally emotionally involved with."

Although he was born in Eastbourne, on December 14 1958, Peter Stacy's childhood was coloured by foreign shores.

When he was two, his father's work forced the family to move to British Guyana, on the north east coast of South America. After six months the Stacys returned to the Sussex coast but then, in 1964, the lure of oil took them to Libya for two and a half years. Back in Eastbourne again, his parents separated and Peter stayed with his mother who took a job in Surrey and, a few months later, in Berkshire.

"My mum was assistant matron at this boarding school called Big Shot, near Broadmoor, so that's where I went to school. Then she left half way through the term and I had to stay there without her; I hated it. When I finished we moved to London, where she met up with my dad again and we've lived there ever since."

When Peter was 12 a girl friend rechristened him Spider, in recognition of his angular body and liquorice legs. He had already established a marked preference for The Rolling Stones over the more popular Beatles. "I didn't like the idea of The Beatles, I thought they were wimps. I always preferred The Stones 'cos they had that darkness and hardness about them."

Stacy confirmed himself as the hippest kid on the block by being the first to get into The Velvet Underground and, later, The Stooges. "I used to listen to all kinds of music: around 1972 I liked T Rex, Gary Glitter and Roxy Music. And - for some reason, I can't figure out why now - I really used to like Genesis and Pink Floyd. But," he quickly adds, "I never liked Yes and I never liked ELO." His favourite records included The Faces' 'A Nod's As Good As A Wink To A Blind Horse' and Humble Pie's live version of 'Hallelujah', "It goes on for about 15 minutes, it's so excruciatingly boring it's brilliant." He also displayed the usual mid-seventies tendency for Led-Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath.

In 1975, aged 16, Spider was expelled from school. He spent the next year doing a series of dead-end jobs. "The first job I had was working in a car wash, that was good, I liked it. Then I worked in an electrical warehouse, shelved in a super-market and did all sorts of crap like that."

He was equally non-impressed by the stale music scene. "It sounds like a cliché, but it was all so boring, there was just nothing to get excited about."

Then, sometime in '76, I saw Dr. Feelgood and I thought they were brilliant. They were hardly revolutionary but they were really exciting. And then, a couple of nights later, I was at some party and someone put on 'Blitzkrieg Bop', and I wondered, 'What the fuck is this!' I'd heard of The Ramones and thought they were Puerto Ricans, so I got a real shock when I picked up the album cover and saw all these white guys with long hair when I had imagined these real sharp Puerto Rican kids with DAs and quiffs. But I thought 'Blitzkrieg Bop' was brilliant, and knew something was definitely going on."

Not long afterwards Spider was watching Bill Grundy's Today programme and, like thousands, he was struck by the 'Filth and Fury' of The Sex Pistols. "I saw The Pistols and that was it. Everything fell into place and made sense. The next day I went out to try and buy 'Anarchy In The UK' but couldn't because everyone had bought it before me. So I bought 'Stupidity' instead and managed to steal a copy of 'Anarchy' off someone who didn't realize what it was all about."

He started going down to The Roxy, in Covent Garden, a squalid showcase for the new bands and, until April 1977, punk's premier home. He also joined The New Bastards. "These mates of mine had started a band in mid '76 called The Bastards, but I'd lost touch with them. Then we met up again through going to the same gigs, and they reformed calling themselves the New Bastards. I was the drummer. . . I play drums even worse than I sing."

The band's initial engagement was at notorious comprehensive school in Brent. Hellbent on hedonism, The New Bastards singer passed the pre-gig hour downing 16 cans of Harp Lager, and the only song chat he could remember, as he was carried from the toilets to the stage, was Stacy's Pulitzer special 'Filthy': 'God you smell, you really reek! You better have a bath this week. You don't even wash your clothes/ You've got scum between your toes/ 'Cos you're filthy. They had to repeat it six times. Suitably inspired, Spider Stacy resolved to form The Millwall Chainsaws with two characters of similar disposition, Ollie Watts and Matt Jacobson. "We started talking about it in '77, but we were all so indolent and drunk and stoned the whole time that it took us two years to get round to actually doing it."

Meanwhile, Spider found temporary employment in filling stations, and somehow ended up as a car salesman. "I was quite good at flogging cars, only I can't drive which is a bit of a handicap. Also I used to go to work in a black suit wearing a black shirt and tie, and my hair was Throbbing Gristle batch. Well 'ard," he laughs.

On New Years Day, 1979, The Millwall Chainsaws took to the stage in style. They opened for The North London Invaders (later to become Madness) at the Film Makers' Co-op in Camden Town. Appearing as Spider shouting, Ollie occasionally hitting drums and Matt booming in on bass, The Chainsaws had their finest moment with the Stacy penned 'Skinhead Escapes'. Drawn from Richard Alien's Skinhead series, it was a bootboy smoocher which began: tree Hawkins died for somebody's sins, not mine/ I'm buggered if I'm gonna pay this fine, one, two, three, feud Me mother says wanking makes you blind/ The teacher says I ain't got no mind/Bricks and mortar make me whine/ Skinhead escapes over the wall/ Skinhead escapes over the wall.

"That was one of our best gigs," remembers Spider. "We also did a song called 'Fuck Off' which consisted of the, er, musicians going, 'BOOM! BOOM!' and me shouting, 'Fuck Off! Fuck Off' and rolling around on the floor and generally making an exhibition of myself." Delighted by their debut, The Chainsaws agreed to go ahead with a full scale tour of London. They upgraded their act to the extent of learning two more songs and were known to do an impressive version of 'No Fun'.

In the spring of 1978, the band moved to King's Cross where they became itinerant residents of Burton Street. Living on the same street was Shane MacGowan (whom Spider had first encountered 12 months earlier in the Roundhouse urinal at a Ramones gig) and it wasn't long before MacGowan had been adopted into the Chainsaw ranks.

"For the kind of stuff we were doing Shane was perfect," enthuses Stacy. "He knew exactly what was required. Technically he's not a good guitarist but in terms of feel and energy he's brilliant."

Early in 1981, The Millwall Chainsaws completed their first tour of London and, inspired by The Dubliners, temporarily emerged as The New Republicans.

"The Chainsaws did seven gigs in the space of two years. But it was better than being pressurized," says Spider. "We've never split up. It was just a long time between gigs."

Born in Stoke-on-Trent, on July 20 1955, Jem Finer grew up in the Staffordshire town of Keele.

When he was 10 his family moved closer to Manchester, and settled in Knutsford. He developed an appetite for music in the teenage takeover of the early sixties. "I was brought up on The Beatles, Rolling Stones, the normal Ready Steady Go sort of fodder; Elvis Presley and Tamla Motown. When I was 12 everyone in school was really into Northern Soul discos. Then, at 13, I started going to see any band that came along. I saw lots of crap and some really good ones, like Deep Purple. I also used to go to pop festivals and saw loads Of good groups, like The Doors and Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight." Jem was introduced to country music via The Grateful Dead's folk-rock and, later, the tough trucking tales of Commander Cody. "I used to listen to them and then I got interested in hearing the originals. Half the time it used to make me laugh rather than actually liking the music. I mean, a lot of country music is funny because the singers think they're serious. But there's some really brilliant stuff too, and Hank Williams is one of the best."

His favourite contemporary band was The Faces. By 1971 their raucous sets, usually lubricated by vast quantities of alcohol, were among the finest live shows in the country; and they attracted a fanatical following. "The Faces were the band that I used to go and see whenever I could. I never followed them round but they used to play quite a lot in Manchester. They always used to look like they were really enjoying themselves, half pissed, there was something that got to you whether they were good or bad. When they were good they were brilliant and quite often they were really bad. But there was just a feeling that you got. It was like being at a football match."

Not surprisingly, Jem was a regular at Old Trafford in the days of glory, glory and Sir Matt Busby. "I Used to go to see Manchester United when they were really, really brilliant. When they had George Best, Bobby Charlton and Dennis Law. There was about three seasons when I went to all the home matches and a lot of away ones too."

At 18, he went to Keele University to study Computing and Sociology. Having completed his course in 1977, he worked on a barge in the South of France then travelled around for a year before settling in London. "I was always a bit like a displaced Londoner," he maintains. "Both my parents are from London and we used to go there to visit the family. It wasn't my fault I had to live in Knutsford and Keele."

In the city, Jem found work in an office, a warehouse and, for a while, an adventure play-ground. "Then I got really fed up with everything and decided I was going to live abroad. So I did a month's course teaching English as a foreign language and was going to go to Italy. But immediately afterwards I got a job teaching photography to delinquents on a scheme called Intermediate Treatment In Deptford."

Throughout this period, Finer lived in number 32, Burton Street, a house which he sometimes shared with Spider Stacy and, later, Shane MacGowan. "There were lots of bands in Burton Street," says Jem. "There was this group called Charge - a sort of anarcho punk band who played benefits all over the place - and they had this basement done out like a rehearsal room, so there was always people just messing around with instruments."

Among the many bands who frequented Burton Street were a psychotic r 'n' b combo known as The Petals. One day, their bassist failed to show up so Jem stepped in and instantly became a permanent fixture. "I don't think The Petals were ever destined for great things. We were ragged round the edges and not entirely serious."

By 1980 The Petals had petered out. But, following the break up of The Nips, Finer and MacGowan started rehearsing together, and eventually laid the foundations for the prototype Pogue Mahone.

James Thirkhill Fearnley was born on October 9 1954, in Worsley, West Manchester. At the age of 11 he went, in family tradition, to Ackworth Friends School near Wakefield, where he excelled as a choir treble. He was 16 before his voice broke. During his first year at Ackworth, James took piano lessons. "It was the first instrument I'd ever played, but the teacher was so horrible that after a year and a half I wanted to pack it in. I'd show up to lessons with bandages around my hands saying that a window had dropped on them, and it just so happened that the fellow before me had done exactly the same thing - so the teacher didn't believe either of us."

Fearnley was eventually excused piano lessons and, when himself and two school friends decided to form their own band, his parents bought him a Spanish guitar. His taste in music was, at this stage, dominated by Motown, The Rolling Stones and white blues. "I got to know a lot of riffs on guitar but they were learnt second hand off white blues guitarists like Peter Green and Eric Clapton. The only gigs that I went to from school were Cream and Bowie."

James took a degree in Humanities at Ealing Technical College and after leaving college, in September 1977, he decided to live in Germany and hit Berlin during the peak of Baader Meinhof activity. He took his guitar with him and soon met up with another musician. "I played with this black lad in a couple of clubs in Berlin. He was a singer/songwriter and wanted someone to borrow money off and help out with a few songs. He was really good on his own, and I only played on a couple of numbers. I lent him some money and I never saw him again, but he said that I was okay on guitar and I ought to get myself into a group. So I Came back to England with the intention of playing."

Back home, a singer called Nick Wade (later Nik of Alien Sex Fiend) had advertised for a guitarist. Fearnley joined the band, but the unchristened outfit only made one demo before splitting for good.

Later he had a brief affair with The Mixers, playing several times around the Kingston and Richmond area, but directly afterwards he met up with The Nips.

"I had an audition and said, 'I'm not going to join the group unless you can give me somewhere to live.' And that's how I ended up in this squat - or so I thought it was - with Jem, Shane and various other people in King's Cross."

The last edition of The Nips consisted of James, Shane, Shanne Bradley and Jon Moss. "Jon Moss is a brilliant drummer, and a great bloke - although he wouldn't sing 'The Holly And The Ivy' when we played with The Jam at The Music Machine. We were all dressed in women's nightdresses and Jon was wearing a pair of frilly pants and wouldn't come out to the front of the stage to do backing vocals."

At the end of 1980 The Nips finally called it a day. Simultaneously, their Burton Street home was designated a dangerous building, so the Housing Association moved James to alternative accommodation in Mornington Crescent. It was then that he joined a soul band, The Giants. "We had a great singer called Paul Cox. He's got a really good soul voice for a white fellow, and I think he's got his own band together now. The Giants were a good group for me to be in 'cos most of the stuff I played before was thrashing. But by playing soul I just came up with these half-learnt Steve Cropper guitar licks, and the rest of it was made up. I really enjoyed playing soul guitar, but that group split up too."

On the demise of The Giants, James decided to hang up his guitar and turn instead to writing. Diversion came when Jon Moss who had joined a group known as Culture Club, paid a visit. "He came round to my flat, and asked me to listen to a tape 'cos they were looking for a guitarist. We were sitting in his car, with no lights on, listening to this tape. And Jon Moss was tapping his feet so that the whole car was shaking. You can imagine what it must have looked like, coming down Arlington Road and seeing these two fellows in a car that's going up and down! Anyway, I told him that I could easily play what was on the tape, and he said if he didn't ring me I should call him. But neither of us phoned, and Culture Club got famous directly afterwards."

After that, James sold his Telecaster replica, and spent the next year writing. He turned out a play and a short story (their topics wildly veering from illness and old age to straight sex) and a series of short pieces. "I wrote for four hours every morning. I did that religiously, weekends as well." Mid 1982, and Fearnley had more or less forgotten about playing in bands when Jem Finer, a friend, paid him an unexpected visit.

Last night as I slept, I dreamt I met with Behan,' Shane MacGowan belted his way through the joyous strains of 'Streams of Whiskey', while Spider Stacy yelled and screamed, belched and sneered and generally behaved at outrageous odds with the others.

The set itself was a shambling collection of Dubliners favourites and loosely practiced originals. From the hazardous instrumental clang of 'The Clobberer' and 'Connernara Let's Go', through 'Dark Streets Of London' to the soulful strains of 'Peggy Gordon' and the plaintive cry of Brendan Behan's 'The Auld Triangle'.

The Pindar crowd had already sensed that this was the beginning of something special when the band played 'Waltzing Matilda': a version so moving that even the obnoxious Stacy was reduced to tears. "The refrain at the end hit an emotional nerve," he says, "and I just started crying. It was really embarrassing."

More embarrassed, however, were Jem and James who found Stacy's Chainsaw behaviour, not to mention his sartorial garb, unforgivable. "We went down really well," says Jem, "and everybody said it was brilliant - which it wasn't, although I obviously there was something there - but you want to get rid of that bloke. He's a complete arsehole."

MacGowan, though, was anxious for Spider to remain in the band, and it was privately agreed that Stacy would borrow an old suit, get a grip on his volume control and learn to play the tin whistle. The next day, Shane was wandering down Oxford Street when he bumped into Cait O'Riordan. Cait had been invited to the Pindar, but it was the day before her dole cheque, and she didn't have the money to get home to Queens Park. Now, with a freshly cashed giro in her hand, it seemed like a good idea to go for a drink. While London woke up to punk, 11-year-old Caitlin O'Riordan was doing her homework and in bed by 10.00 p.m.

She was born in Nigeria, on January 4 1965, of Celtic blood; her father came from Clare and her mother Musselburgh, near Edinburgh. But before she was two, Civil War Persuaded the O'Riordans to leave Africa and head for London.

Caitlin grew up to the sound of country and western and Radio 2. "Before I got my first radio, I just liked what was played on Radio 2, really calm, middle-of-the-road stuff; and my dad had cheap Johnny Cash records and The Dubliners albums."

"Then every Sunday we used to go to the Irish Club in Teddington which had an Irish jukebox. I liked that stuff as well, 'cos I associated those records with my packet of crisps and lemonade on Sunday."

When she was 14, she broadened her musical horizon. "I got a radio and started listening to all the John Peel shows when I went to bed." It was while listening to Peel that Cait was struck by a song titled 'Gabrielle'. She went to buy it from Rocks Off Records, and working behind the counter was The Nips singer Shane MacGowan. "It's all really cosmic," she smiles, "a series of coincidences, both good and bad."

Later Cait acquired a black bass guitar. "I didn't learn to play it, I just had it because it was beautiful. It was a mean, punk, cheap bass which I kept under my bed."

Her introduction to live music came courtesy of Orange Juice and Postcard Pop. "The emergence of Postcard records coincided with me just coming up to 16 - before ever being allowed out of the house - so I went to all those gigs." But by autumn 1982, Postcard was fizzling and the music scene looked limited.

Sitting in The Hog In The Pound, South Molten Street, Shane talked about the gig and Cait casually mentioned she had a bass guitar. Suitably soused, Shane saw O'Riordan as the perfect solution to Pogue Mahone's basslessness.

"Full of my whiskey and my giro, he said, 'You're in the band'," recalls Cait. "I went hungry all that next week."

Already acquainted with Spider, Cait was introduced to James, Jem and John in the pub, before her first rehearsal. James shook her hand and said, "You must be Cait, the new bass player." She replied, "No, I'm just Cait." There would be no illusions.

She made her debut on October 23, when they headlined for King Kurt at Clapham's 101 Club. By going on early, King Kurt could get legless later but, as a result, Pogue Mahone played to a drastically diminished crowd of 20. They also had to wade their way through King Kurt's token trail of talcum powder, flowers and rabbit offal. "It was absolutely disgusting," says Jem. "The stage was covered in goo so that every step you took you stuck to the floor. I trod on this thing that squelched and flew out from under my foot. I looked down and it was a rabbit's kidney, and there was a rabbit's head just lying there. Revolting."

While Cait sat on a stool, carefully strumming on Jem's Monkee-sized old bass, Spider was bashing his brains out by way of percussion. "That was the first time that I employed the beer tray," he says. "I woke up the next morning with a knee that was turning black, 'cos I was banging it on my knee well as my head, and my forehead had gone green. Actually, it looked quite fetching."

A couple of weeks later, they trooped round to Justin Ward's flat, and recorded a demo on his four-track studio. "We did 'Waltzing Matilda', 'Poor Paddy' and 'Streams Of Whiskey'," says Jem. "But it was really unfortunate, because when we copied it on to tape only one side of the cassette was working. So you could hardly hear the bass and drums, and it came out sounding really folky." Billing themselves as The Black Velvet Underground, the Pogues' next outing was to the 100 Club on Oxford Street where they supported The Milkshakes and The Sting-rays. Their short, spirited set was perfectly attuned to the psychotic tendencies of the gathering, and the wreckin' crew went crazy.

"All I remember was John's drum kit falling off the stage," says Spider. "It was probably trying to get away from him and find someone who could hit it properly."

Spider had, meanwhile, cemented his own position by making a start on the tin whistle. "I found it easier than I thought I would," he says. "It's a good instrument to pick out a simple tune on, the fingering is very logical and straightforward. I got this book which had diagrams of the finger movements for tunes like 'Amazing Grace' and 'Silent Night'. And from the very first day I was able to play 'Silent Night', which gave me the encouragement to push on."

By December it had become clear that if Pogue Mahone were going anywhere, then John Hasler wouldn't be with them. It was left to Jem and Cait to issue the forthright suggestion that he should try harder, or they would find someone else. Jumping before he was pushed, Hasler quit the band.

Finding a decent replacement proved difficult, and Pogue Mahone entered 1983 with an all-time low at Camden's Dingwalls. They were drunk and disorganized to the point of total collapse while the 'drummer' - who had been recruited only hours before - made John Hasler look like Art Blakey.

In the crowd that night was Philip Chevron. A former Radiator From Space and, at the time, working in Camden's Rock On record shop, Chevron had come with a curiosity fueled by acquaintance. He wasn't exactly swept off his feet. "I thought they were dreadful," he says. "But there was the knowledge that if they could get it right and sort out the line-up then they would work a treat." Chevron resolved not to watch them again for a few months.

"Dingwalls was the last time we were really bad," says James. "Jem was so frustrated that he started banging his head against the dressing room wall."

Their subsequent dates saw a string of haphazard drummers and equally erratic sized crowds: one week they'd be playing to 70, the next to a dozen. Most of their gigs took place at The Pindar Of Wakefield as part of a series of nights run by two sisters called Fiotla and Gerri Murray, and titled Hey Wire.

Among 10 people watching Pogue Mahone at the Pindar, one night that February, was Darryl Hunt, a drinking acquaintance of Jem Finer and a regular on the King's Cross scene. "They were just another of the many groups playing at the Pindar who all seemed to know each other," he says. "But they were really good, really good fun."

By this time, Shane and Jem had decided that their problem was not just with a drummer, but with the drums themselves. They quickly created their own sound: based on a unique two-piece 'kit' of floor tom-tom and snare drum. "We just worked out what we wanted the drums to sound like, and made a tape," says Jem. "Then we gave it round to various people."

Among these was their original choice, Andrew Ranken.

Born in London's Ladbroke Grove, on November 13 1953, Andrew Ranken's earliest memory is the sound of steam trains rattling to and fro into Paddington Station.

"When I was two years old my father used to rake me to meet my older sister from school. We used to cross a bridge which went over all the railway tracks, and he would put me on his shoulders so that I could see over the parapet. In those days it was steam trains, and because it's a big terminus there were lots of them. I was really excited just by the sound of the trains and the stockyard."

There was always music in the Ranken household. The radio was permanently on, and the first tunes to make an impression on Andrew were the themes from Music While You Work and The Archeys. His parents were keen on Gilbert and Sullivan, and their sizable collection of records included Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller and Artie Shaw.

When Andrew was six, the family moved to a small town in Sussex where they lived throughout the sixties. The first record that he bought was 'She Loves You' by The Beatles.

"For a long time it was The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. They were just the best two groups in the world as far as I could make out. Then when I was about 14 I started looking at the inside of record labels, where it says who wrote the songs, and there were all these names of people that I'd never heard of. It was then I became aware that it wasn't just English pop music, and that it actually came from somewhere else which was rhythm and blues."

During this period, 1967/68, England witnessed a blues boom with new bands like Fleetwood Mac, Chicken Shack and Savoy Brown. "I went for it in a big way, and I've loved r 'n' b ever since. There were bands like the original Fleetwood Mac who were a straight blues band, and a really good one as well, doing cover versions of people that they really admired and The Rolling Stones were doing that too. It took white bands to reinterpret what people like Muddy Waters and Bobby Bland had done to actually get it across to a wide enough audience for anyone to be able to make any money out of it. But if those guys hadn't been there then popular music wouldn't be like it is, and it's really sick that they never reaped the rewards they should have."

At 14, Andrew was enthused enough to start playing the drums. He was also given a caste for Irish music when he paid his first visit to his father's Ballyneety birthplace, a small village just south of Limerick. "I got on really well with my grandfather," he remembers, "he used to sing to me."

When he left school, Andrew went to art college in London and made up for lost time by going to Ronnie Scott's more often than he could afford. "It was comparatively cheap to get in upstairs, and then I'd sneak downstairs. I saw lots of different people and got quite into jazz. It was partly things like Benny Goodman, which I like although I prefer the be-bop stuff."

One of the first performers he saw at Ronnie Scott's was Elvin Jones. "The first time I heard him it was so exciting. I just thought, 'Yeah, this is it', and I still do. I don't have favourite musicians but as far as drummers go I think he's in a class of his own. Lots of people cite him as an influence, but there's nobody who plays like him. It's just really interesting, mentally, to try and work out what he's doing. Technique can be learnt, but it's the way he interprets things and, to me, that's what it's all about. He's completely brilliant, and I've been watching him for years."

During his foundation period at art school, Andrew was the drummer in Lola Cobra, a band fronted by a girl called Lene Lovich. But after a year of college conformism he decided to abandon art and hitch-hike around Europe instead. He sold his drums to raise the fare to Holland but on arriving in Amsterdam; had all his money and possessions stolen. The Ranken losses were recuperated by working for eight weeks in a peanut factory, and he spent a further seven months in France and Italy.

Back in London, a friend asked if he was interested in getting a band together and suggested that, devoid of drums, Andrew should be the singer. The outfit eventually emerged in the mid seventies as The Stickers. "It was a sort of pub rock band, similar to what Graham Parker and Elvis Costello were doing at that point. It was quite good but too diverse: we had a couple of reggae numbers, a couple of country and western and a couple of blues. It just wasn't consistent enough and after two or three years broke up acrimoniously."

Soon afterwards, Ranken formed The Operation, recruiting keyboards and bassist via his special friend Deborah's two brothers, Joe and Simon. "I also managed to involve this guy called Phil Langran, who played guitar and was very good at getting people together. He just started bringing more and more people along, then all their friends kept turning up - every week there was someone new. But it was good fun, and it sounded all right 'cos everyone could play pretty well."

The Operation spawned into an enormous line-up, up to 13, usually including Paul Hookham (who later joined The Woodentops and The Redskins). The band earned a phenomenal reputation for busking: their cajun r 'n' b regularly brought in L 100 from the Covent Garden voyeurs, and they also favoured a spot just beneath Waterloo Bridge.

"There was a bar with tables and chairs just outside the National Film Theatre, and we'd start up just as the audience were leaving, which was great during the summer evenings. The Operation were the kind of band who'd play anywhere; we did all sorts of weird places like kids' adventure playgrounds."

Throughout the seventies Andrew had a series of temporary jobs, but in 1981 he decided to return to college and take Communication Studies and Sociology at Goldsmiths. Meanwhile, The Operation continued to play around London; they attracted a strong following but took themselves less than seriously.

Consequently, it wasn't too difficult for Finer and MacGowan to persuade Ranken to have a second shot at manning the Pogue sticks.

"Jem and Shane had come up with this idea of how they wanted the drums to sound," says Andrew. "It was completely different to the usual way of playing: I was doing with my right hand what you'd normally do with your foot on the bass drum. It was like only having half as much, and trying to get a decent sound with very little. So it was quite a challenge."

From the very first practice it was obvious that Andrew was exactly what Pogue Mahone needed. And, although he was reluctant to make a full-time commitment, Ranken was equally impressed by the band. "I used to go to a lot of Irish pubs in London so I loved the music," he says. "I'd been to a few English folk clubs and they really pissed me off 'cos their whole approach was so reverent, but The Pogues weren't doing it like that at all. It was really exciting, back to the basic thing, and the melodies were great."

Andrew gave his snare kit its first airing at Islington's Hope And Anchor, at the beginning of March 1983. Shortly afterwards, Country Jem went from a jack to a king by marrying Marcia, his close companion for the past-three years. Their wedding party was a night of madness and mayhem in Smithy's Wine Bar, on the King's Cross Road, culminating in a memorably schlewtered set from the band.

'A sinking ship in a sea of sharks/Is no safe place to be/A passing doubt/When passing out/Is not much for company.' (Ranken).

Pogue Mahone spent the next six months stamping their sound on North London. They now attracted a regular crowd, and before long were filling the pubs - although there were still some dodgy nights like the time they played to five people at The Pindar of Wakefield. Or the night they faced a crowd of 16 in The Hope And Anchor and the promoter told them, as politely as he could, "I don't think you're the kind of band that's suited to playing here."

Their fierce thirst rapidly evolved into legend, and their gigs were characterized by drink, disorder and drink. "We were blind drunk whenever we did it," admits Shane. "We were blind drunk because people kept buying us drinks! But there was an energy there, an energy that wasn't going on at the time. There wasn't anybody actually getting up in places like The Hope And Anchor, The Bull And Gate or the Pindar and playing dance music with tunes. And we just thought, fuck it, what we're doing is good however badly we're doing it, it's good 'cos it's based on good music."

"It's emotional. It's what songs are about." With The Pogues, nothing was sacred. Their repertoire readily embraced everything from 'Poor Paddy' and 'Me And Bobby McGee' to The Nips 'King Of The Bop' and the Velvets 'All Tomorrows Parties'. But arguments as to which song they should sing next were invariable. These usually led to a huddled discussion-cum-row, stage centre, and occasionally degenerated into a drunken brawl, more often than not between Shane and the formidable Cait (who quickly won the title of 'Rocky').

Their equipment remained as basic as their approach; the only signs of technology were a small bass amp and Spider's beer tray. The Pogues used instruments traditionally associated with folk, yet played them with all the verve and passion of punk.

"The whole thing had a very unique sound," says Jem, "'cos it was learnt in a completely accidental way. We were just a bunch of Irish musicians trying to play Irish folk music. And, obviously, it turned out completely different." In mid-summer, The Pogues committed their improved Ranken formula to tape. They turned to their Pindar friends, Justin and Vicki, and - having hired an eight-track - transformed the Wards' flat into a recording studio. The result was a demo of five songs, the most outstanding of which was 'Streams Of Whiskey'.

By July, Pogue Mahone had captured the attention of the press, as well as the imagination of a growing public. And among the most ardent of their admirers was Philip Chevron. "It was irrelevant how well or how badly they played Irish music," he says. "It really didn't matter. They just had a magic that other groups simply didn't have." James - whose ability to tune all the instruments had earned him the nickname 'Maestro' - had originally stressed that if Pogue Mahone interfered with his writing then he would have to leave. But by this time his faith in the band had increased, and he downed his pen and threw his creativity into music.

Meanwhile, Spider had come a long way from 'Silent Night' and piped a tune of his own. It was a rousing instrumental, which he made up one afternoon while watching Play School, and which was christened in true Stacy style, 'Repeal Of The Licensing Laws'.

That August, Caitlin launched her singing career. Down at The Pindar Of Wakefield, where a group called The Boothill Foot-tappers were playing, she bumped into Darryl Hunt, whom she had first encountered some months before - when she was sprawled across a pub floor after a fight with Shane - but who was now a frequent face among The Pogues, and sometimes drove their gear to gigs.

Darryl and his erstwhile friend and musical partner, Dave Scott, were discussing their plans for a new band at the bar. They were, they told Cait, fed up with writing their own material and were going to play their favourite jazz numbers instead. They had come to the Pindar to find a singer, and were thinking of asking the Boothill's Wendy May. Cait laughed with searing derision and immediately said, "I'll do it." prior to this, O'Riordan had confined her singing to the bathroom. "I'd sung backing vocals of a sort, on stage, with The Pogues," she admits, "but if you ever heard the tapes you'd know why I never got invited to the front."

She auditioned with a few bars of 'And Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue' and was told, "You can't sing, but we can't play." Thus began Pride Of The Cross.

Pogue Mahone rarely played more than once a week, so Pride Of The Cross were able to make monthly appearances at the Pindar. Their set was famous for its covers: Dionne Warwick, Peggy Lee and, most notably, Abba's 'The Day Before You Came'. It was the Radio 2 fodder that Cait knew (and loved) by heart.

In September, Andrew returned to Goldsmiths for his final year of Communication Studies. For the past six months, he had combined his college work with both Pogue Mahone and The Operation and frequently had to cancel Pogue gigs. Much to their irritation the others would have to find a last-minute replacement in The Sting-ray's drummer Alec.

But as the summer nights closed into autumn, and The Operation began to dwindle, Ranken finally conceded that his busking days were over and put his heart into The Pogues. He marked the occasion by nicknaming himself after one of their songs, 'The Clobberer'.

By the time they celebrated their first birthday The Pogues had acquired a significant following. Their manic mix of furious punk, Irish folk and rampant rockabilly was certainly like no other. The psychotic dementia of Spider, blitzing his brains out with a beer-tray, was a highlight of their show and yet, in complete contrast, when Shane slowed into 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda', the sheer soul could tear the place apart. "It was obvious right from the start that, in a way, we were actually serious," says Andrew, "and that we were trying to do something that hadn't been done before. We had no idea whether it was going to work or not, but we thought it was worth a try and we also thought it was good for a laugh, and we were all into having a laugh. And one of the most important things for me was that it ought to be really good fun to do gigs, or go to a gig and see the sort of band that we were trying to be. It's a terrible cliché but we did genuinely want to have a good time doing what we were doing, and we wanted lots of people to come and see us and have a good time as well."

At this point, various record companies got wise and BMW-driving Agent men were suddenly out in force. Among the bands with whom Pogue Mahone sometimes shared a bill, were a rockabilly quartet called The Shillelagh Sisters. In November, the Shillelaghs were snapped up by CBS. But The Pogues' uninhibited mania was too much to stomach. The Agents scurried away. Perplexed. Meanwhile, the band were fast becoming the pride of North London, with Tell Carroll's Rock On record store in Camden Town a main bastion of Pogue support. Among the Rock On fraternity London Murphia was Frank Murray, a man with a 15-year pedigree in the rock business, and it was on Carroll's suggestion that Murray - and his friend Dave Jordan - went to see Pogue Mahone at the Hope And Anchor.

What they witnessed was an anarchic version of The Dubliners and - if legend is to be believed - Murray stood there open mouthed. "There came a point," says Frank, "when people thought that they'd discovered folk in inverted commas, and a Snobbery came into the music so that people were going into Cecil Sharp House and spending days on end trying to find obscure ballads so they could say, 'This is a song I learnt from Sitting Bull', or whatever. So bands like The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers, who played in the old sing-along tradition became unfashionable, and one had to be like Planxty or The Bothy Band who were, I suppose, more scholarly."

"And I wasn't sure what hit me first about The Pogues, but they just got better and better. They did 'Dirty Old Town' and 'Peggy Gordon' and then Cait came out for the encore and sang 'And Don't It Make My Brown Eyes Blue'. Yet at the same time, the whole stage was so disheveled that they were like a total mess: there were people bumping into each other all over the place. It was kind of like slapstick, except it wasn't feigned and there was nothing pretentious. They were just having a great time."

But although Murray was struck by the spirit of The Pogues, he realized that their shambolic ways would make for a manager's nightmare. He was, after all, used to the likes of Thin Lizzy, Elton John, The Commodores and Blue Oyster Cult, and he was later reputed to have commented that The Pogues were too undisciplined for his consideration.

The Pogue experience, however, continued to spread and, in December, Music Week magazine ran a poll among disc-jockeys, journalists and record company employees, to find out which artists were most likely (and deserving) to succeed in 1984. The vote went to Pogue Mahone.

New Year came though with still no record deal in sight. "The record companies had been sniffing around for months," says Shane, "and they came along, and there were Packed audiences going crazy, but they just couldn't understand it. They came and they saw us blasting it out, and people going nuts, but they couldn't understand why they were going nuts so they couldn't see how they could market us so they fucked off again."

The band decided to forget about recording contracts and make a cut-price video instead. It was to be a promotional reel for their demo of 'Streams Of Whiskey' (which they had recorded at Justin and Vicki Wards, the previous summer), and even though it wasn't of a good enough quality to be released as a single, everyone agreed that a video would be a good crack. The technology was supplied by Richard Elgard - also known as Video Rick - who was keen to capture The Pogues on film, and could shoot it for around £60, considerably less than one per cent of the average video budget.

The initial location was Hillview tenements, around their King's Cross home, and the opening sequence saw the band emerging from corporation dustbins. It continued with some appalling break-dancing from James; Spider battering his head against a brick wall and a spritely step-dance from Cait. It also featured Shane and Jem, stripped to their underpants, sitting in deckchairs on the drained Led of the Camden Canal.

"It was basically pisstakes of lots of other videos," says Jem. "The canal scene is a pisstake of Wham! in Club Tropicana, where they sit by the pool drinking champagne. It was the coldest day of the year, and Shane and I sat on the canal bed - with no clothes on - surrounded by broken bottles, rusty prams and sludge and drank cider from champagne glasses."

The video came to a grand finale when The Pogues hired the back-room of The Pindar Of Wakefield and - after packing the place with friends - tipped over a huge table of drinks, to send streams of beer and whiskey flying. Simultaneously, Stan Brennan offered to put up the money for a Pogue Mahone single. It was subsequently agreed that Brennan - the man behind The Nips' recordings - would issue the single as a one-off on Rocks Off, until he could find a licensing deal.

'Dark Streets Of London' was consequently recorded at Elephant Studios in late January, 1984. Produced by Brennan, it summed up the inimitable rough flavour of Pogue Mahone, with cheering chorus of tin whistle, banjo and accordion, and also hinted that MacGowan might be a promising songwriter. 'Dark Streets' was coupled with Eric Bogle's 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' but on record it failed to capture the magic of live performance.

Ironically, at the same time that Pogue Mahone committed themselves to vinyl, their spiritual mentor died. Luke Kelly was the sublime lead singer of The Dubliners, and it was from them - and Luke in particular - that The Pogues derived their greatest inspiration.

In February, Pogue Mahone were invited to record a Radio 1 session for John Peel. They chose four tracks: 'Streams Of Whiskey', Brendan Behan's 'The Auld Triangle', 'Greenland Whale Fisheries' - a traditional song made famous by The Dubliners - and a crazed country blues number which MacGowan had titled 'Boys From The County Hell'.

But The Pogues were almost ejected from the studio before they got started. Cait turned up completely blotto, totally oblivious to BBC decorum. The engineers did their best to ignore her, and recording eventually commenced. But 'Boys from The County Hell' contained one too many cusses even for the Peel show, and only three tracks were broadcast.

At this stage, The Pogues were managing themselves, with responsibilities shared between Finer and MacGowan. Shane was the creative end of the partnership, and Jem the business side - which seemed to encompass everything. "It used to be my dream," says Finer, "to have someone working for us who would move gear. At the time we only had about seven items, but I always had to arrange who drove these items around, and I always had to find someone to help me and basically it was always me and James."

In March, Pogue Mahone were offered their first date outside London when Wolverhampton Student Union asked them to play the polytechnic on Saint Patrick's Night. The fee was insufficient to cover van and petrol costs but rather than turn the gig down, Jem had the speculative notion of hiring a coach and recruiting a crowd to go along with them. The other Pogues thought it was worth a try and started flogging tickets.

Meanwhile, The Clash were set for a comeback with a hat-trick of dates at Brixton Academy between March 8-10. Shane had known Joe Strummer for years, and asked him for a support slot. Strummer agreed, and Pogue Mahone subsequently played to a packed Academy. "The crowd came in as soon as the doors opened," says Spider, "so we essentially played to a full house, and that was a really good experience." The Pogues won many new fans that night, including The Clash.

The following week, 2000 white label copies of 'Dark Streets Of London' were issued. The Pogues promoted it to their advantage, with a steamy Saint Patrick's party at Camden Irish Centre.

The next day, March 17, was the real thing. With shamrocks to the fore, and The Bothy Band in the tape-deck, the Pogue army headed for Wolverhampton. "The trip was astonishingly successful, financially," says Jem. "We filled the coach up with Pogue Mahone fans, and it all went off very well except that these people were completely mad. They all came on with at least 12 packs of beer, and it was obvious that something horrendous was going to happen."

The tickets were sold on the basis - that they would cover entrance to the gig as well as the return journey. But when the coach arrived at the polytechnic, the Student Union was apparently unaware of the pilgrimage, and 40 ticketless, irate and totally nutered Pogue fans took to the streets of Wolverhampton instead.

After the gig, The Pogues - who were not entirely sober themselves - reloaded their stinking cargo and hoped for the best. But before they hit the M1, disaster struck. Says Jem, "The tank in the toilet burst, so it took about seven hours to get home 'cos we had to keep stopping for people to get off. And when we picked our gear out from underneath, it was all just soaked in piss." Three days later, and Pogue Mahone were heading out of London again. This time, they were special guests at the Jericho Folk Club in Oxford. "That was a really strange gig," remembers Spider. "It was a really folky audience who were so polite that they even clapped the sound check! But they treated us really well: the prices at the bar were slashed to a third of their normal price, and that went on for as long as we wanted with no hassles at all."

That weekend, however, Shane's Saturday night out in Camden Town came to an abrupt end when he was severely beaten, for no apparent reason, in the Electric Ballroom toilets. The following evening, MacGowan arrived at the 100 Club, half-dazed and with the left hand side of his face swollen to the size of a melon. He managed to stumble on stage, and The Pogues began with 'Greenland Whale Fisheries'. But after a few slurred verses Stan Brennan called the concussed singer to one side, and Spider took over on vocals. Meanwhile, Stephan Cush - an irrepressible busker and occasional Pogue roadie - grabbed Shane's guitar and strummed his way through their shortened set.

It was while Shane was putting his face back together that Hokum Hillbilly hit its Height. The music press suddenly picked up on the country based sounds of the Boothill Foot-tappers, Helen And The Horns, Hackney Five-O, and a host of other bands Born Again In Wild West London, and soon everyone had a checked shirt, a hay bale haircut and a banjo. The Pogues were inevitably roped in.

Still, the only bad publicity is no publicity, as Shane openly admitted: "I'm quite prepared to ride any bandwagon that is going to get us somewhere." And so, on Easter Monday, while Glen Campbell, The Osmond Brothers and Rely Daniels were playing the hallowed annual country music festival at Wembley, Pogue Mahone joined the Boothill Foot-tappers, Hackney Five-O, the Blubbery Hellbellies and the Skiff Skats in an Alternative Country Festival at the Electric Ballroom.

Among the audience was a handful of friends, including both Cush and Shanne (who had formed The Nipple Erectors and subsequent Nips with Shane). Midway through the proceedings, they borrowed The Pogues' gear, their drummer and accordion player, and took to the stage with a set of covers: 'A Boy Named Sue', 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone!' and anything else they could think of. The Men They Couldn't Hang had played their first gig.

Simultaneously, London Weekend Television zoomed in on country punkabilly via its South Of Watfoud Show. The programme featured Pogue Mahone, The Shillelagh Sisters, The Boothill Foot-tappers and The Skiff Skats, with the main focus falling on the CBS signed Shillelaghs. After several rounds of live Pogue Mahone footage, Shane articulated the main difference between The Pogues and traditional Irish bar bands. "The stuff we play is more fucked up -'cos you are more fucked up if you live in London than if you live in a nice little town in Tipperary." The LWT censors were less than impressed, and presenter Ben Elton concluded, "I think it will be a while before Pogue Mahone - Gaelic for kiss my arse, by the way - are on Top Of The Pops. Some of the other bands may stand a better chance of breaking through to a wider audience. But in the long run, it's likely that countrybilly will stay where it's at its best - in the boozy, sweaty, raw atmosphere of live performance."

The record companies were equally astute. Although John Peel, David Jensen and even Mike Read were championing 'Dark Streets Of London', Stan Brennan was still slogging from one major to the next.

But by the end of the month Pogue Mahone had become a nationwide name. An eagle-eared producer on BBC Radio Scotland, listening to the Mike Read show, was affronted by the tasteless term 'Pogue Mahone'. As a member of the Gaelic speaking community, he was outraged to hear the words 'kiss my arse' at three o'clock in the after-noon, and he figured that thousands (if not millions) of Gaelic speaking listeners would be equally offended. After a quick call to head office The Pogues were banned from further airplay on Radio Scotland.

Down at Radio 1, they were less anxious to fall the flames of a potential controversy. They had, after all, just recovered from the Frankie Goes To Hollywood fiasco, which hurtled 'Relax' into the list of all time best selling hits. And so, rather than ban the record, the BBC decided to freeze it: the DJs wouldn't play 'Dark Streets' because they couldn't say the name of the group - all that is - apart from John Peel who, after 10 o'clock at night, could say 'kiss my arse' in any language he chose as many times as he liked.

In May, having been turned down by most of the major labels, Stan Brennan took 'Dark Streets Of London' to Stiff. The company showed genuine enthusiasm and immediately agreed to re-release the single. They did stipulate one condition though: the band would have to abbreviate their name to The Pogues, since there was little point in issuing a record that wouldn't get played. "That wasn't a problem," says Jem, "people called us The Pogues anyway, because Pogue Mahone is a bit of a mouthful. Besides, the name was never an attempt to be controversial, it was just a joke. At the time, no one liked it much; it was just a name."

The Pogues subsequently signed a one-off single deal with Stiff, with an option on an LP and another single. But it was no secret that the record company wanted them to curtail their wayward ways in order to make business dealings easier, and the band were soon said to be drinking milk and to have taken up jogging. Publicity shots depicting a very sombre and conspicuously bottleless bunch did little to dispel the rumours.

"When we first signed to Stiff," says Shane, "we had to pretend we'd stopped drinking. So in the photo sessions, we had to hide our drinks. And in the pictures we look really miserable and uncomfortable because we're sitting on our beer-cans."

But it would take a greater force than Stiff to stifle Pogue Mahone, and they were soon sharing a bill with their long-time friends and reprobate label mates King Kurt on a short tour of London.

On June 22, The Pogues played alongside a doom and gloom merchant from Factory Records in central London's Diorama. The depression was exacerbated by the fact that alcohol was banned from the venue. Nevertheless, among the crowd was Elvis Costello, lately pointed in The Pogues' direction by an ever-enthusing Philip Chevron. Suitably impressed, Costello invited the band to accompany him on his autumn tour.

By now, Cait was attracting attention for her monthly appearances in Pride Of The Cross. Dietrich-style, O'Riordan would don dark glasses and beret and - beneath the glare of a stark spotlight - pump out 'Fever', 'Is That All There Is!' and 'The Day Before You Came', then waver through the melancholy moments of 'Black Coffee' and 'I Sold My Heart To The Junkman'. Among the most memorable of Pride Of The Cross performances was a closing down show at The Hope And Anchor. The bar was lit by candlelight, and warmed by the power of Cait's voice. "She had a natural charm on stage," says POTC bassist Darryl. "She could get up and make a song that everyone had heard a million times before sound like it had been written for her. It didn't matter whether she hit the right notes or whatever, she just had it. A true chanteuse."

In July, however, Pogue commitments increased. They were now playing twice a week - taking them from Hammersmith to Harrow and from Carlton Community Centre to Harlesden's Mean Fiddler - and, at the same time, Stiff asked them to record an LP.

Consequently, Cait had to buckle down to her bass, and there was no time for Pride Of The Cross. But before drawing a final curtain they recorded a one-off single at Elephant Studios. 'Tommy's Blue Valentine' is a song which Phil Gaston wrote for Cait as a tribute to her hero, Tom Waits. The music was penned by Darryl Hunt and Dave Scott, and the record also features the trombone playing of Paul Taylor. It was backed with a cover of Peggy Lee's 'Black Coffee', and both tracks were produced by Phil Gaston. Meanwhile, The Pogues had begun work on 'Red Roses For Me', a blend of MacGowan originals and traditional rearrangements. It was produced by Stan Brennan, and recorded at Elephant Studios throughout August.

At the same time, they continued to play around the capital. As a live act, The Pogues might have wiped out the whole of London's North, North-West and even West One, but their performances were still as shambolic as they were exciting, their arguments as frequent as they were pathetic.

They were banned from Wardour Street's Wag Club - after an on-stage fight between Rocky O'Riordan and Mouth MacGowan developed into unarmed combat in the dressing room, and, on August 8, MacGowan and Finer almost came to serious blows at the Sir George Robey, in Finsbury Park.

"Shane used to do really irritating things," says Jem. "We'd learn a new song and then have an argument to put it put in the set, and we'd just be about to do it when Shane'd shake his head and say, 'Nah, nah, nah', and we'd all stand around for five minutes discussing what we were going to do next."

On this particular night, Jem was actually playing the intro to 'And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda' when Shane suddenly announced that he was going to sing a Phil Gaston song called 'Navigator' instead. A furious TOW followed, which was on the verge of becoming physical when Cait butted in. Finer immediately turned from MacGowan to her: there was a pint glass at his foot and he took a well aimed kick. The glass shot into the air, flew across the stage and finally splattered precariously close to O'Riordan's head.

Says James: "The thing I really like about this band is that we're always arguing but no one gets upset for long. In the other groups I was in, if you disagreed with someone then they'd go off in a huff but with The Pogues, tempers explode and it just clears the air."

By the end of August, The Pogues were preparing for their October-long tour with Elvis Costello And The Attractions. Rehearsals took place, as ever, in the tiny back room of a tenement flat. Simultaneously, however, they received their first taste of luxury: Stiff splashed out on six pale blue duster coats, tailored to the Wild And Willing tune of £100 each. Similar garb had been worn by the notorious James Gang in the Waiter Hill Western 'Long Riders,' and Shane had decided this was perfect stage gear for The Pogues.

But when they got round to modeling the coats, in the 'Red Roses For Me' photo-session, MacGowan was looking less than his film star best. He had been involved in a late night collision with three flights of stairs, suffered a broken ankle and now carried a stick.

And there were further afflictions: by the time they realized that the front cover photos would have to be re-done, Andrew had disappeared on holiday. A small Ranken mugshot was subsequently slapped beneath the rest of the band. It was in a similar haphazard fashion that they recorded a video for 'Waxies Dargle'. Shot in Camden's Irish Centre, it featured Darryl Hunt on drums and - since Jem was also on holiday - a behatted impostor on banjo. All the same, the result was gloriously hellbent. The focus fell on the crazed Caitlin and Spider's terminal masochism: he bashed his forehead with a beer tray four times in each verse, 32 times per song and, after nine takes, had inflicted a total of 288 blows on the Stacy bonce.

A couple of weeks later it was time for the Elvis Costello tour, which opened in Northern Ireland, but before heading out, The Pogues invited Daryl Hunt to take on the all-encompassing role of van driver cum roadie.

Born the son of. a fisherman, in Hampshire. Darryl Hunt started playing guitar when he was l0-years-old.

"My brother Ian was in a rock 'n' roll group in Bournemouth and he was really good at playing guitar; he knew all the licks. I never learnt to play from a classical point of view, I just knew the riffs of the latest hits. So the first thing I played was soul: Booker T And The MGs, Tamla and stuff."

When Darryl was in his teens, the Hunts moved to Devon where his interest in music was over-shadowed by art and, after doing a two-year foundation course at a local college, he went to Nottingham to study Fine Art, where he started playing in a group called Plummet Airline. In 1976, the band got their hair cut and abandoned the college circuit for the pubs of London.

One night, Stiff boss Dave Robinson saw them playing at The Hope And Anchor and invited them to record 'Silver Shirt' as one of the first singles on his newly established label. "Stiff had just started, so we used to sit in the office putting singles in their sleeves. That's how we met up with The Damned and we often played with them."

After Plummet Airline broke up at the beginning of 1978, Darryl joined a Nottingham power pop group known as The Favourites, then came to London again where, ensconced in a King's Cross squat, he formed a doo wop punk band called The Lemons, and did a stint of tour managing with the Modettes.

During the course of The Lemons, Darryl got together with his art college friend, Dave Scott (who had played in both Spizz Energi and Athletico Spizz '80) and formed a part-time group which they christened Baby Lotion. "But then," says Darryl, "we got fed up with the whole capitalist, careerist business and we just wanted to play our favourite tunes; murdering them but having a good time."

It was then, in the summer of 1983, that they went to The Pindar Of Wakefield, chanced across Cait O'Riordan and formed Pride Of The Cross. "The band was never intended to be serious, but people really liked it and it was great fun to do." After a year of monthly gigs, the band recorded 'Tommy's Blue Valentine' as a single. "By that time The Pogues were getting really busy so we decided to knock Pride Of The Cross on the head, which was a disappointment for me and Dave 'cos we'd rated Cait very highly."

And so, his musical outlets temporarily thwarted, Darryl agreed to work with The Pogues. He filled a C90 with Seamus Ennis, The Bothy Band, Dubliners, Clancy Brothers and Jolly Beggarnlen and, on September 26, steered their hired Transit towards the Holyhead ferry.

Having arrived in Dun Laoghaire, The Pogues spent a night in Dublin before driving to Belfast for their opening show at Ulster Hall. Since this was to be their first Irish date - there was a feeling of apprehension, not at the magnitude of the venue but at the thought of taking coal to Cork.

"There's no living folk tradition in England," said Shane, "and that's the whole point about why we're doing what we do. But in Ireland there are lots of bands doing a similar thing, so I don't actually see that there's any point in us playing."

But The Pogues needn't have worried, Belfast took their untamed set straight to its heart. "We blew Costello offstage," asserts Spider. "Well, we didn't exactly blow him off stage, but the Belfast audience is really good, very appreciative - and it was, brilliant. I don't think we were ever actually scared of playing in front of an audience in a big hall, but when you're used to playing in little clubs and pubs, the first time that you go out on a huge stage it feels really weird."

What the band didn't realize, though, was that they were expected to pay for both the lighting and the PA. "The gig money was threatened with extinction on the very first gig," says James. "We were getting about £100, but they said that we would have to pay £60 to the lighting and sound men. That would have meant losing two-thirds of our income, so somebody- Elvis, I think - haggled on our behalf and we ended up with just a third of it going."

The following day, they travelled south westward to Galway, eventually arriving at the Leisureland ballroom two hours behind the scheduled time, only to find that their gear was still at the Ulster Hall. "For some reason, best known to themselves," recounts Spider, "Costello's road crew managed to mistake a case hill of BBC Radio oboes for our flight case. So when we arrived in Galway, a little bit late, they presented us with a load of oboes! We said, 'Well that's not really much help' and the guy who was handling the gear turned round and said, 'If you hadn't been late your gear would have been here' - I think he was speaking in Philadelphia time! But we ended up having to play on electric instruments."

While their electric show went down well enough, Galway itself was not without further incident. The city was the scene of a late summer festival and so, before leaving, The Pogues went in search of some Connaught action.

Darryl parked the van outside a late night bar, and James and Cait volunteered to check out die scene. But they hadn't even reached the entrance before Cait's spiky coiffure was attracting uncomplimentary attention. "Will You look at herself," leered one less than sober youth, "with her hair sticking up like she do be frightened." The insults continued to fly but O'Riordan - to the amazement of her colleagues - refused to take the bait and calmly returned to the van. After several minutes, the loudest of the locals poked his head through the door to view the spectacle at closer range.

Without saying a word, Cait leapt to her feet, reached for the handle and ZAP! her tormentor's nose was splattered by the transit door. There was no time for mercy as the Irishman screamed, the blood flowed and The Pogues got the hell out of town.

They arrived at Dublin's National Stadium feeling all the worse for their coast to coast trek. "We were completely useless," admits Spider, "but the crowd were pretty tolerant. They just thought, they'll be off stage soon, they're only a support band. But then Elvis proceeded to fuck up too: five minutes into the set he decided he'd lose his voice, disappeared for 20 minutes and then came back on again. So we blew him off stage there as well."

But after the show, Stacy descended into the drunken doldrums: stumbling and falling until he eventually collapsed on the South Circular Road. "I just lay in the street thinking, "Shit, I've ripped my suit. My new suit. Bollocks! I'm just gonna stay here until a car runs over my head then I won't be pissed off any more 'cos I'll be dead.' But I got picked up and put in the van, and Andrew bathed my wound in Listerine."

The Pogues retired to the scene of Joyce's Ulysses The Ormond Hotel, where Julie Pritchard - a close friend of Darryl's who was on tour to sell T-shirts - waged war against an unsuspecting window.

Reluctant to spend a cold, rainy night sleeping in the van, Julie settled into the hotel lobby instead. But before long, she was turfed out by an inhospitable porter. Seconds later came the vengeful crash of breaking glass: a brick through the window, a £45 stitch in Ormond expenses and another black hole in The Pogues' reputation. Returning to London, the band played the first of five Monday night shows at the Hammersmith Palais and, four days later, 'Waxies Dargle' was transmitted around the country via The Tube. Such was the impact of Spider and his beer tray, that the video was a candidate for the Europe A Go-Go music extravaganza. It was a neat coincidence that the band had chosen the same week to release their debut LP.

A rough and ready mixture of the traditional and their own, 'Red Roses For Me' was an accurate assessment of the story so far. Opening with the thundering nihilism of 'Transmetropolitan', through 'The Battle Of Brisbane' and 'Waxies Dargle' to a passionate, if imperfect, rendition of Brendan Behan's 'The Auld Triangle'. The rest of side one ably illustrated the force of MacGowan's pen with 'Boys From The County Hell,' 'Dark Streets Of London' and the bitter 'Sea Shanty', the tale of a washed up sailor.

The other side began with two of their most well-worn favourites 'Streams Of Whiskey' and 'Poor Paddy', followed by 'Dingle Regatta' and a vigorous charge through 'Greenland Whale Fisheries.' 'Down In The Ground Where The Dead Men Go' brought a Pogue eye view of the Irish famine graves, featuring the unintelligible vocals, piercing shrieks and sonorous screams of Shane and Spider. But the record closed with 'Kitty', a poignant tale of love, internment and separation. It was a ballad which was performed live with only varying degrees of success, but whose genuine heartbreak was perfectly translated on to vinyl.

"'Kitty' is my favourite track on the album," says Shane. "it's a song that I learnt from my mother and I've only ever met one person, who wasn't out of my family or from round our particular little area in Tipperary, who knows it." Although 'Red Roses' managed to capture The Pogues in all their gut-grabbing glory, the overall sound left much to be desired. Nevertheless its strength and originality value made it flavour of the week with the music press.

The inclusion of Behan's 'The Auld Triangle', supplemented by the anti-establishment ethos of their own 'Transmetropolitan' and 'Boys From The County Hell', sparked queries as to whether or not they held Republican sympathies. Non-committally, MacGowan replied that their political persuasions had nothing to do with what they were playing as a band. "What we're saying is fuck everything," he says. "Which is not the same as saying fuck so and so." With 'Red Roses For Me' as a sure-fire flogger, The Pogues took the music they loved to the nation at large. It was almost a crusade.

"The thing about Pogue music," says Cait, "is that people will listen to it more than they would to TR Dallas or Mary O'Hara. They'd just have it in their heads that Irish music is stuff like 'The Old Bell On The High Road' - but it's not! There's still 'Waxies Dargle,' 'Seven Drunken Nights', the real rollickin' stuff that you don't get to hear 'cos it's not tidied up enough for the radio."

With a single flight-case to their name, the band were spared from the burden of heavy equipment. As they travelled from one city hall to another, the organizers would invariably ask, "Where's your truck?. "Where's the bar! Where's the stage? Give us the money!" came the Pogue reply. Their van was filled, instead, with the sound of The Dubliners and Clancy Brothers, and the constant rattle of empty cans and bottles.

Descending on Portsmouth, on October 7, all the better for a long Sunday session, Cait launched a one-woman riot. It began with a single bottle, which she casually lobbed from a back stage window, and developed into a non-stop shower. What O'Riordan failed to take into account, though, was that Costello's road crew were unloading their lorries directly beneath. Says Andrew: "They all chased after her, so she smashed a bottle and came running upstairs with another in her hand. I wrestled with her and -just as they burst into the dressing room - managed to disarm her and hide the missile behind my back." Costello's men failed to get the joke, and it took powerful persuasion from Elvis himself to stop The Pogues being kicked off the tour. For Cait, the incident was merely one in a series of corned capers and is only vaguely recollected at all. "I just drank steadily for about two years," she says. "I never even thought about not drinking, so all I remember is getting horribly drunk."

On the road, under the stars and perpetually at the bottle, The Pogues headed west. En route to St. Austell's Coliseum, they came upon a Newton Abbot cider bar where they knocked back as much scrumpy as their stomachs could stand. .Jem, James and Andrew eventually staggered out with a stolen tray full, knocked back the contents and presented Spider with a brand new instrument.

A couple of nights later they hit the unlikely oasis of Bristol. Jem decided to act out a Leone scenario and - after cutting two holes in the lining of his duster coat - filled both pockets with sand, Pulled down his straw hat and staggered on stage. "I looked like I just come in from the desert," he says, "leaving a trail of sand everywhere I walked."

Unfortunately, some of the sand found its way into Steve Nieve's keyboards, and the episode did nothing to further endear The Pogues to The Attractions.

The following day it was back to Hammersmith Palais, where The Pogues re-decorated their dressing room walls, burnt a hole in the carpet and let off a few explosives. The reprobates were consequently denied a sound check and literally blown offstage by chat night's other support, The Men They Couldn't Hang.

During the evening, various Pogues wandered into the pub next door, and Jem got talking to Frank Murray who was down at the Palais to watch The Men They Couldn't Hang. Murray had an extensive knowledge of the music business, and he and Finer had a lengthy conversation.

The Pogues spent the next few days in the Midlands. After their gig at Loughborough University - where their childish antics had earned them another yellow card from Costello's tour manager - they ended up having a drunken argument in the van.

After a few minutes, Jem was so aggravated by Shane and Spider that he ordered Darryl to stop the van and set off on the 15-mile walk to Nettingham. Most of The Pogues shrugged with unconcern, but it wasn't long before Spider bleated, "Stop! I'm walking too."

"I was walking along the road for ages," remembers Stacy. "First of all I was thinking, 'If the van comes back I'm going to pretend I haven't seen it.' But it never came and after a while I started getting a bit worried that I might actually have to walk to Nottingham. Then I saw the van coming and, for some reason, I got nervous and stepped off the grass verge and moved further into the countryside. But unfortunately I got in the way of a ditch, into which I fell, and even more unfortunately it was hill of stinging nettles."

By this time, Jem had caught up with the commotion. "I had sat on a grass verge for about 10 minutes, drank a beer, then thought I'd better set off and Hitch a lift. I was quite content, walking along, but I went round the corner and there was the bloody van with the lights on, and everyone shouting for Spider."

While Jem climbed back aboard, Shane and Cait attempted to rescue the stinging Stacy. "They grabbed hold of my hands to pull me out, and I dragged them all on top, of me," he laughs. "But then we all jumped back in the van, and lived happily ever after."

By this time, The Pogues had backed 'Boys From The County Hell' with Stacy's 'Repeal Of The Licensing Laws' and, on October 22, it was released as their second single. This time round, MacGowan's lyrics were toned down for daytime consumption and the song was notable for its bottleneck guitar and genius refrain, 'Lend me £10 and I'll buy you a drink.'

The following day they arrived in Leeds, and while Costello checked into the City square's classy Dragonara Hotel The Pogues found themselves in a gay temperance hotel.

"It was the most disgusting place you can imagine," says Jem. "The wallpaper was mushy pea coloured; everything clashed and it was all dank and cold and depressing. And in the morning, there were all these really bad drawings of muscle-bound pretty young men with leather jockstraps on lining the walls of the breakfast room, and there was this extremely homosexual young lad trying to be sophisticated and suave but serving up greasy platefuls of sausage, bacon and eggs with a broad Yorkshire accent."

The experience had to be worth something, and the band decided on a half-hearted stab at self- publicity. They made out they'd smuggled bottles into their rooms for a Post-midnight party, and when the booze-up was discovered they were booted out and ordered never to return. "We weren't really banned," admits Finer. "For a laugh, we just phoned up the ever-gullible press office at Stiff and said that we'd been banned from every temperance society hotel in the country, and it got printed - which isn't surprising, 'cos it's the sort of rubbish they like to put in the papers." The Pogues somehow managed to make it to the end of the tour, winding up a week later in Norwich with a screaming profile and 'Red Roses For Me' in increasing demand.

"That was a great tour" Says James. "It really was. Some of the things that happened…But one of my dearest memories is of Jem sitting in the back of the van: we had 'the office' - which was a shortbread tin that my mum had once given to me with some sandwiches in - and it had a cheque book in it, a notebook, a pen and the petty cash. And nearly every day, Jem would say, 'Can I have the office, please?' and he'd work out how much money we were losing. Then he'd sit in the back of the van, with his feet over the seat in front, tapping his teeth with a pen, just looking through the window."

Back in London it was clear that a biscuit tin would no longer suffice. "I was obviously getting to a point where we couldn't continue on the same day-to-day basis," explains Jem. "We knew that we had to get someone in to manage us, and we wanted someone who was sympathetic." Remembering a conversation from a couple of weeks before, Finer asked Shane if he had ever met Frank Murray. MacGowan replied that he had and that he liked him and, a few days later, The Pogues gave Murray a call.

Drimnagh CBS is a repressive Christian Brother school set in an old castle on Dublin's South Side. And it was there, during the early sixties, that Frank Murray developed a taste for fast action.

During severe bouts of boredom, Murray and his side-kick Paul Scully would ditch classes and head for a gypsy campsite on the surrounding fields of Ballyfermont. Then, having thieved the sharpest horses they could lay their hands on, they would ride past Drimnagh Castle and wave to the dumb-struck teachers.

Murray's school holidays were invariably spent in Carlow, where - as a 13-year-old - he was involved in pig smuggling. "This guy would drive the pigs in his van, and I'd end up at the border smuggling them across to people on the other side. It was all to do with British bacon subsidies, and this particular guy was making a lot of money. I was only a kid, so it was just a good adventure."

At 15, Murray and Scully were freed from Drimnagh and sent to the more Humane confines of Rathmines College Of Commerce where they enrolled for business studies. A greater interest, however, was music: particularly Elvis Presley, blues, and Tamla Motown. They hung out at local hops and, in 1967, witnessed The Black Eagles, a band fronted by the 16 year-old Philip Lynott. They often skived college in favour of Black Eagles rehearsals in an old school on the Crumlin Road. They travelled to all the band's gigs, and spent much of the rest of their time at Philip's house listening to blues records.

The following year, Lynott joined Skid Row and asked Frank and Paul to roadie. But after a series of gigs around Ireland, Frank decided to quit. "I left Skid Row because they weren't showing any signs of moving to England. I wasn't paid the best money to roadie with a part-time band, so I knew I had to get out of the city and get a job or otherwise I'd just continue doing it and never be able to break away."

Scully was equally disgruntled, so they hit London where Frank found work with a computer company and Paul in a clothing firm. But, by 1970, Skid Row had-signed a record deal with CBS and, although Lynott had left to start his own band, Murray, Scully and Ted Carroll (who went on to run Chiswick Records) were invited to become professional readies. The three of them shared a house in the East End and toured England, Germany, Scandinavia and the United States with Skid Row.

"We got our first taste of big time stuff in America," says Frank. "We played the Fillmore West in San Francisco and the Whiskey A-Go-Go in Los Angeles, and after that you're kind of hooked on that sort of lifestyle - it gets into your system-or whatever."

Prior to Skid Row's second tour of the United States, Frank decided to call it a day. By this time he had moved from the Ease End of London to Hampstead where he shared a large house on Belsize Avenue with Scully, Carroll and various Irish musicians. Among the many habitués of the house was Terry Woods, a former member of Steeleye Span who was, at the beginning of 1972, forming a new band with his wife Gay. And so, on leaving Skid Row, Frank became a sound engineer for The Woods Band.

After tours of England, Denmark, Holland and Ireland The Woods Band split, and Murray re-settled in Dublin where he found work in a record factory, pressing discs. Then, in 1973, having hit the charts with the traditional song 'Whiskey In The Jar', Thin Lizzy (now based in London) toured their native Ireland. "Philip always stayed with me when he came home," says Frank, "and he invited me to go on the road as tour manager-cum-personal manager. I was asked if I had a driving license so I went out, did my test, and went to London to work with them."

That May, Murray married his school day amour Ferga, and Lynott was best man at their wedding. But, not long afterwards, guitarist Eric Bell left the band and Thin Lizzy went off the road. During the lull, Frank learned that Dubliners' manager Noel Pearson had set himself up as a theatrical producer and was looking for a production manager. He immediately returned to Dublin, got the job, and worked on a show titled Jacques Brel Is Alive And Well And Living in Paris. Over the next nine months, Murray managed several other productions including Jesus Christ Superstar, Joseph And His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat and West Side Story.

In the meantime, Thin Lizzy had recruited Scott Gorham and Brian Robertson and, in the spring of 1976, released Jailbreak'. The band lined up a headline tour to promote their LP, and asked Frank to resume his former position. He agreed, and tour managed them through a vintage period which included the hit singles 'Waiting For An Alibi' and 'Don't Believe A Word' and culminated in the 1978 double LP 'Live And Dangerous'.

From there, Murray went on to tour manage for Straight Music, where his charges included The Commodores, Blue Oyster Cult and The Tubes. He was later given the opportunity to open up The Electric Ballroom in Camden Town which was being changed from an Irish ballroom into a rock venue.

"I got some of The Pistols and Thin Lizzy together for the opening," he says. "They called themselves The Greedy Bastards, and it was a great night. I also got Sid Vicious to do a one-off gig With the Vicious White Kids. There was Rat Scabies and, ironically enough, Glen Matlock on bass while Sid sang, and Nancy squealed into the mike like a bad dose of feedback. Unfortunately, that was Sid's last gig in England, shortly after that he went off to America and never returned."

Murray inevitably had trouble with the ballroom over soundproofing and within a year noise complaints had forced the venue to close. He subsequently tour managed for Elton John on his comeback dates, working with him through-out Europe but - after a disagreement with Elton's manager - the liaison ended in Glasgow. This disgruntled Murray no end, since it was on the eve of their visit to Moscow.

A lean period followed until he bumped into Rick Rogers in their Camden local, The Devonshire Arms. Rogers was managing The Specials, who were starting to break big and consequently needed a tour manager. "So I worked on the 2-Tone tour with The Specials, The Selector, Madness and Dexys. Then I tried to work with The Bodysnatchers, but it was very frustrating. They were young, and weren't the kind of band who'd let somebody manage them."

Meanwhile, Kirsty MacColl had asked Frank to manage her. Hearing a tape of 'There's A Guy Works Down The Chip Shop Swears He's Elvis', Murray clicked: "That's a hit." He quickly accepted her offer, and watched the single go Top 20.

By November 1984, he had added songwriter/producer and former Radiator From Space, Philip Chevron to his books. Chevron had recently produced the debut single for The Men They Couldn't Hang, and they were the band that Murray was thinking of managing when he was invited to meet The Pogues.

The meeting took place in The Dublin Castle on Camden's Parkway and it was mutually agreed that, from then on, Frank Murray would manage The Pogues.

"I'd had a meeting with The Men They Couldn't Hang a few days before," says Frank, "and I've often thought back but I just can't remember why I made the conscious decision to manage The Pogues. I didn't weigh the talent but, I suppose, I weighed the attitude. The Pogues seemed more open and honest. That's not to say that the others weren't, but they came across like a band who would have to have a meeting about every decision you were going to make.

"I don't think that a band should assume that whatever comes out of a manager's mouth is gospel but if you have a certain relationship, and they know your character, then they should allow you to get on with managing them without looking over their shoulder all the time."

Chapter 2
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