I’ve often wondered about the lyrics to A Pair of Brown Eyes by the Pogues. You probably know the words, but here they are just in case:
One summer evening drunk to hellI stood there nearly lifelessAn old man in the corner sangWhere the water lilies growAnd on the jukebox Johnny sangAbout a thing called loveAnd it’s how are you kid and what’s your nameAnd how would you bloody know?In blood and death ‘neath a screaming skyI lay down on the groundAnd the arms and legs of other menWere scattered all aroundSome cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursedThen prayed and bled some moreAnd the only thing that I could seeWas a pair of brown eyes that was looking at meBut when we got back, labeled parts one to threeThere was no pair of brown eyes waiting for meAnd a rovin’ a rovin’ a rovin’ I’ll goFor a pair of brown eyesI looked at him he looked at meAll I could do was hate himWhile Ray and Philomena sangOf my elusive dreamI saw the streams, the rolling hillsWhere his brown eyes were waitingAnd I thought about a pair of brown eyesThat waited once for meSo drunk to hell I left the placeSometimes crawling sometimes walkingA hungry sound came across the breezeSo I gave the walls a talkingAnd I heard the sounds of long agoFrom the old canalAnd the birds were whistling in the treesWhere the wind was gently laughingAnd a rovin’ a rovin’ a rovin’ I’ll goFor a pair of brown eyes
A bit of digging unearthed this interview with the man himself, Shane MacGowan, from an interview with Folk Roots in August 1987, published at Poguetry.com:
“It’s just about a guy getting pissed at a bar round here,” says Shane nonchalantly. “He’s getting pissed because he’s broken up with this bird and… you know how it is when you just go into a pub on your own to drink and it’s really quiet and you get this old nutter who comes over and starts rambling on you. So this old guy starts on about how he came back from the war, the First World War. Or the Second. One of them anyway. And he tells him about the ship he had out there and how he got out and came back and this girl had fucked off with someone else, a girl with a pair of brown eyes. Which is the same situation as the young guy sitting there listening to all this rubbish and the juke box playing Johnny Cash and Ray Lyman and Philomena Begley, classic London juke box tracks. And in the end he gets to the stage where he says fuck it, and he goes stumbling out of the pub and he walks along the canal and starts feeling really bad, on the verge of tears, and he starts realising that the old guy has had a whole fucking lifetime of that feeling, going through the war and everything, but his original reaction is to hate him and despise him. I’m not saying he goes back and starts talking to him but you know…”