When Shane MacGowan died in November 2023, he left a great, big, romantic poet-shaped hole in music. Now, a year later, the late Irish songwriter’s band, the Pogues, have announced their first tour without him.
The Pogues announced Tuesday that they will play seven shows in May 2025 in the U.K., with tour stops in Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, and London. The tour is timed to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Pogues’ beloved 1985 album Rum Sodomy & the Lash — the record that built MacGowan’s legend as a brilliant, tragic bard. At the same time, his fame as a hard drinker grew right beside it. Within a few years, the Pogues had ended; though they reunited in the early 2000s, they split again in 2014. This will be their first proper tour since then.
“The world got you down?” the band wrote in a statement on its official website. “What helps is celebrating 40 years of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash live with The Pogues!”
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Founding members Spider Stacy, James Fearnley, and Jem Finer are confirmed to take part in the reunion, along with “special guests” yet to be named. (A one-off performance this December marking the anniversary of the band’s 1984 debut, Red Roses for Me, will feature Fontaines D.C.‘s Tom Coll on drums; Coll, however, will be touring the U.S. with Fontaines next spring. Original Pogues drummer Andrew Ranken is unable to perform due to health concerns, according to the band.)
MacGowan died of pneumonia at age 65 in London on Nov. 30, 2023. In an eloquent tribute written following the news of his death, Rolling Stone‘s Rob Sheffield remembered MacGowan as “one of rock’s most fiendishly brilliant growlers, snarlers, songwriters, storytellers, and blackguards,” and noted that “mortality was always at the heart of his music”: “Shane’s demise has been predicted so many times, over 65 years of hard living, it’s bizarrely shocking that the end has finally come.”
