It might seem silly to ask Victoria Mary Clarke how she’s doing. When we speak it’s barely two weeks since her husband, the Pogues frontman and musical icon Shane MacGowan, died at the age of 65. They’d known each other for more than 40 years, and been together for most of that time. But, as it turns out, my question is not so daft.
“I’ve actually been doing fine, because I feel like he’s still here,” she says. “Especially when I’m sitting in his chair or looking at his picture, I feel that he’s communicating with me. I can tell him stuff, and I can feel him watching me and being very much with me.”
Clarke is 57, a journalist and author whose 2001 biography of her partner, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, gave him the space to recount his life in a booze-sodden, wildly inconsistent style. It’s probably the closest most of us could ever have got to being shacked up in a bar with him – and that comes from the intimacy between them. What they had, she says, was more than just romance – it was a soul connection.
Few musicians receive the outpouring of love that MacGowan got when news of his death broke. His punk take on traditional Irish music documented the seedier side of life – the drunkards and down-and-outs that he himself was drawn to. Nobody could accuse MacGowan of not living what he wrote about, and it was this authenticity that attracted people. His funeral procession attracted crowds and mass sing-alongs in the street, while the ceremony was filled with laughter and applause.
“I’ve never been to one like it,” says Clarke, still a bit shocked. “Usually they’re downbeat. But there was so much joy, so much exuberance, and the love was so extreme that it kind of swamped any of the other stuff.”
You could say it was just a shame that the man who would have enjoyed it the most couldn’t be there – but Clarke believes he was. “Shane loved getting high when he was alive,” she says, which is something of an understatement. “And I think the ultimate high for him would have been to ascend, and meet Jesus, and really get off on that cosmic space. That would have been the eternal buzz that he was always looking for in life. And he actually got it!”
Clarke was 16 when she first met MacGowan in a north London pub in the early 80s. The story goes that MacGowan demanded she buy fellow Pogue member Spider Stacey a pint as it was his birthday – to which she told him to fuck off. “And he did fuck off, to the bar. But we stayed watching each other. I was watching him and he was watching me.”
She started going to Pogues gigs. Back then, she remembers MacGowan as the “capable one”, the guy who rounded up the band, picked them up off pub tables and helped get them in shape to appear on stage. What impressed her most about these young punks was the lack of hesitancy they had, the absolute certainty that they were the real deal. Clarke had grown up in West Cork where traditional Irish music was treated with reverence and respect. Here it was being soaked in whiskey and doused with flames. “Young guys who looked cool just didn’t play this kind of music,” she says. “It would be like seeing a bunch of young guys in hoodies playing opera.”
Clarke, who had recently arrived in London and had a job selling vintage clothes in Camden market, found she fitted into the Pogues’ entourage easily. They were like a family, meeting up after work each day in the Devonshire Arms pub in Camden. “That was our living room, and the mum and dad were the owners of the pub,” she says. “They’d keep an eye on you, take messages for you.”
In January 1986, on Clarke’s 20th birthday, someone told MacGowan to give her a kiss, so he did. From that moment on, Clarke says she was “all in” with a lifestyle that was simultaneously thrilling and terrifying. During the Pogues’ glory years, there would be drinking, smoking, screaming, snorting, fighting, much of which Clarke happily joined in with. When it got too much, she would attempt to meditate while on their tour bus. “A real challenge,” she says, “not as easy as doing it in a monastery or a cave.” A yoga mat on a Pogues tour bus paints an unusual picture, but Clarke says MacGowan himself was into Zen Buddhism when they met and happily devoured the Tao Te Ching and the writings of the “philosophical entertainer” Alan Watts. “He was communicating with dragons and alien beings. We both had a very strong ethereal life; we were kind of space cadets together.”
Clarke readily admits she wanted to change MacGowan, to make him calmer and more respectable. He lived in a grotty flat full of ashtrays and burger wrappers and, while she enjoyed the rock’n’roll lifestyle, she sometimes wished they could be “normal”. She soon realised this was impossible. “I’d organise a dinner party,” she says, “but it would end up being on the roof and somebody would fall off. Or my dad would turn up and try to get off with Sinéad O’Connor.”
Amid the chaos, MacGowan would be a sweetheart, she says – a sensitive soul far removed from the intimidating impression many people had of him. He was always buying her flowers or telling her how lucky he was to be with someone he had considered “unattainable”. And despite his drink problems, he was driven and endlessly creative. “He’d be constantly thinking of words and needing something to write them on. It could be a receipt, your bank statement, your diary. You might go to a restaurant and he’d be writing all over the napkins and asking for more napkins.”
Often, she admits, she just could not see what he was seeing. “It would sound really boring to me, the same couple of chords over and over again for six hours. And some of his lyrics seemed quite cheesy. I thought Rainy Night in Soho was really cheesy at first. It was only when I heard the finished thing that it made sense.”
A Rainy Night in Soho is famously a song with a double meaning – MacGowan is clearly singing about the love of his life, but is it Clarke he’s addressing, or alcohol? Actually, she says, it was Frank Sinatra. “He wrote it for Frank because he wanted him to sing it. And possibly the Soho that he had in mind could be the one in New York.”
Other songs, though, were clearly addressed to Clarke. “And not always in a flattering way,” she says with a laugh. “He wrote a song called That Woman’s Got Me Drinking! That was pretty mean. He definitely had a way of using songs to get back at you.”
He could also use them to be extremely romantic. The song Victoria might reference the fling that Clarke had with Van Morrison while the couple were on one of their separations (“Victoria, left me in opium euphoria/With a fat monk singing Gloria”), but it still ends on a romantic note: “Someday I’ll put my pipe aside and hit the road … to find my girl with green eyes.” Clarke says there are other songs about her, too, that went unrecorded: “I guess at some point we will be doing a book of his unpublished stuff because there are quite a lot of unpublished songs.”
When Clarke and MacGowan first got together, she says, they never argued. But as his substance abuse increased, she couldn’t help trying to tame him. “He would do crazy things like take 100 tabs of acid in a day then jump out of the window of a moving taxi, or paint himself blue. And he would quite often set fire to things. He set fire to hotel rooms that we stayed in – while we were in them – because of the acid. We were living very much on the edge of some kind of actual destruction.”
There were times where she would find MacGowan in bed with groupies. “I would be absolutely furious and I would punch him and run out and say: ‘Right, that’s it – I’m never coming back!’ But then I’d get my own flat and just wouldn’t be able to stay away. I would always come back and I think he just knew that.”
Some of the wild stories she remembers with a smile now, such as the time in Los Angeles when MacGowan had taken heroin, crack and crystal meth – then proceeded to jump on someone’s exercise bike and start pedalling like crazy. “I thought: ‘He’s going to have a heart attack on an exercise bike!’” Which, to be fair, is not how anyone would have expected MacGowan to die.
As the 90s drew to an end, however, MacGowan’s songwriting became subsumed under the weight of his addictions, and the couple’s living arrangements became untenable. Clarke half admired their boho existence on a rundown London council estate, and half couldn’t believe that things had come to this. One day, someone overdosed and died on their living room floor. “Oh, there’s been plenty of that kind of stuff – that wouldn’t have been the only one,” she says, breezily. “Plenty of people dying all the time. There seemed to be a bit of an inevitability about that. And Shane always seemed to be the only one who was destined to survive. We all thought: ‘Well, Shane will outlive everybody.’”
During this time, Clarke succumbed to her own struggles with drugs and alcohol. And unlike MacGowan, she knew she was masking what she saw as the failures of her own life. “He could write and sing and perform and his work was immediately appreciated,” she says. “He was always successful, whereas I was the opposite. I was writing, I was drawing, I was designing stuff. But nobody was interested. I would write a book and think – this time I’ll crack it. But it would always be, sorry, not for us. And I’d just pile up rejection letters.”
MacGowan would have none of it. “He always told me to believe in myself, that I was really talented, a genius, and it did help,” she says. “Because I thought, if someone like him liked my stuff, what would a publisher know?”
At the turn of the century things were so bad that MacGowan was forced into the Priory for his heroin problems and Clarke joined him to overcome her depression. “I was properly suicidal,” she says. “And I found it difficult to be in there with him because I always had this kind of fear of judgment and criticism and Shane was inviting it.”
They split, and this time Clarke didn’t think they would ever get back together. It was a time of real despair for her, as she took stock of her life: single, overweight (in her words), unsuccessful. As a last-ditch attempt to save herself, she decided she would try to contact angels to see if they could guide her into making more positive decisions. She says they began to appear for her, not as winged people but as particles of light or certain fragrances. These celestial beings would speak to her, challenge her, and help her understand how to move in the world. In 2007, she published Angel in Disguise?, a wildly honest, occasionally hilarious and utterly unique self-help memoir (one conversation with angels involves them discussing why she has a desire to smoke crack with Pete Doherty). It should be silly, and in many ways it is, but it’s also extremely open and charming, just like Clarke herself.
These days, angels are a big thing for Clarke – from selling silk angel scarves to providing workshops for those who want to make their own connections with the spirit world. Does she think she might one day communicate with Shane? “Oh, I am already!” she says. “He’s already been helping with stuff today, even in a very practical way.”
Go on, I say. “I had to do a lot of wrapping scarves, communicating with customers, all the admin stuff that I hadn’t been able to do since the funeral. And so I said to him: ‘Look, I’m really, really stressed about this – I need your help. I want you to make it go really smoothly.’ And it worked! I do believe that people can help you from beyond.”
Whether or not angels made it happen, Clarke and MacGowan simply weren’t destined to be apart for ever. They rekindled their relationship after the book was published, and in 2018 they were married at a ceremony in Copenhagen. Was he on time for it, I wonder.
“Absolutely, yeah. Because by that stage he had changed very much. He calmed down, and he began to do what I asked him to do. He gave up smoking, he gave up heroin. The only fight we ever had after the wedding was about him doing his physio! [MacGowan had broken his pelvis after a fall in 2015.] He really mellowed. And our connection deepened.”
It’s funny, she says, because she had spent years trying to change MacGowan, and yet when she looks back she realises that he was actually the one who changed her – and definitely for the better. When they first met, she happily admits that she was selfish, snobby and obsessed with celebrities. As the band became more successful, she longed to hang out at glitzy parties with Elton John and Bono, but MacGowan would sooner sit in a bar and chat to whoever staggered in with a tale to tell. “And over the years, just from being around him, I melted. I began to feel the connection with people and the value of that.”
Was the overwhelming wave of affection that came after his death a surprise to her?
“I was really surprised!” she says, “but I think he would have been completely dumbfounded. Because we lived a very quiet life. We hardly ever went out, we spent most of our time at home watching TV.”
Since MacGowan’s death, there’s been a gathering noise around making Fairytale of New York this year’s Christmas No 1. The song is being reissued on vinyl, and Clarke has gladly promoted the campaign, despite MacGowan sometimes claiming not to care for it especially. “I think he was just bored with people focusing on that one song,” she says, “because he was like, well, I’ve written so many other ones.”
With its tale of a couple airing their grievances on Christmas Eve, before realising that their bumpy romance was always a shared journey, it is hard to hear it as anything other than incredibly prophetic about their own relationship. Would MacGowan appreciate a chart-topper now? “I think he probably would.”
We’ve been talking for over an hour and Clarke is still merrily regaling me with stories of MacGowan. The love they shared is undeniable, but I feel as if I should let her go. Before I do, I ask if there’s anything that she’d like to add.
Just one thing, she says. “We’re all going to lose people at some point. I’m just hopeful that people can take away the idea that you don’t have to fall apart – that it’s still possible to maintain your connection with them, even after they’ve gone. I’m sure I’m going to feel the loss at times, but I know that the connection I have to Shane will always be there.”
For Angels classes, artworks and more visit victoriamaryclarkeangels.com
