U2 has shared their contribution to the star-studded line up of the upcoming tribute album 20th Century Paddy – The Songs of Shane MacGowan. The band has covered the Pogues’ 1988 classic “Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah” for the collection, out November 13 via Rubyworks.
The LP will also feature MacGowan covers by Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, Primal Scream, Steve Earle, Kate Moss, and Dropkick Murphys. At least 50% of artist royalties from the album will be donated to the Dublin Simon Community in honor of MacGowan longterm connection to the organisation and his commitment to supporting those experiencing homelessness. The Irish musician died in 2023.
“Shane MacGowan was full of contradictions—and that’s where the truth of him lived,” writes the Edge in a statement introducing the cover. He adds that MacGowan could be “precise about what mattered and gloriously careless about everything else. If that sounds like a kind of performance, maybe it was. But as Oscar Wilde put it, ‘a mask tells us more than a face.’ The crooked grin, the wildness, the old-Ireland inflections—they weren’t disguises so much as signals. A way of placing himself in a lineage that ran from the pub storyteller to the punk stage.”
Announcing the full track listing, MacGowan’s widow, Victoria Mary Clarke said: “It is not possible to say how much it means to me and to Shane’s family to have this extraordinary collection of his songs being sung in tribute to him, to his work and to Irish music. When I first met Shane in the early 80’s he was inflamed with a powerful, passionate mission to bring Irish music, history and culture to the attention of the world through his songwriting. It made him feel like the happiest man alive to know that he had achieved his mission, and that there were many more musicians who came after him and who seized that torch and lit fires with it in places that he had not even dreamed of.”
In July, U2 released a new track called “Street of Dreams.” The song is the first preview of the band’s yet-to-be-announced new studio album, their first in nine years, which is due later this year. The release follows the band’s most recent full-length studio album, Songs of Experience, which arrived in 2017.
