Andrew Ranken, English drummer who plays with several bands including the Pogues, is born on November 13, 1953, in the Ladbroke Grove area of London. He plays with the Pogues from 1983 until their second breakup in 2014.

Ranken spends his early childhood listening to his parents’ jazz records before moving to Abbots Langley when he is five and Heathfield, East Sussex, a year later. He attends Priory School, Lewes, where he is in the same year as Pete Thomas and Wreckless Eric, and is inspired by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. He becomes a musician after an older cousin gives him a guitar he has tired of trying to learn and becomes a drummer after being given a pair of bongos. At the age of 14, he joins a blues rock band, Joshua Bagmat, which is led by Stephen Warbeck, features Thomas, and disbands when the members leave school. Ranken subsequently works with Warbeck and Paul Bradley as part of The hKippers.

After leaving school, Ranken moves to London to spend a year at the Central School of Art and Design, where he forms the band Lola Cobra with three members of the sculpture department including Lene Lovich and her boyfriend Les Chappell. After losing interest in the course, he drops out and sells his drum kit to fund a series of travels with the intention of writing a book of writings and drawings. He settles first to a squat in Amsterdam, which he leaves after it is ransacked, followed by a tent in a campsite in suburban Holland, where he spends several weeks while working in a peanut factory. He then moves to France and then Italy, where his manuscript is stolen. He develops a dental abscess after returning to France and returns to his parents, now living in Epsom.

Ranken becomes the singer for a new wave and R&B band while living with his parents called The Stickers and later moves to Islington with a bandmember. He has a number of unpleasant jobs including spells as a painter and decorator, a builder, a screw factory operative, and a porter at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital. After his temp agency assigns him to work the incinerator at St. Leonard’s Hospital in Hackney, he walks out after finding a half-burnt Alsatian that smelled like bacon. He subsequently decides to take a three-year course in media studies and sociology at Goldsmiths in 1980. The Stickers disband around this time after it becomes impossible to keep members in the band, prompting Ranken to become the singer for The Operation with numerous friends and family members. He then moves into a squat in Huntley Street with his girlfriend and then to the Hillview Estate following an eviction.

In March 1983, Ranken joins the Pogues, then known as Pogue Mahone, replacing John Hasler on drums. He juggles both the Operation and the Pogues for a while until leaving the former to concentrate on the latter. With the Pogues, he spends the first two and a half years playing the drums while standing up, until he contracts blood poisoning and has to play one-handed while he recovers. He plays on every song from their 1984 debut Red Roses for Me, on which he is credited as The Clobberer, until their 1996 album Pogue Mahone, including on “Fairytale of New York” and “The Irish Rover.” Their 1991 compilation album, The Best of The Pogues, is dedicated to Ranken’s long-term partner Deborah Korner, who died earlier in the year from an aneurysm. Two songs on subsequent albums are also dedicated to Korner.

Ranken also performs with the Pogues from their reunion in 2001 until their official break up in 2014. Ranken releases the charity single “Take Me Down to St. Joe’s” in July 2023 with The Mysterious Wheels, a band containing two of Korner’s brothers. The single is released in support of St. Joseph’s Hospice in Hackney following Ranken’s own diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Health issues cause Ranken to withdraw from The Pogues’ 2024 tour.

Ranken dies on February 10, 2026, at the age of 72. He had been married with two children.