Songfacts®:

• This song was inspired by the legendary early 1980s drinking sessions that Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan would take part in with his friends around the bars at Euston railway station before boarding the boat train to Holyhead for the ferry to Dun Laoghaire. "I was always a little envious of Shane, it was almost this ritualistic thing where he'd get stocious and his friends would put him on the train to Ireland," accordion player James Fearnley recalled to The Irish Post December 16, 2013. "A lot from that song had also come from being a barman himself at the Great Ormond Street hospital bar. He knew about watering whiskey down from that I'm sure."
• The Sally MacLennane that MacGowan sings of returning to in his "greatest little boozer" is not a woman, but a brand of stout.
• The Pogues recorded "Sally MacLennane" for their second album, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, a title lifted from a notorious quote often attributed to Winston Churchill. As tin whistle player Spider Stacy explained to Mojo magazine, the phrase was drummer Andrew Ranken's idea.
  
  "He'd read that Churchill was having an argument with some admiral, and Churchill said, 'Oh don't talk to me about the traditions of the Royal Navy - they're just rum, sodomy and the lash!' Perfect!"