Peace and Love continued the band's gradual departure from traditional Irish music. It noticeably opens with a heavily jazz-influenced track. Also, several of the songs are inspired by the city in which the Pogues were founded, London ("White City", "Misty Morning, Albert Bridge", "London You're a Lady"), as opposed to Ireland, from which they had usually drawn inspiration. Nevertheless, several notable Irish personages are mentioned, including Ned of the Hill, Christy Brown, whose book Down All The Days appears as a song title, and Napper Tandy, mentioned in the first line of "Boat Train", which was adapted from a line in the Irish rebel song "The Wearing of the Green". Likewise the MacGowan song "Cotton Fields" draws on the Lead Bellysong of the same name.
Mark Deming of AllMusic said that Peace and Love "isn't as good as the two Pogues albums that preceded it", but felt that "it does make clear that MacGowan was hardly the only talented songwriter in the band".[4]Robert Christgau, on the other hand, believed that "Shane MacGowan will remain the only Pogue in the down-and-out hall of fame".[5]
The album carried a dedication to "the memory of the 95 people who died at Hillsborough Football Ground". The reason for this apparent anomaly is that at the time of the album's release the disaster's eventual 96th victim Tony Bland was still being kept alive on life support at Airedale General Hospital in Keighley, West Yorkshire where he would eventually die on 3 March 1993.[17]
The boxer on the cover has six fingers on his right hand. The boxer was British Empire Games, later changed to the Commonwealth Games, bronze winner, Hugh Cameron. The fifth finger was added by sleeve designer, Simon Ryan, to accommodate the word "PEACE".