Hell's Ditch

Hell's Ditch is the fifth full-length album by The Pogues, and the last to feature front man Shane MacGowan as a member. Released in 1990, the album continued the group's slow departure from Irish music, giving more emphasis to rock and straight folk rock, and forsaking their earlier staples of traditional compositions almost entirely. MacGowan parted with the band after the release of the album, due to problems with his abuse of alcohol and drugs, which had been leading to deterioration of his reliability as a performer. Several of the songs on the album have Asian themes, in sound or in content, notably "Summer in Siam", "The House of Gods", and "Sayonara", although only the latter has a noticeably far-eastern tune. The song "Lorca's Novena" draws on MacGowan's affinity for Spain (particularly Almería, which he discovered years earlier when filming Straight to Hell), and the famous Spanish poet Federico García Lorca. The song tells of the poet's murder by Francisco Franco's Nationalist supporters in the Spanish Civil War, and how his body, never having been recovered, was said to have walked away. "The Wake of the Medusa" is a first person narrative inspired by Théodore Géricault's painting "The Raft of the Medusa," which appeared on the cover of the band's second album, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. The title track "Hell's Ditch" is based largely on the life and writings of French author and playwright Jean Genet, in particular The Miracle of the Rose and Our Lady of the Flowers, with its vulgar description of squalid prison life. The album was produced by The Clash's Joe Strummer, who later served as a temporary replacement for MacGowan when the band went on tour. The cover-art for the album was designed by Josh Shoes.