Gareth O'Callaghan: Homesick diaspora took comfort in drink and music of the Pogues

It washed away bittersweet memories of a life interrupted, and banished what we were once taught were immoral thoughts that now didn’t seem so sinful in this new modern world, and the religious baggage we carried in our Catholic brainwashed minds since leaving home; until of course, you woke up sober.

Then you counted down the hours until you could drink again.

If you didn’t leave Ireland in the 1980s, then it’s difficult to explain the attraction of the music of the Pogues and the abracadabra effect it had on a homesick diaspora. 

As they say, you had to be there.

Unless you experienced the shocking depths of longing for aspects of a life that were no longer accessible to you, then ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ is just a ballad filled with lovesick words strung together by musicians and their instruments, and performed by a singer with broken teeth and a voice distorted by chain-smoking. 

Homesick exiles

Add the homesick ingredient and a strange magic happens.

Homesickness needs a musical balm of a unique genre to prevent its indescribable madness from catching hold.

Back then, ‘The Streets of New York’ or ‘The Fields of Athenry’ just made you cry into your pint. 

As an exile, you didn’t need to hear ‘The Flight of Earls’ in an Irish pub to be reminded that this was why you were now here, maybe forever, whether that was London, Boston, Sydney, or the myriad of other dots on the globe where we were drawn to by other exiles to try to make a fresh start.

I landed on English soil for the first time in my life on a beautiful Sunday morning in May 1983. 

I had taken the ferry to Holyhead and the overnight train to Euston, emerging onto the streets of Camden after a three-hour delay at Crewe Junction. 

I was 22, and it was my first time outside of Ireland.

I might as well have landed in Timbuktu, it was so utterly different.

I had no hands-on knowledge of this strange new culture, expecting it to be no different from where I had come.

Truth was, there was no comparison that came to a mind as green as the grass back home on that first Sunday morning.

Nor was I aware how suspicious I must have looked: a young lone Irish man with a mullet, a khaki-green jacket, and a canvas-green hold-all bag thrown over my shoulder, trying to navigate the streets using a London A to Z to find my way to Covent Garden.

Eventually, I found it. I was given an address where I’d meet a man who would offer me work. 

I rang the doorbell. No answer. I decided to go for a pint, my very first pint of London ale. 

I wandered through the sprawling streets of Soho, fascinated by the variety of cultural bric-a-brac, and the smells of foods and spices, mixed with the kerbside remnants from the night before.

The pub was busy, but cosy and inviting. I dropped my bag and placed an English fiver on the bar. “A pint of ale, please?” I asked with a smile.

The barman stared at me while he dusted down the bartop. “Sorry?” he asked. I repeated my request. He shook his head. “Did you not see the sign on the window?”

The pub went silent. Eyes rained down on me. He nodded his head in the direction of the door. I walked outside and read the scrawled sign: No Irish.

I could feel a shudder somewhere deep inside me. Without even knowing why, those two words would reset the bar for me on the proverbial cultural goalpost for the next five years of my life living in that country.

Within those few seconds, I had become an alien in a city that back then didn’t want me. It was a feeling I have never forgotten.

By late that evening, I had found the Archway Tavern, situated in Highgate Hill, in the middle of Navigator Square. 

Within half an hour, it felt as though I had found a new home where I was made to feel welcome by strangers who all had one thing in common: We were all Irish, lost abroad together.

As the months passed, the Archway became a second home at weekends. It was like recharging the Irish battery. 

I would travel from Luton, where I worked, on a Friday afternoon, throw my bag into a friend’s flat, and head for the Archway.

It was the one place where I didn’t feel conscious about my accent. For those London Irish in their 20s, the pub was the home-from-home cultural capital of our world.

If you were looking for work, you were told to ask for so-and-so who drank in the Archway. He would sort you out with a few hours next week and a place to stay until you found your feet.

You could cash your cheque there every Thursday, although many just used it to pay some money off the tabs they had been running behind the bar for years.

An 80s social media hub

This was the ‘80s version of a social media hub, a primitive form of an alcohol imbiber’s networking circuit.

Someone would know the person you needed to talk to. And somewhere in the background on the pub’s speakers, while GAA results were being discussed, and rounds of pints were being called, was the sound of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues, on a cassette tape that was owned by one of the regulars.

A man in his 50s asked me one Friday to read a letter from home to him, written by his elderly mother in Co Clare. She never knew he couldn’t read, and never asked why he didn’t reply to her letters.

“I’d phone her, and tell her I always preferred to hear her voice,” he told me.

She sends me ten pounds every month. I haven’t seen her in years. I’d be afraid to let her see that I’m a wee bit down on my luck.”

And in the background, the Pogues: "Some of them fell into heaven, some of them fell into hell."

For those of us who lived in those places during those awful years, the music of the Pogues became a distraction from the loneliness and the daily insecurity, a connection to lyrics and melodies that painted the pictures that hearts tried so hard to create for minds to understand.

Our Irish heritage keeps us as unique as the music of the Pogues, wherever life takes us, even in dark winter days, linking us to generations of singers and poets who have shaped our lives.

Homesickness is part and parcel for so many at Christmas, but it also reminds me of days and nights at the Archway Tavern all those years ago, and how proud I am, in hindsight, to have been an Irishman in London.