The Dublin Castle, Camden — early Pogues shows

The Dublin Castle on Parkway in Camden has been one of London's essential small live music venues since the 1970s — a Victorian pub with a back room that holds a few hundred people, named for its Irish associations and embedded in the Camden Town that served as the operational centre of London's Irish immigrant community and, later, of its rock and indie music scene. Madness were regulars. The Pogues played early shows here in 1982 and 1983, when the band were still called Pogue Mahone and still working out whether their particular combination of Irish traditional music and punk aggression had an audience beyond their own immediate circle.

The band had formed from the wreckage of Shane MacGowan's previous outfit, the Nips, and a loose community of London Irish musicians who shared a conviction that the Irish music they had grown up with deserved to be played with the velocity and fury of punk rather than the studied reverence of the folk revival. At the Dublin Castle, playing for crowds who understood both sides of that equation, they found an audience who agreed. The name Pogue Mahone — "kiss my arse" in Irish — was eventually shortened to The Pogues after a BBC producer objected to broadcasting the full version; the Camden shows predate that compromise.

The Dublin Castle still operates as a live music venue at 94 Parkway, still booking bands in the back room seven nights a week, still Irish in name and atmosphere if not exclusively in clientele. Damon Albarn of Blur has cited it as one of the places where he first understood what a London music scene looked like. For The Pogues, it was part of the circuit of early shows — often chaotic, occasionally transcendent — that established they were something real.