If I Should Fall from Grace with God

Three new members arrived for this record: Darryl Hunt replaced Cait O'Riordan on bass, Philip Chevron joined on guitar and Terry Woods played cittern and other instruments. Woods and Chevron, the only two members of the band born in Ireland, contributed the first original songs on a Pogues album not written by MacGowan or Finer. After the situation with Stiff was resolved in early 1987, the band recorded demos at Abbey Road in March and entered RAK Studios on 9 May 1987. They chose Steve Lillywhite to produce, and Finer said the experience was as exciting for him as for them because he had never worked with a band live in the studio.

The songs range widely. Turkish Song of the Damned took its title from a misreported Damned B-side, as Chevron told NME, and ends with the jig The Lark in the Morning. Bottle of Smoke is the story of an imaginary horse that wins the Cheltenham Gold Cup. Fiesta came out of a party during the filming of Straight to Hell in southern Spain, and includes a Spanish verse adapted from Lorca that names Jaime Fearnley, Elvis Costello and Cait O'Riordan. Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six pairs a Woods ballad about Michael Collins with MacGowan's song about the Birmingham Six. The CD added South Australia and The Battle March Medley, tracks 7 and 12 here. The US and Canadian cover shows the band's faces on shots of James Joyce.

It reached number three in the UK, four in New Zealand, and nine in both Sweden and Switzerland, and was the band's best-selling album. Finer called it the creative peak for him, a very cohesive album that drew on a lot of styles. NME's Terry Staunton called it the bleakest of masterpieces, and Kurt Loder wrote in Rolling Stone that the Pogues obviously could do it all. Mark Deming of AllMusic considered it the best album the Pogues would ever make, and Q placed it 37th on its 2006 list of the 40 best albums of the 1980s.