From The Desk Of The Pogues’ Spider Stacy: Coffee

The Pogues on record are never short of inspirational, and in person, they might be a life-changing experience. This hackle-raising blend of traditional Irish folk music, politically charged broadsides and electric rock ‘n’ roll, delivered by charismatic frontman Shane MacGowan flanked by a grizzled band of veterans that includes penny-whistle virtuoso/alternate vocalist Spider Stacy, was formed in the King’s Cross district of north London in 1982. Despite occasional time off for good behavior, they’ve been playing ever since and have a handful of festival dates planned for this summer. Here’s hoping it lasts for at least another 10 years. We are proud to say that Stacy, who is currently appearing as a street musician in season two of HBO’s Treme, will be guest editing magnetmagazine.com all week. Read our new Q&A with him.

Stacy: Someone once told me you can’t get a decent cup of coffee in Oaxaca City, Mexico. This is complete and utter bollocks. As long as you don’t go to the one place in town that actually does serve bad coffee, you’ll be fine. If you want properly bad coffee, your best bet, in my experience, would be to stop at a service station on a British motorway that has a coffee franchise called Ritazza. (They can also be found at some mainline railway stations.) My advice would be not to buy any coffee, but if you do, throw it away immediately. I’d say throw it on the floor, but then some poor fucker from Belarus with a degree in microbiology would have to clean it up, because the only job they’d been able to find had been on the outskirts of a dead-end bog of a town in the heart of the nowhere that is our England now.

Bar Italia in Soho, London, might as well be in a different space-time continuum, in every respect. Founded in 1949 and still run by the same family, this place is a London landmark that has somehow avoided becoming a tourist trap and remains very much a crucial part of the neighbourhood’s identity. The clock with its red neon legend Bar Italia Espresso has been a symbol of recuperation and regathering since the days of Soho’s bohemian heyday in the ’40s and ’50s. Subsequently patronised by mods and punks, stop-outs the sleepless and the broken people so poignantly invoked by Pulp in the song “Bar Italia.” Though I think the song is also about a more personal, existential despair, the feeling you get trying to focus on a cup of coffee when the streets are coming back to life with all the noise of work and buses, and you’re sitting with only the dull shadow of last night’s drugs remaining. Anyway, the coffee’s the best, and it’s open 24 hours.

There’s a place in London, on Seven Sisters Road in Finsbury Park, called Addis Ababa, where they bring out the freshly roasting coffee beans from the kitchen, darkening and sweating in a rich, heady cloud. The coffee is delicious, gritty and deceptively mellow and is served with enormous bowls of popcorn. It is very easy to drink too much, which is a drag what with the attendant anxiety and constant need to piss, but it is really good.

If I’m not there, I’ll be in one or another branch of CC’s in New Orleans. A proudly Louisianan institution originating in Baton Rouge in 1919, the company opened its first coffee house on the corner of Jefferson and Magazine in the Uptown district of New Orleans, an operation still thriving to this day. CC’s is an integral part of New Orleans, a chain of coffee shops that is, by virtue of its being what it is, one of the myriad of differences that set the city apart from the rest of the country.

Video after the jump.