If I Should Fall From Grace With God is a 1988 album by The Pogues. See 1988 in music. The album was a huge departure from previous Pogues albums, which had focused on an Irish Folk/Punk hybrid which had earned them both a reputation as music radicals and also as a commercial success. On IISFFGWG several more genres were added to this mixture, including Jazz, Spanish Folk and Middle Eastern Folk sounds to the mix. The adding of Spanish and Middle Eastern sounds was a sign of things to come, as on later albums such as 1990's Hell's Ditch these would become the defining sound. However on this album it was very much Irish Folk to the fore, especially on songs such as the title track, "Bottle of Smoke", "South Austraila", "Lullaby of London" and "Sit Down By The Fire". These songs were more typical of the earlier Pogues albums, mostly fast and heavily textured. Also prominent on the song were the ballads, "Thousands are Sailing", "the Broad Majestic Shannon" and especially, the Christmas hit, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, "Fairytale of New York". The album also showed a political side to their music, with "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six" showing both a passionate and angry side to their music, the first part being about the sorrow a person feels about the streets of Northern Ireland, and the second half about the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four, two groups of people wrongly imprisioned for terrorism offences and held in gaol despite evidence showing they had not committed the crimes. The song also makes a passing reference to the Loughall Martyrs with the line "while over in Ireland eight more men lay dead, kicked down and shot in the back of the head".
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