I recently found Straight to Hell with Spanish subtitles on YouTube. Like Blue Velvet and River’s Edge, Straight to Hell was released in 1986. Three decades haven’t dulled this whacked-out western which married MTV to the wild west with a cast of rockers including the Pogues, Joe Strummer, Courtney Love, Dennis Hopper, Grace Jones, Elvis Costello and Jim Jarmusch. This one was directed by Alex Cox who helmed both Repo Man and Sid and Nancy. This one takes Repo‘s bizarro irreverence and cranks it to eleven with its punk disassembling of cowboy film tropes. Straight to Hell is more of an experience than a story, and it’s one of those instances where the style delivers the substance

Here’s a brief but pretty thorough plot summary from IMDB…

A gang of bank robbers with a suitcase full of money go to the desert to hide out. After burying the loot, they find their way to a surreal town full of cowboys who drink an awful lot of coffee. The townspeople are hostile to the outsiders at first, but seem to accept them once they’ve killed a couple of people. After a while, a mysterious man named Dade arrives, who seems to have unpleasant business to settle with the robbers. A free-for-all shoot-em-up ensues.

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Yesterday I posted about the birthday of The Pogues’ bassist Cait O’Riordan. It’s likely that my YouTube searching for that video of Cait singing “Danny Boy” had YouTube suggesting this today: The Great Hunger-Life and Songs of Shane MacGowan.

“This the extraordinary story of how a North London punk transformed himself into one of Ireland’s greatest living balladeers while threatening to destroy himself in the process…”

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Today we celebrate the birthday of Cait O’Riordan who was born on January 4, 1965. Cait was the bass player and background vocalist on The Pogues’ first two classic records, and her lead on “I’m A Man You Don’t Meet Everyday” from RUM, SODOMY AND THE LASH certainly makes any short list of the band’s best. Here’s Cait in STRAIGHT TO HELL singing “Danny Boy.” Heartbreaker…

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