The Pogues changed my life at the Glasgow Barrowland in December 1985. I was 14 years old. It was an 18-and-over gig, but I was tall for my age and this was Glasgow in the 1980s. Nobody gave a fuck.
I went with my mate, Billy. (Important background: Billy had been raised a Catholic but given a proddy name by his Protestant dad.) We were music nuts and John Peel devotees. When Peel played The Pogues' song The Old Main Drag on his show, the two of us talked excitedly about it on the school bus the next day – it was as exciting as when we saw Boys From The Black Stuff, or Tim Roth in Made In Britain, or Jamie Lee Curtis’s tits.
It was extraordinary. We’d never heard anything like it.
The Old Main Drag was unusual even for the Pogues. Shane MacGowan half-talked, half-sang a story of a rent boy in London – of police brutality and drug abuse – that sounded like it came directly out of the mouth of someone living on the street. It’s a song without a chorus, where the music is pretty much just a drone, and it ends brutally and abruptly with rape and death. You didn’t hear music like that on Radio 1 very often.
It came from The Pogues’ second album, Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, and we fell hard for its uproarious music and tales of drinking and fighting. Sally MacLennane was a riotous drinking song, The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn was a riotous drinking-and-fighting song, A Pair of Brown Eyes was a gorgeous drinking-and-fighting-and-dying song. In fact, pretty much all the songs ended in death and/or partying. The Pogues were clearly going to be the best live band ever.
We had already managed to sneak into the Barrowlands to see gigs by Echo & The Bunnymen, Siouxsie and The Banshees and The Cult, but the atmosphere at those gigs was nothing compared to The Pogues. Their hell-raising folk-punk struck a chord in Glasgow. It wasn’t a gig, it was a drunken riot. The Barrowlands is in the East End of Glasgow – near Parkhead, the home of Celtic FC, and the most Irish part of the city – so these sounds resonated, even to us non-Irish, non-Catholics. We’d all endured ceilidh music as part of ‘country dancing’ at school. As anyone Scottish will tell you, you took your life in your hands with country dancing – with people twirling and throwing each other around the room, it was more an extreme sport than anything that could be considered 'dancing'. To hear music like that, played with punk attitude and lyrics about fighting and fucking? It connected, big time.
Siouxsie, the Bunnymen, the Cult – they were from a different planet. They were dark and mysterious. The Pogues were like us. As the music of the 80s got more futuristic – more synthetic, more produced, as Steve Lillywhite and Hugh Padgham developed the gated drum sound that would define the decade – the Pogues stripped music right back to drums, banjos, accordions.
As Stuart Adamson of Big Country, another man reinventing Celtic music at the time, said: “Music used to be a thing where working people got together on a Saturday night and played some songs. Someone’d play the guitar or the fiddle or an accordion. No bastard’d played the synthesiser.”
At Barrowlands we bumped into some older kids from our school and during the gig they grabbed me and Billy and swung us around in a mad highland jig – and then they let us go. We went flying: the Barrowland’s floor was wet with rain and lager and we both went skidding across it, sliding into people’s legs and ending up in a heap a few feet from the front. We picked ourselves up, laughing, and pogoed into the middle as plastic glasses full of lager sailed over our heads – and occasionally bounced off them.
When the gig was over and we spilled out onto the December Glasgow streets, we were so hot and wet that clouds of steam billowed off us as soon as we hit the cold air. We looked like we’d been on fire – like Wile E Coyote after his wheelbarrow full of dynamite has exploded – and felt like it too.
That was my fourth gig. It changed me forever.
The Pogues looked and sounded like a gang, but at the heart of it was MacGowan. His voice was one thing – booze-soaked, cigarette-scorched, aye, but tender at times, smooth as Guinness; pint-glass-chewing, fighting-talk furious at others – but his words were something else. Evocative, funny, romantic, full of characters and stories. He humanised the desperate and disenfranchised and sang of working class struggles and victories. He made working class characters heroic: coarse-mouthed, hard-drinking, hard-living characters who stuck two fingers up at the state and punched fascists for fun.
The Poguetry In Motion EP, their next release, was a great illustration of two sides of his songwriting. The Body Of An American captured a wake turning into a party, with MacGowan’s evocative lyrics (“The Cadillac stood by the house/And the Yanks, they were within/And the tinker boys, they hissed advice/'Hot-wire with her a pin'”) propelled by the band and his electrifying howl. A Rainy Night In Soho dialled-up the romance and the melody. If there had been any doubt before, it was obvious now: this wasn’t just drunken folk music: it was art. Music for the ages.
The next time I saw The Pogues at the Barrowlands, it was December 1987. Joe Strummer joined them onstage for I Fought The Law and London Calling. Fairytale Of New York had been released the month before and they played it live for the first time that night, joined onstage by Kirsty MacColl. Snow fell from the roof and Shane and Kirsty did a clumsy waltz. The words “I could have been someone/Well so could anyone” have never been sung so loudly. It was the perfect gig and If I Should Fall From Grace With God was the perfect album – produced, ironically, by Steve Lillywhite, the man defining the sound of the 80s, husband to Kirsty MacColl. He’d proposed to her at a Big Country gig at the Barrowlands. Looking back, romance and tragedy swirled around them all.
It was obvious that Shane wasn’t gonna have a happy ending – it's a miracle that he lasted this long. By the fourth album, Peace And Love, the band were having to cover for him. He added acid and ecstasy on top of his drinking and recorded a 20-minute acid house track. (It never made the album.) By the time of Hell’s Ditch (1990), he was locking himself in his hotel room and painting himself blue. Producer Joe Strummer comped together his vocals, word by word.
But still, some of the later songs were classics: Summer In Siam, Rain Street, Five Green Queens And Jean. After he left the Pogues, he recorded with Shane MacGowan And The Popes. Songs like Aisling, The Song With No Name, Donegal Express, More Pricks Than Kicks and St John Of Gods (chorus: “F’yez all’) kept our hopes up. Just maybe– with the right producer, the right musicians – maybe he could still come up with the goods.
I interviewed Shane in 1997 at Filthy McNasty’s in Islington. He was drinking Martinis to keep off the hard stuff but everyone in the pub was buying him Martinis, me included. By the end of the night he was sprawled across the table, a bellyful of Martini, surrounded by empty glasses.
This wasn’t Oliver Reed and Keith Moon-style debauchery – no-one was gonna be wetting themselves over Shane’s hilarious escapades in years to come – this was someone chasing oblivion and catching it. Lemmy once told me, “There’s a fine line between a heavy drinker and an alcoholic.” If you're careful with alcohol, said Lemmy, “you become an amazing, anecdotal man of the world. Which is better than being the guy having a shit in the bathtub.”
Shane seemed hellbent on the bathtub. (I brought my mate Fin to the interview. We were both sure that Shane would be dead before the year was out.)
Still, he was friendly, he laughed his crazy laugh, and although when he talked there were huge gaps in his sentences – long pauses and hesitations – when I transcribed the tape, it read perfectly, like he wasn’t drunk at all, like the drink was muddling his speech but not his thoughts.
“I’ve always liked drinking and taking drugs,” he said, “and I’ve always liked making music. The two go hand in hand for me. I’m not saying you have to drink or take drugs to make music. It’s rubbish to say that. But it’s easier when you’re laid back and a bit out of it. The imagination’s set free.
“I’m not interested in writing about my own angst. Whether or not I’ve broken up with my girlfriend this week – who gives a shit, y’knoworramean? I like a good story. Violence. A bit of sex, a bit of drinking, a bit of drugs. A bit of real life, y’knoworramean?”
I thought I could see a future in which he gave up music, maybe cut down on the booze and became a novelist. He wasn’t having it. “No,” he said. “I’m a musician. The words are just things you put in to go along with the music.”
I was stunned. This from the guy who’d written some of the finest lyrics of our lifetime? “Tsssssssssst!” he laughed. “The music is more important than the words to me. But they’re both really important.”
He lived the way he wanted to live. Here's to you, Shane.
"Of all the money that e'er I spent
I've spent it in good company
And all the harm that ever I did
Alas it was to none but me
And all I've done for want of wit
To memory now I can't recall
So fill to me the parting glass
Good night and joy be with you all."
The Parting Glass
