Shane MacGowan is dead at 65 and it seems like a miracle he made it that far. It wasn’t just the boozing, which started when he had his first Guinness at 5 years of age in Tipperary, it was a lifetime of reckless behaviour. There was the time he jumped out of a moving car onto a motorway while on LSD. Or when he fell off a train in Japan in 1991 after too much sake and was promptly fired by The Pogues. His wife Victoria resuscitated him “a couple of times”, he said. Basically, he could have died any year since 1976 and no-one would have been surprised, but it came this year, at a point where he was appreciated, revered actually, as the great artist he was.
The stories of MacGowan’s antics are legion. For many years that seemed to obscure what he had achieved, which was to channel punk through Irish folk music, thereby heightening the innate humanity in the former and the innate aggression in the latter. Firstly this was done with The Pogues, and their ramshackle hot blooded recordings led by Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985). Then he did it with the Popes through the Nineties, before reuniting with The Pogues in the 00s until several fall restricted his movements around 2014.
After this he still seemed to embody both punk and folk, just as he always had. It was not pretty, it was not nice often, but it was filled with humanity – the warmth of the tributes paid to him in the wake of his death tell that story. “A true friend and the greatest songwriter of his generation,” said Nick Cave. Another friend Imelda May said, “Thank you for opening your heart and sharing with us your glorious talents…in a world of perfection bulls**t you were always real.” His wife, who was with MacGowan at his home in Dublin when he died, along with his sister Siobhan, wrote on Instagram that she was blessed to have shared, “so may years of life and love and joy and fun and laughter and so many adventures.”
Of course to the wider world, it’s Fairytale Of New York that always brings aboutthe yearly nod of genius acknowledgement from the planet – it’s a dead cert tobe number one on Christmas Day, his birthday (it only reached number 2 when itwas first released in 1987, beaten by The Pet Shop Boy’s ‘Always on my Mind’) - but he’d also reached a stage of true appreciation, having been awarded a Lifetime Achievement Award in Dublin on his 60th birthday, and an Ivor Novello Inspiration Awards the same year. Famous fans and friends would pay their respects, Johnny Depp, Bono, Kate Moss, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan, to name a few. A great documentary by Julien Temple was made - ‘Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGown’ (2020) - which fully illustrated his remarkable story, from being steeped in folk songs (and that Guinness – MacGowan said his family told people, “If you give them enough when they’re young, the don’t go overboard with it later on.”) in Tipperary to coming to Kent and being a public schoolboy, to the London punk scene and hitting worldwide acclaim with The Pogues, before landing in outsider infamyIt’s worth reflecting, amid all the outporings, that he was always an outsider. Often he was treated in the media as joke, just a toothless alkie who had drank away whatever his talent was. But pity never fit MacGowan, he was too funny forthat, too smart. He was always exceptionally smart. His father would read him Finnegan’s Wake with him as a kid, and let’s not forget that before he hit the punk scene in The Nipple Erectors, he won a scholarship to Westminster. Admittedly, he was thrown out in his second year for possessing drugs, but he was always part of a lineage of Irish literary greats, Joyce, Yeats, and his pal Brendan Behan.
“The thing about Irish writing is it developed from story-telling,” he told The Quietus in 2012, “Story-telling is a huge thing in Ireland, or used to be. All the playwright, all the novelists, all the poets… it’s all poetry, really, the same way Shakespeare is poetry in play form.”
He called his songs “Gutter hymns”, and that says it all really: his was rousingromantic music for spiritually lost people who had also lost their house keys. Itwas and is, for outcasts, weirdos, and yes, drunks. It feels ridiculously anachronistic to talk of hellraiser artists these days with anything but disdain. Certainly not every drunk is a genius, but I'd argue every great genius was a drunk. I won’t defend that with a list of wild artists, nor a list of mediocre artists who prefer the Peloton to the pub, but it has to be acknowledged that those who take life to the limits create the truly great art – and intoxication has always provided a fast track.
‘How would you like to be remembered?’ he was asked recently. ‘I don’t care’, he fired back. Well, he will be remembered for the songs, the art lives on much longer than the man, but dare I say it, his life is worth admiring too. In an era of worship for biohackers, where sobriety and asceticism are viewed as the path to enlightenment, MacGowan will surely remain a reminder that chaos, madness, fearlessness, hopelessness and a derangement of the senses are the basis for many people’s best memories of love, friendship and communality. Look, he was a poet of the classic variety, and in a world of self-worshipping monks, his loss leaves a huge gap indeed.
