Songfacts®:

• "The Drunken Boat" appears on Waiting for Herb, the first Pogues album recorded without Shane MacGowan, the band's famously erratic but poetically gifted frontman. Without him, the band found itself adrift in unfamiliar waters, and accordionist James Fearnley decided to lean into that sense of disorientation by writing a song about, well, a drunken boat.
• Fearnley's lyrics take their cue from Arthur Rimbaud's 1871 poem "Le Bateau ivre" ("The Drunken Boat"), a wild, hallucinatory piece written by the then 16-year-old French poet. The poem describes a ghost ship set loose after its crew has died, floating through oceans of stars, sinking eventually into the depths. It's a surreal journey full of drowning suns, phosphorescent floods, and metaphorical sea monsters. Just your average French schoolboy fare.
• Fearnley borrowed the poem's mood, fusing the dream imagery with a more modern metaphor: toxic tankers. These are ships loaded with hazardous waste, often denied entry at any port. Fearnley saw himself, and the band, as one of those tankers, sailing in circles, no one quite sure what to do with them.
  
  "It was scary without Shane," Fearnley told Uncut magazine. "I wrote one song, 'The Drunken Boat,' which was such a thrill. It was about a toxic tanker going round the ocean and nobody would let it dock. I used this as a metaphor for everything I had been through with The Pogues."
  
  So, the song becomes a double metaphor: Rimbaud's poetic boat meets the environmental crisis vessel meets the post-MacGowan Pogues. If that sounds like a lot to load onto one ship, well this one floats.
• Arthur Rimbaud wrote most of his poetry in his teens, and yet over a century later, his words still echo through some of the most inventive corners of popular music: from punk and folk to indie and art rock.
  
  Here are a few notable examples:
  
  1964 "Chimes Of Freedom" by Bob Dylan
  Early critics (and later, basically everyone) noted that Dylan's transition from folk protest songs to surrealist epics owed much to Rimbaud. Dylan even name-dropped him as an influence. You can hear it in the visionary, lightning-lit imagery of this song.
  
  1967 "The End" by The Doors
  Jim Morrison didn't just admire Rimbaud, he practically tried to be him. He read "A Season in Hell" and Rimbaud's collection Illuminations obsessively and believed in the idea of the poet as a visionary. "The End" is drenched in dream logic, apocalypse, and Oedipal dread - classic Rimbaud, but with more leather pants.
  
  1975 "Land" by Patti Smith
  Smith took Rimbaud's Illuminations with her to New York, calling him her "archangel." He isn't just an influence here - he gets a shoutout ("Go Rimbaud, go Rimbaud"). If Rimbaud had ever fronted a CBGB house band, it probably would've sounded a lot like this.
  
  1981 "Traces of the Western Slopes" by Rickie Lee Jones
  A deep-cut track with Rimbaud's fingerprints all over it. Jones said she was reading him "constantly" while writing it. The song's surreal images and drifting narrative are steeped in his trademark chaos and color.
  
  1982 "Ghetto Defendant" by The Clash
  With beat poet Allen Ginsberg on guest vocals, this track directly references "Jean Arthur Rimbaud by the bodyguards of greed." Ginsberg idolized Rimbaud and was basically his spiritual heir in the US counterculture.
  
  2014 "Rimbaud Eyes" by Dum Dum Girls
  Singer Dee Dee named this one after seeing Rimbaud's haunting face on a T-shirt and later said she pulled lines straight from his poetry. A literal adaptation in eyeliner and guitars.
  
  2022 "Part Of The Band" by The 1975
  Matty Healy drops the line "I was Rimbaud and he was Paul Verlaine," invoking their volatile romantic relationship. It's a nod to artistic chaos, queerness, and the eternal lure of being a beautiful mess.