Pogues in Paris: 30th Anniversary Concert (2012)

If you want a one word review of this concert video the word would have to be "FUN" no question about it. This video captures a Pogues show quite well showing the band and the crowd having a raucous good time! We were lucky enough to see the Pogues here in Chicago about a year ago and this truly does capture the energy in the room during a Pogues show.

For those of you that follow the Pogues you'll know that frontman Shane MacGowan likes to have a little bit of the whiskey before the shows, sometimes causing him to miss the performance and sometimes making him pretty incoherent on stage. While all of that adds to the charm and the mystique of the Pogues if you ask me here, for a night in Paris, Shane is in fine form. There are times during the show where you catch another band member's reaction to what Shane is doing on stage and there are smiles all around.

The picture quality is excellent and the shots and cuts all make sense. We have all seen concert footage where the director thinks his job is to jump from camera to camera with no apparent rhyme or reason and that, thankfully, is not the case here. Even with this video being pushed out the door a few weeks after the concert the end result is a quality product. The sound quality is excellent and should be turned up until it is making your speakers shake.

The crowd shots here are a whole lot of fun. If you've never been to a Pogues show you might be surprised that a mosh pit is a regular sighting at the front of the stage and here in Paris is no different. The crowd is banging around, people are crowd surfing and overall having a damn good time. The Pogues music is all about fun and the fans react to it.

The musical selection here is pretty standard for a modern Pogues set, it really plays as a greatest hits type of show and I think that is exactly what the fans want. Shane gives up the mic for a few songs giving Spider Stacy and Andrew Ranken a chance to lead the best Irish Punk band in the land.

Overall I have to highly recommend this to anyone that likes the Pogues and to anyone that likes good music whether it be Irish Punk or anything under the sun. I love Shane and I love the Pogues and this video had me smiling from beginning to end. This concert video is a whole lot of fun and shows the absolute joy the Pogues have making their music and their fans have listening.

If ever there was any doubt that the Pogues are one of the all-time great live bands (not to mention all time great bands, full stop) then this is the final proof. If you've ever been to a Pogues concert then this does an amazing job of recreating the experience bettering it in some ways, since Shane has rarely, if ever been so... coherent. The first time I ever saw them he could sing ok, but otherwise stood vacantly on the stage, whirling his mic around in a daze. Here he is on top of his game and clearly having fun. But no one goes to a Pogues concert for the vocal abilities (throughout the show we also get Spider, Terry and Andrew all crooning, and none of them are going to win any awards); the Pogues have always been about the energy, skill and sheer exuberant joy of the instruments, and it is so good to see that, 30 years on, they can all still produce in abundance. Even Phil Chevron, who is obviously suffering from his cancer, is channeling everything he has into the performance.

The Blu Ray is verging on perfection. My only regret is the absence of White City, one of their best songs and a true live classic, and I wish I could switch that out for Bottle of Smoke. But that's nitpicking. It's almost impossible to watch this and not find yourself jumping around with a huge smile on your face, reveling in one of the truly great songwriters of the 20th century.

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My husband enjoyed watching this blueray very much. I bought it with the CD and it turned out to be a great buy.

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