Hell’s Ditch by The Pogues

Hell's Ditch, the Pogues' fifth studio album, came out on Island on 1 October 1990 with Steve Lillywhite producing, and it was the last one Shane MacGowan made as a member. The London band that had welded Irish traditional music to punk was drifting away from the pub session here, dropping the old traditional numbers almost entirely in favor of rock and straight folk rock, with Spider Stacy, James Fearnley, Jem Finer, Terry Woods, Philip Chevron, Darryl Hunt and Andrew Ranken still aboard.

MacGowan's imagination was wandering too. "Summer in Siam" and "Sayonara" look east, "The Wake of the Medusa" speaks from inside Géricault's painting of the doomed raft, and "Lorca's Novena" mourns the poet Federico García Lorca, killed by Franco's supporters, his body never found. "The Sunnyside of the Street" is the one the countdowns kept. A year later, midway through a 1991 tour, the band sacked him, his dependency on drugs and alcohol having worn down their live shows.

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