Song Story: Gintlemen's Club

Gin.

Looking around for things to write about for the Polka’s Not Dead album, I read about the extraordinary prevalence of gin in London in the 1700s. According to one historian:

Gin had originally been marketed as a medicine for upset stomachs in the Netherlands. It was imported into Britain after 1689 and quickly became the choice drink of the poor. Many distilled and sold it from their homes. Some historians claim that by 1750, one out of every fifteen houses in London sold it. Children would often be sent to buy gin for their parents and sampled it themselves. It was also regularly given to calm babies.

And the epicenter of it all was a place called Drury Lane, dubbed “Gin Lane” in a famous engraving done by William Hogarth:

Hogarth was trying to moralize about the evils of gin but I’m sorry, a lot of that just looks like a really, really good time. Two friends having a chat over glasses of gin. A healthy little gin-induced nap. And look at the lady in the wheelbarrow being pushed around and fed a glass of gin at the same time!!

Drury Lane now looks like this:

Fig 2. Drury Lane, Now

I’m sorry, is this supposed to be an improvement? Because it fucking isn’t. Look at that boring twat with his boring backpack. He probably hasn’t been pushed around in a gin soaked wheelbarrow in his life.

Of course, The Dreadnoughts adopted real cider as our official beverage, but far and away the most astonishingly ridiculous drunken evenings we’ve had have been on the gin. A few of us went to see the Pogues in Seattle in like 2008 and ended up almost missing the show due to this endless gin orgy we fell into. At an early gig Seamus wandered off in the middle of the first set and fell asleep on some rocks by a river. Why? Gin. I’m told that I once engaged in a (good natured, consensual) fist fight with a Polish woman backstage after a gig. GIN. Squid Vicious famously drank an entire liter of it on Day 1 of a tour and ended up sleeping under a pony in Belgium. Google that one if you want. GIN, GIN, GIN. For the WIN.

So we invented this club called the “Gintlemen’s Club”, which you joined by drinking two shots of gin in a row, shouting “GINTLEMEN’S CLUB!” and punching yourself in the crotch. Tom McSod from Boat Show, author of “Knife to the Eye”, did this with us in Chicago once and claimed it was a religious experience. I think.

Naturally this song just kind of came together, and I still love it:

It’s got some good poetry in it.

Fun fact #1: At first, all we had was the instrumental riff for this song, and I stuck it on to a terrible song about a girl being kidnapped by goblins and then turning into a goblin and telling her rescuer to piss off because she wanted to stay a goblin forever. Oof. Really glad that one never saw the light of day. Somehow Go Away I’m A Goblin doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Fun fact #2: After actually getting “Gintlemen’s Club” going, I was totally stuck because it didn’t feel complete, and we were almost going to scrap it. But we’d been listening to a lot of the Wurzels and Adge Cutler. I was just blown away by how they could take a tune to the next level by just adding a few joyous “la la laaa”s to a song, as they do in the classic Blackbird and in the music hall classic At The End of Me Old Cigar. And I remember sitting in my crap unlicensed basement apartment in Burnaby, BC, sipping on some chilled Bombay Sapphire, and suddenly realizing that I could just add some fun la la laaas of my own to complete this song. So thanks, Adge, you’re the reason this one was even recorded!

Well, you and the gin. I don’t drink gin straight anymore, but I’ll occasionally put back a Negroni or two, and when that beautiful vegetal floral scent wafts over my nostrils I’m transported back in time to a wilder, crazier era, a beautiful age of chaos and poetry, almost none of which I remember at all, because of the gin.

Gin.