“Shane MacGowan was full of contradictions—and that’s where the truth of him lived,” writes the Edge in a statement introducing U2’s new cover of the Pogues’ “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah.” The track is the latest offering from the upcoming tribute album 20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan, out November 13 via Rubyworks. The LP will also feature MacGowan covers by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Primal Scream, Steve Earle, and Dropkick Murphys. Listen to Bono and co.’s take on the 1988 classic single below.
Adds the Edge, Shane could be “precise about what mattered and gloriously careless about everything else. If that sounds like a kind of performance, maybe it was. But as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘a mask tells us more than a face.’ The crooked grin, the wildness, the old-Ireland inflections—they weren’t disguises so much as signals. A way of placing himself in a lineage that ran from the pub storyteller to the punk stage.”
Read the Sunday Review of the Pogues’ 1985 album Rum Sodomy & the Lash.
