Everyone has a band that crowbars their skull open aged thirteen, and for me that band was the Pogues. My friend Coll, who was ten years older than me, gave me a tape with some songs on it – Fairytale of New York, Sickbed of Cuchulainn, Turkish Song of the Damned – which I played to destruction. A few weeks into my obsession I saw The Great Hunger, a TV documentary about Shane, and the footage of them playing If I Should Fall From Grace With God at the Town and Country in 1987 pretty much made me feel as if my heart were about to explode, as if something fundamental had been articulated to me for which, up to that moment, I had lacked the right language. I wanted to be watching that band, at that concert in 1987; I wanted to be that band; I wanted to be wherever something like this miraculous, improbable thing was occurring, rather than in a high school where people mainly liked happy hardcore and openly being into this kind of thing would definitely get me called a puff and kicked around at lunchtime. At the first opportunity I went out and bought the album and pored over it with the furious pedantry and desperate hunger of, well, a thirteen-year-old who’s just lost his Art cherry.

It’s still my favourite Pogues song, and when Shane died my first impulse was to go out in the street and play it at people, to go look at this, fucking look at it, to cut through the sentiment and the jokes and the endless rotation of Fairytale of New York and rub their noses in this irreducibly wild and uncategorisable thing.

I don’t know why it’s good and I don’t care to think too much about it. The tune, I suppose, is as good as any they wrote, an aching vaguely Scottish thing in a that dips gorgeously in and out of minor; there are enough surviving recordings to hear how hard they worked to get it right, trying different tempos before settling on a headlong boom-chicka-boom rockabilly, surprisingly fast, with Jem Finer’s banjo rolling metronomically beneath it. A version the band put out in a remix single features a longish mid-song breakdown and some twangy country guitar, which is fun, but the album version’s power and authority comes precisely from its having been pared back as short and as fast as it’ll go: it crashes in without preamble and ends with the shortest possible flourish two minutes and eighteen seconds later. It sits, as the whole album does, at the apex of the band’s coherence and strength as a group, when they were capable of doing pretty much whatever they wanted in their chosen idiom, but still focused enough to have a good idea of what that should be. Shane’s singing is at a sweet spot here too, having deepened into something rich and strange and Johnny Cash-like, just before he became too fucked up to be comprehensible.

The words, by Pogues standards, seem barely there. Many of Shane’s most celebrated lyrics are miracles of compression and suggestion, with whole grand or antic canvases conjured from a succession of evocations whose associative links, when you look closely, barely hold together. But they hinge on specific places, names, mythologies, clearly delineated images of such intensity that a thing you’ve not heard of before – the metal doors at Vine Street, the Chelsea, Finnoe – can take on an improbable weight of emotion. If I Should Fall from Grace with God is entirely abstract: an arrangement of fragmentary suggestions, pleas, prayers, expressions of defiance, valedictions. There’s something in there about an inheritance, and probably a curse; a warding off of the evil eye, an incantation against death and damnation; there’s a bit about having and not having a country, and rivers running dry, and burial at sea. In other hands or other contexts, it might read as doggerel with a suggestion of dumb nationalism, but in that voice, to that tune, played by that band, it has the simplicity and mystery of a nursery rhyme or a hymn. Shane said at some point that the lyrics were inspired by the band’s stay in Spain while they were shooting Alex Cox’s bonkers trash-western Straight to Hell: something about the parched bones of the landscape and the ghosts of the civil war. As suspicious as I am of lyrical exegeses, this makes sense. If it’s a song about anything it’s a song about the weird elation of defeat.

But it isn’t about anything, and that insubstantiality makes it fragile in its reception too. It’s vulnerable to conscription, in ways that more specific songs aren’t, to a lumpier understanding of the Pogues’ music, a boozy masculine pride-and-passion kind of kitsch which the band never quite stayed clear of, and which the ways they’ve been loved and domesticated within the culture has too often made the dominant mode of understanding them. For every invocation of them as a kind of Paddy’s Day Oasis, to whom you can roar along with your arms around your mates, I’ve always wanted to supply a rejoinder that emphasises their strangeness and delicacy; for every queasy celebration of MacGowan as rock’s most hilarious and stereotypical drunk, I’ve always wanted to insist that he’d’ve been just as fundamentally odd, as unnerving and as haunted if he’d never self-medicated.

That hauntedness is probably the most important thing about the Pogues. If their best songs have the quality that all properly miraculous songs have, of having somehow always existed and simply been plucked from the air or heaved up from a collective unconscious, it’s worth remembering that they emerge from an obsessive engagement with a folk tradition and the histories that made it – all of which are histories, more or less, of defeat. Shane once famously said of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash that it comprised eleven songs about death plus one instrumental, which was also about death; the line from Ulysses which supplied their name reads, in full, “Pogue Mahone! Acushla Machree! It’s destroyed we are! It’s destroyed we are surely!” (That Joyce gives this line to the sly and cynical Buck Mulligan, a mocker of his country’s cloyed mythologies and sentimental self-regard, hints at the irreverence and irony with which the band approached their own cultural investments and visions of catastrophe.) The characters and personae of Macgowan’s songs are variously cannon fodder, emigrants and exiles, addicts, madmen, victims, sex workers, thugs, the conscripted and abjected. Where there’s romance, it’s always amidst ruins; where there’s home, it’s always irrecoverable except in dreams. There’s something of this in the awkward photo from the cover of the album which If I Should Fall… kicks off, and which shares its name: a plain picture of the band with their instruments, sat on battered steamer trunks and suitcases, awkwardly serious in their old-fashioned suits, pale and undateable, as if those faces were looking at you out of a photograph of emigrants in steerage or volunteers in a war against fascism. Set against this imagery, the song itself sounds like a manifesto or a distillation of these obsessions: the weight of history, dislocation, trauma, precarious existence and precarious grace.

It was also the first song I ever heard at the first gig I ever went to. My mate Coll, who’d given me the tape of the Pogues in the first place, reckoned he could get me in to see Shane and the Popes at the Newcastle Riverside. I was a late bloomer – fourteen by then, and my voice had only broken that summer – and I spent weeks puzzling out how to look older, covertly dragging my sister’s mascara brush through my cheek fuzz to see if I could make it look like proper stubble. The prospect of not getting in terrified me.

But of course I got in, and found a venue full of people significantly older than me, refugees from a decade I could hardly remember: goths, gays, social worker mams, lads in Celtic shirts with tricolors and missing teeth. In the bogs a trans woman was smoking and holding court, talking to some lads about seeing the Pogues in London in the eighties and watching Spider break a tea tray over his head. The band were an hour or two late to the stage – this was Shane’s grimmest period, at least during his productive years – and we were getting ready to leave, me mortified and shaky with incipient heartbreak, when they shambled onstage and flew straight into If I Should Fall from Grace with God. I felt suddenly as if I was levitating, or the room was levitating, or both.

I felt that same sense of levitation, years later, seeing the Pogues every Christmas at Brixton, coming off my feet to the demented roar when they came on stage and launched into that song or into Streams of Whiskey, their other great terrifying manifesto of a set-opener. I felt it one Christmas in a bar in Riga, coming back from a disastrous attempt to live in Russia, in about as bad a state as I’ve ever been in, when If I Should Fall suddenly came over the speakers like a voice from another world. I felt it again, the last time, at my sister’s wake – she’d died doing her job in Africa, senselessly and violently, and it took weeks to get her body home amidst diplomatic fuckups, Covid, a winter of storms that shut airports and washed out railway lines and blew the roofs off half our street – and I remember, I think, the opening bars knitting together the strange hysteria of the occasion, the booze, the dislocation, the bewilderment, the shock and the grief, into something very briefly comprehensible, and causing a bar full of mourners above a charity shop in Whitley Bay to seem, for a few seconds, as if it had risen into the night air.

I don’t know what else to say about it. You can play it at my funeral, too.