3. The PoguesRum, Sodomy And The Lash

That album has played a really big part in my life, it’s been pretty much a constant actually. I didn’t know it at the time but my mum always used to say we had some Irish heritage. As I got older, I researched my family tree and found out how much Irish heritage I’ve got. It was Irish dockers coming over in the late 1900s. The Pogues always affected me on quite a deep level, I really responded to them. I remember going to watch them at Liverpool University in 1988, I was 18 and the song ‘Poor Paddy’ – I remember Shane MacGowan being on the stage and deliberately playing up the lyric “In 1844 / I landed on the Liverpool shore” and the whole place went absolutely wild. It stuck with me, that. It was very personal. I’ve always had that connection – and my family do, we put the Pogues on and we all go mad and have a dance. I always say to my son, in my more bleak moments, play ‘The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn’ at my funeral.