Former Pogue Cait is key part of Muldoon’s Picnic

Arts Week

Bass player and singer Cait O’Riordan, who first came to prominence in the early 1980s as a member of London-Irish band, the Pogues, was a model student until two weeks before her 14th birthday. That was when she received a gift of a radio and it changed her life.

Instead of going to sleep at night, the teenager used to listen to BBC’s John Peel until midnight, and after that, Dave Fanning on RTÉ’s 2FM until 2am. Then she’d turn the dial, maybe finding some French radio station that played her kind of music.

What Cait didn’t do was sleep, not good when she had to get up at 6am to go to school. And “nobody told me to go to sleep”. So, within a short while, her academic career went west.

Cait had been born in Nigeria in 1965 but her family moved to London a couple of years later when civil war broke out in that country. Her father, from County Clare, worked abroad a lot and her Scottish-born mother looked after their four children.

She’s sketchy about her young life and her parents, but clearly, she wasn’t happy because she moved out as soon as she was legally able.

Now living in Dublin, Cait will be in Galway on Tuesday, August 29, as part of Muldoon’s Picnic, an evening of song and poetry hosted by the Pulitzer prize-winning poet, musician and New Yorker poetry editor, Paul Muldoon.

Muldoon’s Picnic has been taking place on a monthly basis in New York’s Irish Arts Centre since 2014, featuring Muldoon and his house band, Rogue Oliphant with a wide variety of guests.

Cait, alongside lead guitar and vocalist Chris Harford and Ray Kubian on drums and vocals, forms the house band for the popular show.

The winding road that led her from London to Dublin and monthly gigs with Muldoon in New York, included her time with the Pogues, with whom she recorded two albums and an EP, Red Roses for Me; Rum, Sodomy and the Lash and Poguetry in Motion. There was also a 17-year relationship with singer-songwriter Elvis Costello, although it sounds like she was a functioning alcoholic during that time. She’s been sober for a decade now.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.