Shane MacGowan (vocals): The energy of punk rock was already in Irish music. When I was a kid, I saw The Dubliners, The Clancy Brothers – it was all around. The idea for The Pogues was just adding a bass guitar, and a very loud drummer stood up in the middle – Moe Tucker-style, except he was (clenches fists). And Spider’s drinks tray as well, a traditional Irish instrument – like the bones or the spoons [live, Spider Stacy was wont to hit himself over the head with a drinks tray].

Spider Stacy (tin whistle, vocals): I first met Shane when he was in The Nipple Erectors. You could hear that this guy was a really great tunesmith, and the lyrics were always smart and slightly psychotic. In early ’81, Shane, myself and members of my old band The Millwall Chainsaws played down at [Richard Strange’s] Cabaret Futura as The New Republicans, doing Irish rebel songs, and that was the springboard for The Pogues. Shane had wide reading, empathy, and a keen and observant eye – but the way he plunged into that whole Behan-esque, Joycean literary tradition, you’d have to say it was awe-inspiring.

Jem Finer (banjo): There was this period where it was just me and Shane practising and going busking. When he started teaching me what would become Pogues songs, I was quite blown away. It felt so familiar and old already, but also so totally of that moment.

Dave Robinson (Stiff Records co-founder): I went to see them early on: they did two songs and dived into the audience, and only the drummer [Andrew Ranken] was left. I went into the public bar next door and they were all in there having a pint, so I thought, These are my people. Their first manager, Stan Brennan, had produced [1984’s debut] Red Roses For Me, so we signed that and it sold about 4,000 copies over a few months. They were always so smashed out of their minds, it was very hard to get things going. They had a small punky crowd. The Irish didn’t like them, because they were, a) English, and b) too drunk even for Irish people, so we got them a tour with Elvis Costello [circa Goodbye Cruel World], and after that they were starting to get wild audience participation.

James F: There were many times where it ended up with Jem, Shane and I in a rehearsal room, getting to the bottom of what Shane was trying to do, while everybody else went to the pub. We knocked heads a few times. Shane was a feisty fucker, I maybe saw more of his feisty side than the vulnerable, gentle side. But I was gobsmacked to find that he’d written Sally MacLennane. I was ready to believe it was a traditional, just because of the subject matter of the pub and saying goodbye to somebody, and the way that it sounded.

Jem F: For the Irish tunes we actually covered, Shane and I had these little books called Traditional Songs Popular In Ireland. Stuff like Eric Bogle’s And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda was in there, as was Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town, which we already knew from The Dubliners.

DR: After the Costello tour I’d put the feelers out, Would Elvis produce them? He’d left Stiff and his manager, Jake Riviera, my ex-partner, had him signed to his new label, F-Beat, so it was a delicate negotiation. As luck would have it, Elvis had the hots for Cait [O’Riordan, bassist], so he decided he would do it.

Elvis Costello (producer): I saw my task as to capture them in their dilapidated glory before a more professional producer fucked them up by taking away that raw thing they had on-stage.

James F: I was intimidated on the first day when he came down the stairs into the basement at Elephant Studios in Metropolitan Wharf, Wapping. There was Elvis with his pork-pie hat on, peeling a pomelo – a fruit that actually rhymes with his name. By now, he was already living with Cait in Holland Park – hence the exotic fruit. It was a bit like, “Oh, we’re West End people now, and you’re still north Londoners.”

Jem F: Elvis was a massive step up from Stan. You felt you were in the hands of someone who knew what they were doing. It was suddenly like the songs sounded huge and full, reaching a potential.

Dick Cuthell (horn): I’d encountered Costello on [1979 EC production] The Specials. I’d actually worked with The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers back in the early ’70s while I was the engineer at Island’s studio in Chiswick, which [The Pogues] liked. They asked me to put a horn arrangement on And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda. So many bands after punk didn’t have decorum, but I found The Pogues very focused. After one listen you couldn’t help ‘getting’ this song, so I made up a brass section which was meant to evoke a rather sombre military band. I later found out that a distant relation of mine, Algernon Hubert Cuthell, was killed at Gallipoli, where the song character loses his legs.

James F: We had our misunderstandings with Costello over who was in the band, and who was producing. That was partly my problem. Elvis did the slide on Jesse James, and I got cross, because I thought he should be behind the desk.

EC: I know Shane didn’t like me at all… I wasn’t a punk, as far as he was concerned. I think he thought I was a dilettante. The music I’d made immediately before that wasn’t my strongest game, so there was every reason.

James F: There was this Ovation guitar Costello brought in, which Shane thought was bewitched or something. He projected whatever inner conflict he had about working with Elvis onto it. Here was a songwriter’s songwriter with a certain amount of power, who was going out with Cait, when Shane and Cait had had a relationship, and with Shane being a lightning conductor for emotions that he wouldn’t know what to do with apart from make them into a song or drink himself stupid… so, he gave the guitar a kick and it went flying across the room, and we had to make sure that Elvis didn’t know.

SS: The album title was [drummer] Andrew Ranken’s idea: he’d read that Winston Churchill was having an argument with some admiral, and Churchill said to him, “Oh don’t talk to me about the traditions of the Royal Navy, they’re just rum, sodomy and the lash!” Perfect!

James F: Thematically, it’s a combative record. A lot of it is to do with war, weaponry and soldiers. Billy’s Bones is all about a soldier, The Gentleman Soldier, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda too. A Pair Of Brown Eyes is all about military service and how people don’t understand it now, and The Wild Cats Of Kilkenny is about a fight.

Jem F: I was talking to my wife Marcia Farquhar, who’s an artist and an art historian, and she suggested the Géricault painting The Raft Of The Medusa, for the sleeve – not only because it fits with the nautical theme, but also because it was a protest against this shipwreck where the underclasses had been left abandoned on a raft, while the top brass got the lifeboats. That very much resonated with the worldview of The Pogues. Marcia’s also a prolific collagist, and when Stan and his partner had their first son, Marcia made a collage for them with babies cut out from a Mothercare catalogue, and our heads stuck on them. We decided to do the same on The Raft Of The Medusa.

Peter Mennim (front cover artist): The band had had this idea, so I took photos of each of them in their studio – in Camden, I think. I asked them which character they would like to be in the original Géricault, and shot them accordingly. Then I had a large print-out of the painting made, and painted them straight onto that.

SS: We had one of the best launch events ever on HMS Belfast. We sailed across the Thames on a longboat in 19th-century naval costumes and played the album. Later on, a Melody Maker journalist was thrown overboard by a Sounds journalist – a good party!

DR: The album charted [in August ’85], then went straight out again. Slowly, we got up towards 30,000 here, and 100,000 in France – the French love a genuine alcoholic. When we really got The Pogues going, was when we did The Irish Rover with The Dubliners [in ’87]. Before that, The Pogues were seen as ‘plastic paddies’, but that track turned the Irish audience onto them.

EC: I quit production as a full-time occupation after The Pogues. When all’s said and done, The Sick Bed Of Cúchulainn, Sally MacLennane, A Pair Of Brown Eyes – those are the truly great songs MacGowan wrote.

SS: By the early ’90s, Shane’s writing had dried up. Certainly, there was a lot of burn-out. It just became a slog. I wouldn’t presume to speak for Shane, but I think he just lost interest.

James F: Forty years later, RS&TL won’t stay in its box. It wants to get out, which is why we’re playing it again.

Jem F: It’s taken on a whole life of its own, and we’ve got guests appearing like Lisa O’Neill and guys from Lankum. It feels like how tradition is supposed to work: you take something from the past, then you rework and reconfigure it, and pass it on again. So playing these songs with this new generation who were inspired by us, it feels like a circle completing itself. The Pogues present A Celebration Of 40 Years Of Rum Sodomy & The Lash live in the UK in May.

Shane MacGowan interviewed in 2012. Elvis Costello quoted from Stereogum and Virgin Media Television, both 2022. See Peter Mennim’s other work at www.petermennim.com.