‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’: The most underrated track by The Pogues
Longing is the lifeblood of much great songwriting, running through some of the most devastating love songs ever recorded, such as ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’, ‘The Long and Winding Road’, and ‘Lover, You Should’ve Come Over’, but longing can be geographic as well as romantic.
A feeling of standing somewhere while emotionally belonging somewhere else, and nowhere is that tension more beautifully captured than on The Pogues’ ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’, the often overlooked opener from their 1989 album Peace and Love.
Irish bands singing of longing wasn’t a new trope when The Pogues picked up their pens, and it’s one that continues to endure today. In 2019, Fontaines DC sang of Ireland on Dogrel, and in 2019, on Skinty Fia, they sang of leaving it, carrying a homeland in their pockets while settling into life on the road. They had lived in Dublin until their 20s, the streets, the rain, the hum of the city etched into them, evident in the simplicity of their early lyricism, such as “I kissed her ‘neath the waking of a Dublin City sky”, and “Dublin in the rain is mine”.
On Skinty Fia, written away from home in London, that simplicity gives way to homesickness, with their second single ‘I Love You’ is as much an ode to Ireland as it is to a person, the ache of place mirrored in the ache: “If you don’t know it I wrote you this tune to be here loving you when I’m in the tomb”.
The Pogues, by contrast, identified as London-Irish, having spent most of their lives in the city. Shane MacGowan moved to England when he was six due to his father’s work, a relocation he later described as a “horrific change of life”. The nights were long, lonely, and filled with dreams of Ireland, and he would cry himself to sleep thinking of the country he had left behind, yet London eventually came to offer its own strange comforts.
“Because there’s an Irish scene in London,” he explained, “You never forget the fact that you originally came from Ireland. There are lots of Irish pubs, so there was always Irish music in bars and on jukeboxes. Then every summer I would spend my school holidays back in Tipperary.”
Though their music remained steeped in Irish culture, London eventually became a home of sorts for The Pogues, well documented via ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ and ‘London Girl’, and while ‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’ is a typical Irish emigration song, it turns the trope on its head, mourning not Ireland but the city the band had grown to love.
Composed solely by Jem Finer, the band’s banjoist and co-founder, during their extensive 1988 world tour, the song centres the Albert Bridge, which spans the Thames between Chelsea and Battersea and opens with a dreamy image of a couple standing on the banks of the Thames on a cold, misty morning, a cigarette passing between them, smoke curling into the fog, and a farewell hanging in the air with the tolling bells.
I visited the spot while living in London and was struck by how close I felt to Finer in that moment. The grey water, the soft pastel colours of the bridge emerging through the haze, it all felt exactly as he described it, and now that I don’t live in London, it is one of the first images that comes to mind when I think of the city I used to call home.
“I awoke subcon and alone in a faraway place /The sun fell cold upon my face, the cracks in the ceiling spelt hell / Turned to the wall, pulled the sheets around my head /Tried to sleep, dream my way back to you again,” sings Finer as the dream evapotates, but who is he dreaming of: London, or the woman? Perhaps, it is both.
“The first draft of it I wrote in some dump in New Zealand when I was feeling particularly lonely, like I was at the end of the earth,” Finer recalled in Pogue Mahone – Kiss My Arse: The Story of The Pogues, “The weird thing about New Zealand is that a lot of it looks like another planet, where someone has recreated 1950s England. A lot of the planning is exactly like English planning, but in a slightly alien landscape. There’s a lot of melancholia about it. It reminded me of when I was a kid, probably subconsciously, and it made me feel further away, not just in terms of distance, but in terms of time as well. It was a very weird experience.”
However, there was a woman Jem was imagining too, as he noted, “Marcia [Jem’s wife] grew up living next to that bridge. I can remember one of our early dates, walking very early in the morning past it. I guess that’s something that stuck in my mind.”
‘Misty Morning, Albert Bridge’ might not be as devastating as ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ or have the bombast of ‘Sally Maclennane’, but in its quiet lyricism, it captures something equally important: the strange ache of loving a city, and perhaps a person, that has become home.
