VIA PRESS RELEASE | To celebrate its 40th anniversary on the 15th October, The Pogues debut album Red Roses For Me is to be reissued on two brand new formats: recycled red vinyl containing the 2013 remix of the album and a double-CD set, including the album and and a bonus disc of B-sides and the band’s BBC sessions from 1984. These anniversary formats will be released on 18th October and are available to pre-order here.
After four decades, Red Roses For Me is still celebrated as a groundbreaking debut album from an unlikely group of supposed ne’er-do-wells from London’s Kings Cross in the convulsive aftermath of the re-election of the Thatcher government. The album mashes traditional songs and instrumentals—about death and drink, love and London—with those of frontman Shane MacGowan’s—and all fueled by the punk ethos.
The album’s release was met with ardent critical acclaim: Melody Maker proclaimed “the quality of their music, even the very nature of it, is strangely irrelevant. What’s important is their existence at all. For The Pogues are a gesture—a particularly bloody two-fingered one—aimed at all things considered current and fashionable in 1984… Theirs is a gut reaction to traditional music—and with it comes all the motion, intensity and vigour that has largely been lost to these songs since the early days of the folk revival in the Sixties.”
“… If you think they’ve rehabilitated a music that’s been asleep for a while you’re dead wrong—on both counts. The music has never been away, and The Pogues in all their irreverent ‘seriousness’ have taken it out on a limb, where it all started, where it belongs.” —NME
”Red Roses for Me is a satisfyingly impure, purposefully imperfect and totally irresistible collection of lasting resentment, rebellious roars, watery-eyed romance and uproarious jigs… Surprisingly, this record works. It manages to convey the sullied, brazen and raucous spirit of their live set very effectively.” —Sounds
Irreverent, powerful, unique and spirited, Red Roses For Me was the beginning of an incredible and unflinching journey for a London-Irish band whose music not only lights up playlists in December by virtue of the band’s beloved “Fairytale of New York,” but which also sparkles with the genius of its songwriting.
