Cait O'Riordan, The Pogues

Cait O'Riordan (punk musician and bassist for the original lineup of the Pogues) was a whole vibe back in the 80s tbh

Female Bass Players

Listen/purchase: The Shortest Longest Story (featuring Cáit O'Riordan, Eddie Muñoz) by Palmyra Delran and the Doppel Gang

Happy birthday Cait O'Riordan

come fill up your glasses with brandy and wine whatever the cost, i will pay so be easy and free when you're drinking with me i'm a man you don't meet every day

The Pogues - A Pair Of Brown Eyes

sei bella da schiantarsi!

Shane MacGowan with Cait O'Riordan, Andrew Rankin, and Jem Finer, 1984.

Happy Birthday to Caitlin "Cait" O'Riordan, bass guitar player for the Irish punk/folk band the Pogues and later bass player with Elvis Costello, born on this day in 1965, Lagos, Nigeria.

Photo by Dean Shaw

#punkrock #womanofpunk #punkrockhistory #otd @rockyoriordan

My 1986 shoot with Shane MacGowan of the Pogues was such a brief, strange encounter that I never really held it in much esteem when I was scanning images for my old blog. But a single image from that shoot did end up in one of my photozines, so I decided to revisit the whole fleeting episode again. The story is pretty simple: the band were on tour, with a stop (on my birthday!) at Toronto's long-gone RPM club way out on the old industrial blocks of the city's eastern port lands. Elvis Costello was lurking backstage; he and Cait O'Riordan, the band's bassist, were recently married. I sat in on an interview with members of the band like Spider Stacy, James Fearnley and (I think) Philip Chevron, but asked if it was possible to get a portrait of the conspicuously absent Shane to go with the article.

I was told that it was possible, but that I'd have to wait a little bit while they got Shane ready. Eventually somebody called me over and walked me out to the parking lot where the band's tour bus was parked. I was told to wait outside while two of the handlers went inside and closed the door. I heard some voices, and when the door opened again Shane was led out of the bus, wearing sunglasses and obviously, as the kids say today, tripping balls. I was asked where I wanted to take the photos, and the handlers led him to a spot with the lake behind Shane. I took a couple of shots with the sunglasses, then asked him to take them off. I asked him to look around, then up. He complied blandly; I knew I wasn't going to get much more and said I was done. The handlers nodded their heads, then led Shane back to the Pogues' tour bus. I revisited these shots with the aid of the neural filters that come with recent updates of Photoshop, cleaning up the scrappy old negatives and even colourizing one of the shots - a subtly unrealistic result that might approximate MacGowan's own perspective that day.

Haunted - the Pogues- Sid And Nancy original soundtrack (Cait O'Riordan lead vocal)

(via ALBUM REVIEW: THE POGUES – The Stiff Records B-Sides 1984-1987 (2023) | LONDON CELTIC PUNKS WEB-ZINE)

lesser known genders - listening to cait o'riordan sing I'm a man you don't meet every day

13 January 2024: "Clown Strike"/"Do You Know What I'm Saying," Elvis Costello. (Warner Bros. promo, 1994)

I've collected Elvis Costello promos for decades, and I've never seen or heard of this little oddity until stumbling across a copy at Reckless Records on Belmont Avenue. "Clown Strike" is from Costello's 1994 album Brutal Youth; apparently at one point it was slated for a single release, but it never surfaced commercially. Here we have a promo that wouldn't be that fascinating had it included "Clown Strike" alone. However, this promo marks the only official appearance of the song "Do You Know What I'm Saying." I've scoured all of my Brutal Youth-related items and it's nowhere to be found, not even on the lengthy bonus disc of the 2002 Rhino reissue. So, if you want to be a canonical Costello completist, it looks like you're going to need this promo single.

Like several Brutal Youth B-sides, "Do You Know What I'm Saying" is one of the numerous songs Costello originally wrote for Wendy James, frontwoman of the London band Transvision Vamp. During that band's final tour, James had a chance encounter with Pete Thomas, Costello's drummer. She asked if she thought Costello might be willing to share his insights about establishing a solo career. She wrote him a letter, and in a burst of creativity he, with some contributions by his then-partner Cait O'Riordan, wrote her an entire solo album. She recorded it and released it in 1993 as Now Ain't the Time for Your Tears. The entire set of Costello recordings of the James material can be found on bootleg as The Gwendolyn Letters.

Above we see the disc itself; like many CD promos of its time, this has no booklet or insert. The second photo is the back cover.

I'm including a photo of the spine below, as it implies this promo was meant as a sort of double A-side single. It's a bit hard to make out, but both song titles are listed on the spine.

Andrew Ranken and Cait O'Riordan being the only members of The Pogues with sexy voices