Five months after announcing he’d fallen ill again and that “this time the cancer is lethal,” The Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron — who joined shortly the band after the release of the Celtic rockers’ 1984 debut Red Roses For Me — today lost his battle with cancer, the group revealed via Facebook, saying he “passed away peacefully this morning.” He was 56.

The band’s full statement: “After a long illness we are sorry to inform you that Philip passed away peacefully this morning and we all send our sincere condolences to his family.”

After first battling head and neck cancer in 2007, Chevron announced in May that it was back, and that it’s “inoperable and will prove fatal in time, though it is at present impossible to measure life expectancy.”

The disease returned in the summer of 2012, and while Chevron performed with the band in September of that year for the concerts that were recorded for its The Pogues in Paris live audio/video package, he said in May that he would take a break from The Pogues and his other, even longer-running project that he fronts, The Radiators From Space.

The Pogues recently announced a four-date U.K. tour during which the band will perform its classic 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash each night plus “other favorite songs.”

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