The Pogues: Hell's Ditch, 1990

****

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hell's Ditch is the fifth full-length album by The Pogues, Released in 1990, the album continued the group's slow departure from Irish music, giving more emphasis to rock and straight folk rock, and forsaking their earlier staples of traditional compositions almost entirely.
Several of the songs on the album have Asian themes, in sound or in content, notably "Summer in Siam", "The House of Gods", and "Sayonara", although only the latter has strong elements of a noticeably far-eastern tune. The song "Lorca's Novena" draws on MacGowan's affinity for Spain (particularly Almería, which he discovered years earlier when filming Straight to Hell), and one of its famous poets, Federico García Lorca. The song tells of the poet's murder by Francisco Franco's Nationalist supporters in the Spanish Civil War, and how his body, never having been recovered, was said to have walked away. "The Wake of the Medusa" is a first person narrative inspired by Théodore Géricault's painting The Raft of the Medusa, which appeared on the cover of the band's second album, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. The title track "Hell's Ditch" is based largely on the life and writings of French author and playwright Jean Genet, in particular The Miracle of the Rose and Our Lady of the Flowers[1], and is typically MacGowan in its vulgar description of squalid life in prison.
The album was produced by The Clash's Joe Strummer, who later served as a temporary replacement for MacGowan when the band went on tour.

I've been enjoying this album since the mid 90's but am particularly enjoying "Lorca's Novena" this time around. A poem from Federico García Lorca. & the lyrics:

Sonnet of the Sweet Complaint

Never let me lose the marvel of your statue-like eyes, or the accent the solitary rose of your breath places on my cheek at night.
I am afraid of being, on this shore, a branchless trunk, and what I most regret is having no flower, pulp, or clay for the worm of my despair.
If you are my hidden treasure, if you are my cross, my dampened pain, if I am a dog, and you alone my master,
never let me lose what I have gained, and adorn the branches of your river with leaves of my estranged Autumn.

*

Lorca's Novena

Ignacio lay dying in the sand

A single red rose clutched in a dying hand

The women wept to see their hero die

And the big black birds gathered in the sky

Mother of all our joys, mother of all our sorrows

Intercede with him tonight

For all of our tomorrows

The years went by and then the killers came

And took the men and marched them up the hill of pain

And Lorca the faggot poet they left till last

Blew his brains out with a pistol up his arse

Mother of all our joys, mother of all our sorrows

Intercede with him tonight

For all of our tomorrows

The killers came to mutilate the dead

But ran away in terror to search the town instead

But Lorca's corpse, as he had prophesied, just walked away

And the only sound was the women in the chapel praying

Mother of all our joys, mother of all our sorrows

Intercede with him tonight

For all of our tomorrows