James Fearnley (Pogues) Interview 06/02/2026

James began his musical journey around the age of ten, initially through piano lessons suggested by his parents rather than his own request. His early encounter with performing came at primary school when the music teacher noticed his singing voice and suggested he perform a solo at morning assembly, a nerve-wracking experience that nevertheless led to further opportunities such as joining the church choir and becoming a notable boy soprano.

As James moved on to boarding school, he continued with piano lessons but soon grew to dislike them. He preferred to explore music independently by “…by liberating instruments in the course of the weekends from their lock-up in the music wing and just fucking around on them: trombone, cello, clarinet, anything I could lay my hands on, and the kids I was with who’d formed an experimental group, we’d take them and go over to the theatre building and …..improvise.”

But then, when we started playing it became clear what kind of a talent he was. We got on pretty much straight away, the way Shane ‘gets on’ with people, that is, which isn’t like anyone I’ve ever known. He was awkward and clumsy and abrasive and curt. The band made me hang around in a pub down the street to wait while they had another couple of guitarists go in to audition. I was living in Teddington at the time. I was in an imbroglio I needed to get away from. So I hung about in the pub. Eventually Shane and the manager came in and offered me the guitar-playing thing, whereafter, me and Shane went on the lash round Bloomsbury, from pub to pub, getting to know one another, swapping stories, making each other laugh, getting drunk.

When and how did you join The Nips?

It was the summer of 1980. They said they wanted me in the band. I said I’d join, but they had to get me somewhere to live. Shane sent me my gear, and the Transit van I’d borrowed to put it all in, to a flat above Gay’s the Word, a bookstore on Marchmont Street in Bloomsbury, where the people already living there said something like, Oh, he’s always doing this. They sent me and the van to Burton Street, more or less round the corner where I borrowed the room that Jem had for a bit, until he came back from Spain. I got something that was like Harry Potter’s room under the stairs at the Dursley’s house, but half the door was missing.

The Nips was fun. I had no idea how fiercely loyal their fans were. I hadn’t played to fans like that. It was like someone picking me out of a string of fairy lights and sticking me in a proper socket or something. And I got to hang out with the Jam – or at least I like to think I hung out with them. I mean, we opened for them a lot and Shane and I played with Weller and Foxton and Buckler at the Jam’s Christmas party in Fulham (‘Heatwave’ – there’s a recording from the mixing desk I came across – fantastic.)

We went to Top of the Pops the Christmas show that the Jam played ‘Going Underground’. I nearly got into a fight with the Dr Who at the time in the BBC bar because I was hitting on his girlfriend. Up to Aylesbury or down to Brighton to see the Jam, or the Rainbow or wherever else. We went on ‘Nips outings’ to Cambridge to see the Specials. That kind of thing.

How long have you been playing the accordion? 

Since Shane MacGowan sent Jem Finer up to the block of flats I was living in, with an accordion inside a laundry bag, which he’d borrowed from one of the women in the squat he and Jem lived in, with the instruction to find me and tell me to learn how to play it.

I hadn’t seen Shane for a year and a half. I’d been the last guitar player with his band, the Nipple Erectors, but that band broke up, and I thought I was done with playing music. Jem found where I lived by cocking an ear down the corridor on every floor of the block of flats to see if he could hear a typewriter going and that’s how he’d be able to tell where my flat was. I mean, it wasn’t exactly a massive building – just five floors – but still.

Then, later, the people that came out of the woodwork who wanted to either be with us, work with us, keep us, move us on, all that stuff. I suppose Shane got the brunt of it. The forces at work on us didn’t really impact me so much, indirectly of course, but, for me, it was fairly easy to be invisible and a bit immune. It was Shane it impacted more than anyone, though Spider was vulnerable, I guess.

What was it like recording with The Pogues?

It was brilliant, recording with the Pogues. At first, we were pretty shit. But there was some value in that, I think, in the sense that we weren’t good enough to get into ornament or anything. We just played our instruments, which we’d pretty much all learned from scratch. We’d practised a lot, in a spare room in one of the tiny flats near Shane’s, stopping for last orders at the pub before going back to practice more. We’d played a few gigs by the time we started Red Roses for Me. Not so many when we did our first demo at a friend’s flat near Kings Cross. We had no idea about harmony vocals, so we just didn’t do them.

When we got better, after playing more, meeting more people, working with Costello and the like, when we’d got more confidence, the recording thing got much more fun. I mean, there were some awful musical car-crashes from time to time. Sometimes, later on, Shane might have been incapable of singing much or singing very well. That was hard, but that was towards the end, when he’d more or less lost interest, and I guess if I’d looked hard enough, been a bit more sensitive, I would have seen that it was really all coming to an end. But the learning curve was a steady and graceful one, pretty much.

And there was fun to be had, especially for me: I was adept at getting sounds I wanted from different instruments, and got a lot of enjoyment from spotting places in songs that might benefit from I don’t know a countermelody or I want to say ‘descant’, like in carol singing where the sopranos hoist their voices over the top of what’s going on for a verse or a line or something. That kind of thing got competitive during Rum Sodomy & the Lash, with Costello, because he liked to do that too. We didn’t exactly lock horns or anything, but it got a bit spikey for a time with him.

Are there any favorite Irish songs or bands that you like?

As far as songs go, up there is the Raggle Taggle Gypsy, Planxty’s version of it, though it’s the way it goes into Tabhair Dom Do Lámh that’s like, I don’t know – a phrase that people like to use is ‘inflection point’. I wonder if that transition between Raggle Taggle Gyspy and Tabhair Dom Do Lámh is one of those in Irish music – an inflection point.

Bands, artists? All those we’ve been working with in the past couple of years: Fontaines DC to the Mary Wallopers, Lankum, Øxn, Poor Creature, Lisa O’Neill, John Francis Flynn, Iona Zajac, Junior Brother, One Leg One Eye. A lot of things that John ‘Spud’ Murphy has touched.

When and how did The Walker Roaders form?

I’d been getting together with Ted Hutt, who’d been one of the founder members of Flogging Molly, to write songs and maybe play them out, I don’t know. We hadn’t much of a plan. He’d get in touch with me to play accordion on tracks he was producing and I’d go up to whatever studio in Los Angeles and play for a bit. Now and again, we’d muck about with something or other at the same time, with me playing the piano or something.

Our bass player, Brad Wood, I’ve known since my kids were in elementary school. He was a parent of two daughters too. We started playing together in a group called Cranky George, with Dermot Mulroney (the actor) and his brother Kieran. Brad is a producer (good to have a couple of producers in the group) and all-round great bloke. Bryan Head is our drummer. He seems to have played with everyone from Supertramp to Dick Dale.

Tell us about releasing your latest from Walker Roaders.

What’s the latest? The LP? Or the single we just ‘dropped’… which is the currently favoured way of not saying ‘released’. Dropped? Yes, we just ‘dropped’ it, the latest single, if that’s what it is. As in, letting it slip from our hands, I suppose. It came out without much fanfare. You’ve got to have fanfare to give these songs a chance of getting listened to, but we’re not all that fantastic at fanfare. We’re learning, but it’s not there yet. Whatever. It’s a song called ‘Singing School’. It’s about, basically, not getting the picture, not reading the room, kind of. It’s about people getting together to help themselves and others, but not to get together so solidly that next thing you know, you’re a fucking militia or something.

The music bit was inspired by a song on Their Satanic Majesties Request. The lyrics come from a few places. There’s bits of references to songs: an anonymously written ballad about a nightingale from 1310; there’s a song from the musical Babes in Arms which starred Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland; there’s a staple from the Boy Scouts’ Gang Show by a guy called Ralph Reader who seemed to write most of those songs for the Boy Scouts; there’s a bit from a Charles Causley poem called Timothy Winters. The title’s from W B Yeats (the same poem that No Country for Old Men comes from). There’s even something a woman taxi driver from Russia said to me once when we were talking about singing. She said, “I can’t sing. The bear stepped on my throat.” There’s a nod, too, to Radiohead in the lyrics too.

Any future plans and projects for you, James?

Absolutely! I’m working with Ted Hutt, Marc Orrell, Brad Wood and Bryan Head on another LP for the Walker Roaders. We’ve just signed on new management. We’ve got a gig or two coming up in February (before I go off to Australia with this iteration of the Pogues). We’ve been writing a slew of songs together, since….I don’t know when. We played a charity show for the Elephant Conservation and Research Fund at the Troubadour in West LA just recently.

Otherwise, Jem Spider and I are excited to work with all the people we’ve been working with and getting close to and getting inspired by – Lisa O’Neill, John Francis Flynn, Iona Zajac, Jordan O’Leary, Fiachra Meek, Jim Sclavunos, Daragh Lynch, Holly Mullineaux. We had a good year last year, playing with the Mary Wallopers at a gig they did at Brixton Academy (they played with us at Barrowland in Glasgow). We worked with Nadine Shah for a bit, which was a privilege and who is an important (and vulnerable) voice in the dialogue which is going on now over the fate of Palestine. It was wonderful to share a stage with her.

And then I might write a book. Who knows?

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