Nick Cave, Mark E Smith and Shane MacGowan at the NME Pop Summit in 1989

Daniel Holland
10 minutes ago
10 min read

Black-and-white photo of three men, one smoking. Background shows a blue-toned street scene and pub. Cigarette butts in a bowl nearby. Gritty mood.

It is one of those stories that feels almost too perfect for music history. In 1989, as glossy synth beats were drifting out of fashion and British music was hunting for its next direction, three unlikely figureheads found themselves sitting around a battered pub table in south London. Nick Cave was working his way out of addiction and into a sharper artistic future, Mark E Smith was continuing his uncompromising reign over The Fall, and Shane MacGowan was riding the stormy heights of The Pogues. The eighties had been defined by excess, artificial brightness and polished surfaces. These three men were the opposite.

So when the NME brought them together for what they grandly called a Pop Summit, the scene looked nothing like the polished photo shoots of the decade they were supposedly ushering out. Instead, it meant a twenty pound bar tab per person, a pub with a gothic ambience, and two patient journalists. One was James Brown, not that James Brown, and the other was Sean O Hagan, yes that one, if you are thinking of Nick Cave’s recent memoir collaborator. Their job was theoretically to record whatever came out of the trio’s mouths. In practice, you suspect it required both of them simply to keep the afternoon from collapsing into pure chaos.

They gathered at The Montague Arms, a once beloved and famously eccentric pub with taxidermy, naval bric a brac and dusty chandeliers. It was an environment that suited all three men, since each had built his career in some form of dazzling gloom. What happened inside that pub has become one of the small legendary moments of British rock culture.

Opening Shots and Shared Insults

The conversation began the way conversations with volatile artists often do. With a jab.

“So the NME thinks we’re the last three heroes of rock n roll, do they?” Nick Cave asked. Shane MacGowan fired back without missing a beat. “Smarmy fuckers. What they actually mean is that we’re the three biggest brain damaged cases in rock n roll.”

Given the surroundings, it was not entirely unfair. They were meeting in a pub near Millwall’s old Den. It was not exactly the spiritual home of delicate pop craftsmanship. Mark E Smith clarified the matter with the bluntness that only he could provide. “Apart from Nick. Nick’s cleaned up.” Cave answered with a rare moment of cheerful modesty. “Yeah, my brain’s restored itself.”

None of this stopped Smith from appreciating his company. Their friendship went back years and had been forged in the margins of British music. Cave remembered their early days in London with a certain fondness. When The Birthday Party arrived from Australia, bringing a wild energy that was sometimes invigorating and sometimes simply dangerous, they were not welcomed by many. But Smith and his endlessly rotating line up in The Fall made room.

“We were friends with The Fall, and we were friends with The Pop Group, and these were great English bands. Particularly at that time. They were the saviours of the music scene because there was so much shit that was happening at that time. Terrible, boring kind of stuff. And Mark Smith’s lyric writing was just incredible, so they had a huge impact, but we weren’t involved in a scene, we just knew them.”

It was never a cosy friendship. Smith was famously prickly and nobody would have described any of these men as eager to mingle with the cool crowd. What they shared was not so much a lifestyle as a sensibility. They each wrote songs that lived between literature and chaos, between poetry and pub fights. They were drawn to the edges of things, and each in his own way tried to give a voice to lives and emotions that pop music often ignored.

Outsiders Talking About Being Outsiders

This was why the discussion soon turned to the subject of fashion and the avoidance of it. Cave observed, with surprising calm, “I think we’ve all tended to create some kind of area where we can work without particularly having to worry about what’s fashionable.”

For the only known time in history, Mark E Smith agreed. “Yes, fair enough,” he said, before shifting instantly back into critique. “But I think there’s a lot of big differences in this trio here. Nick was very rock n roll to me but he’s turned his back on it which was cool. Shane’s more, I dunno. To me, The Pogues are the good bits from the Irish showband scene, like The Indians. You had that feel, probably lost that now. Your work’s good though.”

There was no pretence in the room. MacGowan simply shrugged off the analysis with one line that summed up his lifelong attitude to public attention. “Fuck it man. Who wants to work in a place where there’s all these people looking at you?”

Smith’s reply was instantaneous. “Are you talking about your gigs? You should stop doing them, then.”

From there the talk unravelled in a tangle of theology, philosophy and the kind of insults that only good drinking companions can get away with. At one point MacGowan remarked, “I don’t go round saying Socrates was a cunt Jesus Christ was an idiot, do I?”

Smith countered with one of his most notorious lines. “Jesus Christ was the biggest blight on the human race, he was. And all them socialists and communists, second rate Christianity. It’s alright for you Catholics.” Then he added, with comic timing, “I was brought up with Irish Catholics. Some of my best friends are Irish Catholics.”

It was absurd. It was provocative. But it was also the exact sort of chaotic magic that the NME had hoped for.

Mythologies, Subconscious Journeys and the Inner Theatre of Songwriting

When the conversation drifted back towards their actual work, it grew unexpectedly reflective. MacGowan, who often resisted the mythologising that hovered around him, insisted, “Nobody created my mythology. I certainly didn’t.”

Yet he immediately dug deeper into Cave’s own lyricism, offering a reading that would not have been out of place in an academic paper. “It seems to me that in your songs, Nick, you’re doing a Jung style trip of examining your shadow, all the dark things you don’t want to be. A lot of your songs are like trips into the subconscious and are, therefore, nightmarish.”

He elaborated with unusual care. “You’re exploring the world through the subconscious. I’ve done that on occasions for various reasons, whether it be illness or self abuse, or whatever. Once things start to look grotesque I don’t write them or sing them. I couldn’t write them the way you do, I couldn’t, making nightmares into living daylight…”

Cave, who is rarely caught off guard, seemed genuinely touched. “I think you do a pretty good job of it in some of your songs.”

In this moment their artistic kinship became clear. All three were drawn to the ragged edges of human experience. They wrote songs that embraced the grotesque, the comic, the violent and the tender. They never flinched from the messy realities of life. Whether through Cave’s brooding narratives, Smith’s jagged repetition or MacGowan’s poetic slur, each man wanted to make sense of the world through honesty rather than polish.

The Summit That Accidentally Captured an Era Ending

Their conversation at The Montague Arms has since become part of musical folklore. It was messy and brilliant. It showed three artists who had survived the eighties on their own terms and were about to help shape the next decade in ways nobody predicted. Instead of shiny pop perfection, they offered literature, satire, raw emotion and wit so sharp it could slice through the thickest hangover.

The Pop Summit did not deliver profound conclusions, but it revealed something more valuable. It showed three men who were not trying to be saviours at all. They were simply following their own crooked paths and pulling British rock music into new, stranger and far more interesting places.

And as Nick Cave has since reflected in later interviews with Sean O Hagan, moderation is a far better companion than the excesses that once powered afternoons like this. Even so, the legacy of that pub meeting remains a reminder that sometimes the most chaotic conversations can illuminate the deepest truths about art, survival and the strange beauty of unvarnished honesty.

The full transcript of the conversation is available over at The Quietus, but below, you can read a relatively small excerpt.

Do you think it’s accurate to describe the three of you as outsiders?

Nick Cave: “I think we’ve all tended to create some kind of area where we can work without particularly having to worry about what’s fashionable.”

Mark E. Smith: “Yes, fair enough. But I think there’s a lot of big differences in this trio here. Nick was very rock ‘n’ roll to me but he’s turned his back on it which was cool. Shane’s more, I dunno. To me The Pogues are the good bits from the Irish showband scene, like The Indians. You had that feel, probably lost that now. Your work’s good though.”

Shane MacGowan: “Fuck it man. Who wants to work in a place where there’s all these people looking at you?”

MES: “Are you talking about your gigs? You should stop doing them, then.”

SM: “Can’t afford to.”

MES: “Fuck it, you could fight not to if you don’t like it.”

SM: “…and leave the rest of them in the lurch?”

MES: “Nah, the rest of your band will always complain about not working. If you’re paying them a wage tell them to stay at home and behave themselves.”

SM: “It’s a democracy, our band.”

MES: “Why aren’t they here with you then?”

SM: “Cos the NME didn’t want to interview them.”

MES: “Cos nobody’d recognize them.”

SM: “That’s it! They want to interview us because we’ve got distinctive characteristics. They just want to interview three high-brow loonies. (Laughs)”

MES: “In that case you should have brought your mate Joe Strummer along.”

SM: “I said high-brow loonies.”

How do each of you approach the actual mechanics of songwriting?

MES: “When you ask about that, you just induce fear in a songwriter. I just go blank.”

NC: “It’s not a cut and dried process.”

SM: “For a start I ‘ve got to be out of my head to write. For a lot of the time it’s automatic writing. ‘Rainy Night In Soho’ was automatic.”

MES: “It’s gotta be subconscious and off the wall. He says he’s got to be out of his head, and a lot of the time I have too. Sometimes, I just wake up and do it. It’s one of the hardest questions you ever get asked. For instance, you sometimeshear things that would make a great idea for a song but you never carry them out.”

SM: “I do. Like ‘The Turkish Song Of The Damned’ was a Kraut trying to tell me something and I misheard him. He said ‘Have you heard ‘The Turkish Song’ by The Damned’. Then I woke up.”

MES: “My German song’s better than yours, I bet. This is like one of those night-time discussions on Channel 4.”

NC: “I write songs in batches and then record them and then can’t write again for ages. I try and build one song upon another, they may not obviously look inter-related but often one song acts as a springboard into another.”

SM: “You haven’t been back to the swamps for a while, have you.”

NC: “The swamps? Heh, heh. I’ve written a novel about that.”

MES: “Nick thinks a novel’s two pages long. Very novel, heh, heh.”

SM: “What’s it called?”

MES: “It’s called It’ll Be Ready In Another Five Years. You should write more aggressive songs, Nick, you’re getting too slow.”

NC: “I haven’t sat down and thought about the mood before I wrote them.”

MES: “I find your work almost English Lit oriented, like Beckett, things crop up again and again.”

NC: “And your songs are very deceptive Mark, in the way they’re sung. They may appear at times like streams of consciousness but that’s deceptive.”

MES: “One thing that really annoys me is that stream of consciousness thing. I wouldn’t let on to it normally, but it annoys the shit out of me. I put a lot of hard sweat into them, I think about them. They have an inner logic to me so I don’t really care who understands them or not. I see writing and singing as two very different things. My attitude is if you can’t deliver it like a garage band, fuck it. That’s one thing that’s never been explored, delivering complex things in a very straightforward rock ‘n’ roll way. My old excuse is if I’d wanted to be a poet, I’d have been a poet.”

SM: “And starved.”

MES: “I listen to your songs, Shane, and I see the old Ireland coming up there and it moves me and I boogie to it. I like your stuff believe me or not. I can listen to Peter Hammill and I know he’s not enjoyable, not even entertaining but I like it. I’ve got a very old fashioned attitude that I shouldn’t give any of my secrets away.”

SM: “What are you doing here then?”

MES: “I can write, boy, I can write. That’s what I do. People like you sit round moaning about the state of pop music… The trouble is that it’s too bloody easy for people, that’s why music is in the sorry state that it is. Any idiot, actors mainly, can go in there, sing a chord, bang on a machine… I’m not objecting to that but when people get at me for trying to say something in a rock ‘n’ roll mode it’s as if I’m the freak.”

SM: “All this talk about the state of music, rock ‘n’ roll music, Irish music, soul, funk.”

MES: “Salsa.”

SM: “It’s been proved by Acid House that anyone can make a record.”

MES: “We’re not thick, we all know that.”

SM: “Look, I’m talking about the implications of Acid House.”

MES: “There’s nothing new in Acid House for me, pal. I’ve been using that process for years. Bloody years. It might be new for you but don’t assume it’s new for anyone else, because you’re fucking wrong, pal.”

SM: “What the fuck are you talking about? Have you made an Acid House record?”

MES: “It’s the same process, right. Have you had some sort of bloody revelation about Acid House?”

SM: “Hah! It’s obvious if you listen they put Eastern melodies over it, bits of this and that…”

MES: “That’s what music should always have been like.”

SM: “It always was.”

MES: “Why haven’t you been doing it for years then pal?”

NC: “I think they have been doing it. I’ve heard zithers and so on. Eastern stuff, Turkish stuff.”

MES: “We had jazz arrangements in ’82 when the rest of those tossers were playing cocktail lounge music and fucking pseudo new wave, so don’t talk to me about it because I know what I’m talking about pal.”

SM: “Fucking hell, what’s he on about?”