Five months after announcing he’d fallen ill again and that “this time the cancer is lethal,” The Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron, who joined the band after the release of its first album, today lost his battle with cancer, the group revealed via Facebook, saying he “passed away peacefully this morning.”

For a band that swore off its traditional Christmas tours of the U.K. following a 2010 outing, The Pogues just keep coming back. After last year’s one-off December gig in London, the band returns this year with a four-date U.K. tour during which it will perform its classic 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash,

After first battling cancer in 2007, Philip Chevron — who first joined The Pogues shortly after the release of the Celtic rockers’ 1984 debut Red Roses For Me — this week announced that his cancer is back, and that, this time, it’s “inoperable and will prove fatal in time, though it is at present impossible to measure life expectancy.”

The Pogues will embark on a short run of European dates later this summer, culminating with a pair of back-to-back concerts in Paris this September that are being billed as a 30th anniversary celebration that will be filmed and recorded for both a future live CD and DVD release.