Summer in Siam explained
"Summer in Siam" is a single by The Pogues from their 1990 album, Hell's Ditch. Composed by enigmatic frontman Shane MacGowan, it charted in the UK Top 100 at Number 64. The accompanying music video was directed by Don Letts and produced by Nick Verden for Radar Films. The album was produced by Joe Strummer.
"Summer in Siam" was originally played by MacGowan to the rest of the band on a Casio synthesiser. While the final arrangement was greatly modified from the original demo, it reflected MacGowan's growing interest in acid-house music.[1] MacGowan claimed in 2022 that along with "Lorca's Novena" and "Hot Dogs With Everything", "Summer in Siam" is one of his favourite songs by The Pogues.[2]
In 2023, Stephen Dalton of The Times listed "Summer in Siam" among the Pogues' six best songs, commenting that, written on a "tiny Casio keyboard", the song grew out of MacGowan's interest in acid house. He deemed it to be a "woozy, lysergic, euphoric lounge-jazz reverie" and added: "Initially the band hated it, but it became one of their most unusual hit singles."[3]
Notes and References
- Book: Balls, Richard . A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan . 2021 . Omnibus Press . 978-1-78760-108-6 . 262 . "Victoria vividly remembers Shane's acid phase. She says he became completely immersed in it and was writing new material for the record while tripping, something other members of The Pogues found difficult. 'He was listening to a lot of acid-house music and he was going to acid-house clubs all the time and taking acid all the time', she says. So, he started writing things that were very far out. Even "Summer In Siam", when he first did it, everybody thought, What the fuck is this pile of crap? because he was doing it on a little Casio thing, and he was off his face. He wrote the entire album completely off his face, but none of them were doing acid.
So, I think they thought it was quite scary and weird and not The Pogues. They thought he was completely insane, which probably he technically was. He was wearing T-shirts that were all multi-coloured and his hair was grown, and he was just mental. He latched on to that because it was like, "Wow, this is really trippy". But they couldn't really handle it because they gave a shit. How did the performance come across[…]"
Excerpt From
A Furious Devotion
Richard Balls
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- Web site: Thomson . Graeme . 2022-04-28 . 'I came, I saw, I scribbled': Shane MacGowan on Bob Dylan, angels and his lifelong love of art . 2023-08-10 . The Spectator . en-US.
- Web site: Dalton . Stephen . Shane MacGowan and the Pogues’s 6 best songs — chosen by our critic . The Times . 29 August 2024 . https://web.archive.org/web/20240829024238/https://www.thetimes.com/world/us-world/article/shane-macgown-pogues-best-songs-fairytale-of-new-york-z7kb3lsz0 . 29 August 2024 . 30 November 2023.
