After making one of the definitive rock biopics with Sid & Nancy, Alex Cox was hired to document The Pogues, Joe Strummer and Elvis Costello as they toured Nicaragua. When it was decided that sending a bunch of rock stars to tour a country which had recently been at war was a bad idea, Cox made Straight to Hell instead, a spaghetti Western parody with Strummer as the leader of a group of bank robbers whose attempted getaway lands them in a sinister town ruled by a coffee-addicted bandit gang played by the Pogues.
It sounds like… well, it sounds like something, god knows what, and this week Mark Cunliffe of We Are Cult joins Graham to pick over the aftermath. As well as the surpassingly silly film that resulted from all this chaos, there’s also room to talk about the hard-drinking British character actor Dudley Sutton, Kathy Burke’s position as Greatest Living Englishwoman, and the changing fortunes of British film magazines as measured through the quality of their classified ads.
If you want to help us feed our debilitating coffee addiction, you can donate to our Patreon, where tomorrow we’ll be releasing an exclusive follow-up to this episode, with Mark returning to review Julien Temple’s documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan. Don’t forget to follow us on social media too – we’re on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook.
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