LIKE The Smiths, The Pogues had only two Top Ten hits in their Eighties prime, and yet their songs sustain and succour down all the years.

No wonder they patched up last December to join the Christmas cabaret arena circuit that Madness find so lucrative.

In pop as in politics, there are lies, damned lies and statistics, and statistics damn well lie.

A Pair Of Brown Eyes reached only number 72 in April 1985 but is the greatest drunken love song of all time, better still than Fairytale Of New York. Anyone who disagrees, step outside now.

London Irishmen The Pogues were a drinking band, right down to the beer tray that tin whistler Spider Stacy banged on his head to keep time amid their fast and furious assaults on age-old, unfashionable Irish folk.

They drank, the audience drank, and Shane MacGowan out-drank them all.

Drink (and drugs) made him and broke him and, truth be told, he has not written a jukebox classic since Summer In Siam, the piano ballad from his last studio set with the band, 1990's Hell's Ditch.

By then his voice was shot (listen to And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda from 1985's Rum Sodomy & The Lash to grade the decline), but they played on for two more corny pastiche albums without him.

Overseen by The Pogues, these re-mastered re-issues come gilded with essays by the likes of Tom Waits, Steve Earle and film-maker Jim Jarmusch, and more importantly, 36 bonus tracks, faded singles and B-sides of the stature of London Girl, Rainy Night In Soho and Bastard Landlord.

Alas, Haunted, MacGowan's sublime duet with Cait O'Riordan from the Sid & Nancy soundtrack, misses out.

Perhaps it will finally make a Pogues album in the box set of rarities, demos and unreleased material projected for release later this year.

In the meantime, anyone with iPod time on their hands should put together a Pogues collection of London songs: the best set of capitol vignettes since The Kinks' Ray Davies gazed upon his Waterloo Sunset.

Updated: 09:03 Thursday, January 20, 2005