Retro Video of the Week: "The Irish Rover" by The Dubliners and The Pogues

For this week's Retro Video of the Week, I'm going a little off script.  Since it's St. Patrick's Day this Sunday, and it will be the first one since Shane MacGowan -- founder and lead singer of Celtic punk pioneers The Pogues -- passed away, I thought a Pogues song would be fitting.  Then I stumbled upon a 1987 collaboration they did with Irish folk mainstays The Dubliners.  The "old" and "new" in Irish folk music did a version of the Irish folk song "The Irish Rover" together.  What I like is that The Pogues, who had a drunken and brash reputation, got together with The Dubliners, who were by this time kind of elder statesmen of Irish music.  But what The Pogues were doing was basically taking what groups like The Dubliners had done and adding punk sensibility and more modern themes.

The song was a big success, topping the Irish pop chart and reaching #8 on the UK pop chart and #25 on the New Zealand pop chart.  The video below is a live performance on the Irish TV show The Late Late Show (not to be confused with the Colin Ferguson talk show of the same name).  So it's not technically a "music video" in the sense that it was a video made to be put on MTV or similar channels.  But it fits the week's theme.  And in addition to the great collaboration between these two groups, what stands out to me are MacGowan's teeth.  Yikes.