Wiki
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Release Date
1 January 1988
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Length
15 tracks
If I Should Fall from Grace with God is a 1988 album by The Pogues. It reached number 3 in the UK album charts. The album was a departure from previous Pogues albums, which had focused on an Irish folk/punk hybrid, combining musical radicalism with strong commercial appeal. On If I Should Fall From Grace with God several more genres were added to this mixture, including Jazz, Spanish folk and Middle Eastern folk. The adding of Spanish and Middle Eastern sounds was a sign of things to come; on later albums such as 1990's Hell's Ditch these would become the defining sound. On this album, however, it was very much Irish folk to the fore, especially on songs such as the title track, "Bottle of Smoke", "South Australia", "Lullaby of London" and "Sit Down By The Fire", and the rendition of the traditional jig "The Lark in the Morning" as the coda to "Turkish Song Of The Damned". These songs were more typical of the earlier Pogues albums, mostly fast and heavily textured. The album was also the first by the band to utilize a complete drum kit.
Also prominent on the album were the ballads "Thousands are Sailing", "The Broad Majestic Shannon" and especially the Christmas hit, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale of New York". "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six" showed a passionate and angry political side to their music, the first part being about the sorrow a person feels about the streets of Northern Ireland, and the second half about the Birmingham Six and the Guildford Four, two groups of people wrongly imprisoned for terrorism offences and held in jail. The song also makes a passing reference to the Loughgall Martyrs with the line "while over in Ireland eight more men lay dead, kicked down and shot in the back of the head".
If I Should Fall from Grace with God marked the most substantial line-up change to date for The Pogues, as it was the first full-length album on which multi-instrumentalist Terry Woods and bassist Darryl Hunt appear. It also marked the first departure of one of the original members, former bassist Cait O'Riordan.
The album cover is a montage of photos of the group's members; those pictures imitate the style of the fourth photo from the left, a shot of Irish author James Joyce.
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