Remembering the night: 40 years since The Pogues played this Tipperary pub

40 years ago last week, on a winter’s night in 1986, on what is colloquially known in Ireland as ‘Little Christmas’, The Pogues played Puckane.

At the time, the village, tucked between Nenagh and the shores of Lough Derg, had developed a reputation as a place for a great night out. Buses would arrive from neighbouring areas, dropping people at Kennedy’s bar, which had become known for lively weekends and an unusually strong run of live music. For a relatively small rural venue, the list of performers was striking: Christy Moore, Mary Coughlan, Paul Brady, the Black family and, on one January night, The Pogues.

By 1986, the band were riding momentum. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash had been released the previous year and announced them as something entirely new: traditional Irish music delivered with punk energy and a reckless sense of freedom. They were touring relentlessly, playing theatres, clubs, halls and pubs wherever they could.

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That touring reality is what brought them to Puckane. Gigs in rural Ireland were often arranged through informal but effective networks, publicans willing to take a chance, local organisers with contacts and venues that had already built reputations for live music. Kennedy’s was one such place.

Local photographer Pádraig Ó Flannabhra, who was there on the night with his camera, recalls that the gig was not a spur-of-the-moment booking but part of an established circuit. It was advertised in the Nenagh Guardian the week before, scheduled for 6 January, Little Christmas, at the tail end of a long festive weekend of music in the venue.

“It was a kind of a weekend festival,” he says, with Saturday and Sunday gigs leading into The Pogues on the Monday night. Behind the scenes, family and local connections mattered too. Members of the Kennedy family, along with figures connected to the band’s management, helped make it happen.

While The Pogues were already well known in London and Dublin, Shane MacGowan’s roots in the area gave the night the feel of a homecoming. His mother’s family came from nearby Carney and he had spent long stretches of his childhood there, absorbing music, stories and folklore that would later find their way into his songs.

The venue itself was the purpose-built lounge behind the pub, constructed in the 1970s and designed for cabaret-style shows rather than punk-inflected folk chaos. It had tables, a lofted seating area and a small stage, and by the mid-1980s it had become one of the most important live-music venues in north Tipperary.

According to Ó Flannabhra, Kennedy’s was already well established as a stop for major names. “Kennedy’s and Puckane was the place to go at the weekends,” he recalls. “It really was.”

When The Pogues arrived, the lounge was packed “to the gills”. It was standing room only, hot, loud and compressed.
Flannery remembers arriving while the band were already in full flow, with little room to move.

“There were people in front of me, beside me, behind me. I was kind of stationary wherever I was.”

The room was never designed for a band like The Pogues and that was part of the electricity. The sound was raw and overwhelming, more force than finesse. This was not a polished performance delivered at a safe distance. It was confrontational, chaotic and physical. The music didn’t so much fill the room as collide with it.

Shane MacGowan, already a compelling and unpredictable presence, commanded attention. He was sharp-tongued, ferocious and utterly uninterested in smoothing the edges of either himself or the songs. For many in attendance, it was unlike anything they had experienced before.

The crowd was a mix of the curious, the committed and the accidental. Some knew exactly who The Pogues were and had come specifically to see them. Others had little idea what to expect and found themselves caught up in something far bigger than a local night out.

There were farmers and students, locals and people who had travelled in from nearby towns. Some stayed for the entire set, transfixed. Others drifted out early, overwhelmed by the volume and intensity.

The Pogues’ live reputation in the mid-1980s was built on unpredictability. Sets could be exhilarating or barely controlled, sometimes both at once. Drink, disorder and brilliance often existed side by side, and Puckane was no exception. The night has since acquired a near-mythical quality, spoken about in fragments and half-remembered moments: the sheer volume, the press of bodies, the sense that the band might either lift the roof or fall apart entirely.

What mattered most was the energy. Songs that drew on centuries-old traditions were delivered with a ferocity that felt completely modern. For a rural audience used to more conventional live music, it was a shock and for some, a revelation.

For Flannery, the photographs he took that night were simply filed away. There was no sense at the time that they were of particular value. “I didn’t do anything with them,” he says. “I kept them. I didn’t see where or how I would make any more of it.”

Occasionally, people would ask for prints, and he obliged.

It would take decades and MacGowan’s passing for their significance to fully crystallise.

Ó Flannabhra's book, ‘Shane MacGowan: Songsmith’, brings together three distinct bodies of work: the photographs from Puckane in 1986; a studio portrait session in Silver Street in 2003; and images from MacGowan’s funeral in Nenagh.

The idea for the book only came after the funeral. Witnessing the scale of public grief and the breadth of MacGowan’s following forced a reassessment. “I realised then that this man had a huge following,” Flannery says.

“I had these images, and I was doing nothing with them.”

The book was self-published, produced in a limited run of 1,100 copies, with a foreword by Spider Stacy of The Pogues.
All proceeds were donated to UNICEF, ultimately raising more than €24,000. Orders came from across Ireland and around the world, Europe, North America, Australia and beyond, underlining the reach of MacGowan’s legacy.

For Ó Flannabhra, the significance of the night lies not just in the music, but in its place within MacGowan’s longer relationship with the area. Though born in London to Irish parents, MacGowan’s maternal roots were in Carney, just down the road from Puckane.

He spent holidays there as a child, often staying on when his parents returned to England.

“It was in that cottage that the music came from,” Ó Flannabhra says. “The songs, the stories, the folklore, that influenced him greatly.” MacGowan would later fuse that inheritance with punk’s confrontational language, creating something that felt both ancient and entirely new.

The Puckane gig, then, was not just another stop on a tour. It was a performance in front of family, neighbours and extended relations, many of whom had never seen him play live.

Relatives from Carney, Borrisokane and the surrounding area were there to greet him, hail him and in some cases, join him on or near the stage.

That sense of proximity between artist and audience, between global reputation and local identity, has only grown in importance since MacGowan’s death.

In the reassessment that followed, attention has turned not just to the cities where he lived, but to the smaller places that shaped him.

Puckane has quietly become one of those places.

The fact that a band of that stature played there at such a pivotal moment speaks to the fluidity, energy and the excitement in Irish music culture at the time, a type of energy we're starting to see again in modern Irish bands like Fontaines DC, The Murder Capital, Gurriers, Lankum, The Mary Wallopers and more.

The Pogues themselves traded in myth as much as music. Their songs blurred history and invention, tragedy and humour. It is fitting, then, that a night like Puckane in 1986 should exist somewhere between what happened and what is remembered.

In an era when live music is increasingly centralised and carefully curated, the idea that one of the most influential Irish bands of the last half-century once played a small village like Puckane feels radical.

It is a reminder that culture does not only flow through capitals and concert halls. It passes through pubs, parish halls and places that rarely make the headlines.

Forty years on, the night The Pogues played Puckane stands as a testament to a different way of making and experiencing music.

For those who were there, it remains unforgettable. For those who weren’t, it has become part of the wider story of Shane MacGowan and a band who never quite belonged anywhere, and therefore belonged everywhere.