A Martin D-28 is a difficult guitar to handle. Beautiful, but loud. The strings (the action, as the pros call it) are high. It booms. It's not a gut string. It lends itself to be played well by Elvis and Hank Williams and thin men drinking corn whiskey. It's an instrument you belt to, or over. The player doesn't hear it as well as someone standing ten feet away, just by the nature of sound waves. I could be wrong about all this, so, a healthy attitude is to play the thing, enjoy it, let it age, take good care of it. And when the wind is blowing right, you not only feel it, but you hear it, and it is an awesome instrument, related to the violin, something to played without any shyness.

A writer is often a musician. A writer is going to appreciate the four and a half minutes of Rainy Night in Soho. Such a performance is what we're all looking for when we write a passage. Does it move us? Does it sing? Does it have a hypnotic background rhythm reassuring so that we take it up, fall for it, love it, sing it. It's a song I've had faith in ever since I heard it. And when I played it for other people, I felt I risked Roman torture. It seems to have caught on, popularly, since those early Christian days when this barman could only get away with it on St. Patrick's Day.

Everyone now at a Pogues event can sing along with it. I don't blame... I join. And on You Tube, if you go back to the late eighties, you can find more or less original versions. Back when Mr. MacGowan was young and dapper. His mum a singer, and him too. A natural. A guy with a voice being natural. No wonder he can read about zen and samurai.

A writer will write a whole book trying to get that effect, of hearing such a song. The background chords, banjo tickling over, the appropriateness of chord change beneath a line like 'still there's a light I hold before me.' It's not something I can resist.

I know, it's juvenile to make a cross comparison, or to try to describe the effect of Shakespear, of a poem, of a moment in a literary thing in terms of another evocative wordy musical performance... And yet, MacGowan, backed by Pogues, and they backed by him, are the crown of our art.