I Was Always Plain Saucer Eyes ; Convinced His Life Had Been a Failure, Unsure His Wife Loved Him and Ashamed of How His Drinking Had Hurt His Family, Ronnie Drew Tells His Story for the First Time... In His Inimitable Raucous Style

Summary

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WHEN Ronnie Drew gradually awoke, his head thumping from the alcohol-fuelled excesses of the night before, his face was six inches from a filthy wall. A tattered grey blanket was draped over him as he lay on a bed that felt more like a stretcher.

Turning to the next bed, where his Dubliners bandmate Barney McKenna was half-asleep, Ronnie growled: 'What sort of kip is this? Did you book us into a doss house or what?' Barney looked back and muttered disdainfully. 'Sing The Auld Triangle now, ya b****x&' And that's when Ronnie realised they were in jail.

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I Was Always Plain Saucer Eyes ; Convinced His Life Had Been a Failure, Unsure His Wife Loved Him and Ashamed of How His Drinking Had Hurt His Family, Ronnie Drew Tells His Story for the First Time... In His Inimitable Raucous Style

It was the end to an exceptional bender in Derry with The Pogues after their joint hit, The Irish Rover, had become a chart hit in 1987, and it showed, as if anyone doubted it, that Ronnie's capacity to carouse had not withered with age.

At 53, despite long periods off the drink, he could still return to it with a vengeance, invoking the spectre of a hell-raising past that immor-talised him and his fellow Dubliners in a country where drinking is a badge of honour, not the fast track to rehab.

Except, of course, for the fact that Ronnie h...

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