Buttkickin' Halloween Songs: "Shankill Butchers" - The Decemberists (2006)

The Shankill butchers ride tonight
You better shut your windows tight
They’re sharpening their cleavers and their knives
And taking all their whiskey by the pint

‘Cause everybody knows
If you don’t mind your mother’s words
A wicked wind will blow
Your ribbons from your curls
Everybody moan, everybody shake
The Shankill butchers wanna catch you awake…

I make it a habit not to talk about political issues I know fuck-all about, so I’ll keep this part of the write-up as brief and historical as possible: the infamous Shankill Butchers were a gang of Ulster loyalists in Northern Ireland who, in the mid 1970s, were responsible for over two dozen known acts of horrific kidnappings, beatings, tortures, and murders of mostly Catholic but also some Protestant civilians.

By all accounts, their brutality seemed to be endless. Many of their victims’ corpses were found to be mutilated beyond recognition; when police discovered these corpses, they found slashed throats, missing teeth, or worse. The fact that they almost always targeted civilians trying to live their lives outside the conflict made their deeds even more horrifying.

I admit having some trepidation when it came to including such subject matter as part of our Buttkickin’ Halloween Songs, but sometimes the very real and the very recent make for the most chilling horrors.

Regardless, it is thus within the milieu that I just described that indie folk/rock band The Decemberists recorded their 2006 track Shankill Butchers and, without trivializing these very real events, managed to create a chilling yet deeply effective folk song. Contained therein is a very palpable sense of dread, a pervasive evil mist hanging low over terrified streets, as terrified people close their shutters, lock their doors, and protect themselves from the namesake gang riding through nighttime streets.

Shankill Butchers ostensibly creates a haunting tune about the ugliness, depravity, and capacity for evil that exists in any town, anywhere, beneath the cobblestones and behind the picket fences. It serves as a warning to be mindful of your surroundings, always, and of the everyday people that surround you. Because one tip of the scales can turn your average nobody into a total butcher.

If human history has taught us anything — and it has — it’s that it doesn’t take a lot of pressure to let the carnage flow.

The Shankill butchers on the rise
They’re waiting until the dead of nights
They’re picking at their fingers with their knives
And wiping off their cleavers on their thighs