Shane MacGowan (RIP)

Cheasty · November 30, 2023, 5:22pm

You can’t fault his choice of venue. Lovely and spacious jackses with superb sinks and reliable hot water and powerful hand dryers.

Juhniallio · November 30, 2023, 5:32pm

Im not really the gambling type but I’d bet @Funtime rarely troubles the sink.

artfoley · November 30, 2023, 5:39pm

I wouldve thought he frequently pisses in them

Cheasty · November 30, 2023, 5:41pm

And he’s still the cleanest of the gang.

cmontofuck · November 30, 2023, 6:19pm

Documentary from 2001. Unfortunately not all of it, about an hour.

backinatracksuit · November 30, 2023, 6:30pm

Six one news went with John Kelly over Dave Fanning,
I’m sure Dave had something prepared and all

balbec · November 30, 2023, 6:36pm

Thankfully

Ralphie · November 30, 2023, 7:09pm

John Kelly has opened his programme with

Haunted
Lullaby of London
A pair of Brown Eyes

farmerinthecity · November 30, 2023, 7:09pm

I saw the Pogues three times in three consecutive years.

2007 and 2008 in the RDS.
2009 in the Olympia.

2007 was probably the best gig I was ever at. Shane was in flying form and Sinead dueted with him on Fairytale. It doesn’t get much better. Sad to think of it now.

The other two weren’t as good. Shane went prigressiveky downhill over the two years resulting in the Olympia gig being a bit of a car crash. It was still him though and the songs were still great.

Assumpta_Gilhooley · November 30, 2023, 7:23pm

When looking after his accounts back in ‘90s London, I had to send something over to him at the parents. It was back in the days of dictaphones. When the young English secretary gave me the letter back, she had written the address as - Near Nee Naaa, Co Tipperary.

balbec · November 30, 2023, 7:31pm

The whole show so far. A good one to listen back to on the player.

StoneCold · November 30, 2023, 7:33pm

I was at that gig too and don’t remember Sinead being there at all

StoneCold · November 30, 2023, 7:36pm

He used to drink for about 3 weeks solid in Philly Ryan’s pub in Nenagh back when he’d come home for Christmas. Would open a tab on his first visit and hand over a bag of cash to settle the tab on his lqst visit before heading off again.

Assumpta_Gilhooley · November 30, 2023, 7:39pm

In the Pogues financial statements, they had an expensive account called ‘Fruit and Flowers’. It was their biggest expense.

Little_Lord_Fauntleroy · November 30, 2023, 8:02pm

Cheasty · November 30, 2023, 8:03pm

On December 23rd, 2005, I was part of a three person group who were practicing music in a rehearsal room called Loop Studios in that lane at the back of where the Bachelor pub and Smallman’s plumbers used to be. Not the junkie lane, the other one, Lotts. We were there from around 1pm to around half five. I was recovering from snorting Coca-Cola at the Oasis concert in the Point Depot the previous night, which was the final time I ever snorted Coca-Cola. After we finished up playing the music the three of us went to the Neptune bar downstairs in the Flowing Tide, another drinking buddy of ours came in as well, so there were four of us. Around 7:30-7-45pm the other two lads I’d been playing the music with made their excuses and went home, so it was just meself and the drinking buddy still there. I knew The Pogues were playing in the Point Depot that night and said to the drinking buddy, lets call him Canso, that it might be an idea to go to it as neither of us had ever attended a Pogues gig before. He wasnt that keen but I persuaded him, “ah shure fuck it, go on man, it’s The Pogues, it’s Christmas, the weather is dry, and Shane McGowan will probably die soon.”

We started walking up towards the Point, but the only problem was I still had a bass guitar and a case with me, and there was no way I was getting that into the Point Depot nor wanted to. So I had to ring me oul’ fella, the giver of favours. “Da, sorry, is there any chance at all you might come in and collect me guitar?” “Aaahhhh, I was just settling down here to watch the telly, you’ve ruined me evening. Aaaalright.” “Ah deadly, nice one Da.”

We sourced tickets fairly handy. So meself and Canso have to wait for me oul’ fella to come in in the car, and we sip away on the cans of cider we’ve purchased at the off-licence on Marlborough Street just around the corner from the Flowing Tide.

To kill the time, I pretend to busk on the electric bass guitar, without amplification, in silence, with Canso doing an extremely unconvincing impression of Bez, just to keep warm. It’s a mime. About 20 minutes passes, and as fully expected I haven’t got a hapenny from gig goers passing by, and then a chap around 30 years of age comes up, and says loudly to me in a culchie accent: “Fair play to boss, are a fan of Fine Gael by any chance? Enda Kenny, he’s the man that’s going to revitalise this country!”

“Ehhhh…yeah, he’s alright I suppose”, I mumble and lie.

“That’s the spirit, good man yourself, hup Fine Gael, Merry Christmas to ya, ho ho ho” he shouts, and firmly hands me a 50 euro note and walks on around the corner into the Point Depot, as my jaw drops.

A minute later me oul’ fella pulls up with a frown on his face and I hand the guitar into him.

Night sorted. That was the last time I was in the old Point Depot and the only time I ever saw The Pogues or Shane McGowan play live. It was very good and I don’t remember much of it.

TDH.

Corksfinedtboy · November 30, 2023, 8:04pm

Barry Egan: Hara-kiri, heroin and Haughey – Shane MacGowan left me with colourful memories from his life of pain, pleasure, poetry and punk

Barry Egan

November 30 2023 7:22 PM

Shane MacGowan turned 65 on Christmas Day last year.

Perhaps fittingly, he died in the weeks before the festive season, when his most famous song starts ringing out all over Ireland, and the world.

The misanthropes among us have been predicting the death of Shane MacGowan – who subjected his liver to decades of unforgiving GBH — since he first emerged, drink in hand, with The Pogues in the mid-1980s.

The Indo Daily: Poet, punk, performer extraordinaire - Shane Mac Gowan has left us

He wrote about death in a profoundly emotive manner on A Pair of Brown Eyes:

“In blood and death ’neath a screaming sky/

I lay down on the ground/

And the arms and legs of other men/

Were scattered all around/

Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed/

Then prayed and bled some more/

And the only thing that I could see/

Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me/

But when we got back, labelled parts one to three/

There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me.”

When he first played the song to the band, tin whistler Spider Stacy was perplexed, asking MacGowan: “What sort of a twisted, f***ed-up sort of mind comes up with lyrics like that?”

“Mine,” replied MacGowan.

He had an outsider’s attitude that informed his artistic vision. He influenced Fontaines DC, The Mary Wallopers and Damien Dempsey as much he did Martin McDonagh, Jim Sheridan or Christy Moore, among many others.

“I regard Shane as easily the best lyric writer of our generation,” said Nick Cave who recorded a duet with MacGowan, What a Wonderful World, in 1992. “He has a very natural, unadorned, crystalline way with language. There is a compassion in his words that is always tender, often brutal, and completely his own.”

“His songs, even though they are hard-edged, always have empathy for the characters in them,” said Bobby Gillespie, of Primal Scream. “He has a brutal eye for detail, and he can tell a story in a concise but almost cinematic way using these amazing images that just hit you in the heart with their tenderness and emotion.”

Johnny Depp (who featured in the video of That Woman’s Got Me Drinking by Shane’s post-Pogues band, The Popes) called his pal MacGowan “one of the most important poets of the 20th century”.

Shane MacGowan with his mother Therese and father Maurice in 1997. Photo: Getty Images

“He weaves his tapestry seamlessly, in and out of Tipperary, Soho, Almeria, Siam, New York,” said Christy Moore. “For me, Shane is a storyteller like no other.”

Like Moore, MacGowan was fascinated at the deepest level by storytelling.

“Literature is just stories,” he once said. “One of the greatest works of literature is Finnegans Wake by James Joyce. The inspiration for that came from Finnegan’s Wake which is a great story-song. Nobody knows who wrote it, it’s so old. Well, it’s not that old. It’s 200 years old maybe. “

“People just used to pass it down, as often happened at wakes. That’s what wakes are for. People would start off being very nice about the person, then there’d be more and more slanging and then they’d have a huge row and all the rest of it.

“If that didn’t wake them up then they must be dead, yeah? It was all because there were so many premature burials in those days,” he said, adding: “In his later years Joyce was nearly blind and he was using a typewriter that he was constantly having to hock and get out again. There were two or three bum letters on it so he didn’t know exactly what was going to come out. He had bad eyesight, a bad back, all the rest of it. In those days a doctor would write you a prescription for everything, and he was a boozer from an early age.

“I’m just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life,” he continued. “Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure…”

In Julien Temple’s 2020 documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, the singer joked of his holidays in Co Tipperary as a child, “God looked down on this little cottage in Ireland and said, ‘That little boy there, he’s the little boy that I’m going to use to save Irish music’.” He made good on that light-hearted promise.

With Spider Stacy on whistle, Jem Finer on banjo, Cait O’Riordan on bass, James Fearnley on accordion, Andrew Ranken on drums, Philip Chevron (who wrote Thousands Are Sailing, about the emigration of Irish to America “to break the chains of poverty”) on guitar and Terry Woods on everything, The Pogues were the bastard children of punk and The Clancy Brothers, The Dubliners and The Chieftains on cheap amphetamines.

The Anglo-Irish sonic dissidents also reinvented a genre and gave the world two of the greatest albums of the 1980s, with Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace with God.

MacGowan sang Dick Shannon’s The Auld Triangle (written by Dick Shannon but popularised by Brendan Behan who included it in his 1954 play The Quare Fellow) on The Pogues’ debut album, Red Roses for Me, in 1984. On Streams of Whiskey, from the same record, he dreamt of meeting him in a dream. In real life, he was fascinated by Behan too.

Shane MacGowan at his family home in Tipperary in 1997. Photo: Getty Images

“Behan recorded loads of talk-books in which he bursts into song,” he said. “I think they’re great. I also think he was a great writer of stories. He used to experience things when he was pissed but he couldn’t discipline himself to write it down or type it out.”

“Even if Behan had his things in the pub with him, he’d only have a pint of stout because he’d drink slowly while he was doing it. He couldn’t get wrecked and then go home and write a bloody story. It’s not the same with me. It’s strange… Later on, he could write stories when he was pissed because people recorded him. He’d go off in all directions. It’s fascinating, really fascinating.

“Bursting into song. All that. That’s the thing about Irish writing. It developed from storytelling. Storytelling is a huge thing in Ireland, or used to be. All the playwrights, all the novelists, all the poets… well they’re all poets. It’s all poetry, really, the same way that Shakespeare is poetry in play-form.”

MacGowan also spoke about drink’s role in his creative process. “For a start, I’ve got to be out of my head to write,” he told NME in 1988. “For a lot of the time, it’s automatic writing. Rainy Night in Soho was automatic.” He added that The Turkish Song of the Damned by The Pogues sprouted from “a Kraut trying to tell me something and I misheard him. He asked, ‘Have you heard The Turkish Song by The Damned. Then I woke up.”

He spoke about what Ireland had become with a lyrical power that was worthy of Yeats or Behan. “There’s McDonald’s everywhere,” he told me at 2am over dinner in La Stampa on Dawson Street with his then-girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, in 1993. “Even in Tipperary. That’s always the first sign. The Americanisation of anywhere leads to the loss of a nation’s soul.

Course he’s fing devious! Look at the cs he’s dealing with, the British government and Margaret Thatcher! F**in’ hell!

“I’m not saying I don’t hate every f***ing thing the English did to Ireland, but they never managed to get rid of the Irish soul. Ireland’s not as good as it was, probably because the people died or moved away, and the towns died.”

I remember asking him: did he think the Irish who had to move to England (because politicians like Charlie Haughey couldn’t find them work) are angry at Ireland.

“I can’t be a spokesman for the rest of the London Irish, but I know a lot of them who are very bitter, yeah, especially the ones who’ve been in prison.

“The anti-Irishness is not as strong as it was in the 1970s in London, because Londoners are too busy hanging each other nowadays to pick out any particular social group.”

Intriguingly, when Hot Press once pressed him on his admiration for Haughey (“a sincere politician and a very clever man”) and suggested the then Taoiseach was devious, he replied: “Course he’s fing devious! Look at the cs he’s dealing with, the British government and Margaret Thatcher! F**in’ hell!”

He also told me that time, in the wee hours on Dawson Street, the story of Yukio Mishima, the author and poet who committed hara-kiri in the Japanese army HQ in Tokyo on November 25, 1970.

“He thought the Japanese nation had lost its soul. He hated the way the country was being run by bread-obsessed capitalists and finally found that he couldn’t write anything angry enough. So he topped himself. He committed ritual hara-kiri,” MacGowan said.

Would he ever consider ritual suicide?

“Naah!” he chortled, a sound that was a cross between Muttley on the run from Dick Dastardly and the hissing of a rattle snake. He could be quite the charmer, even on matters of self-disembowelment.

I met him for the first time in Glasgow in 1988. I was sent into a hotel room where the interview was scheduled to take place. There was no sign of the young star. Only a lumpy, unmade bed. I sat on a chair and waited. I could have sworn the bed was making sounds.

Ten minutes later, the sheets were melodramatically pulled back.

Like Dracula getting out of his coffin in his castle in Transylvania, MacGowan jumped out of the bed and ran naked around the room.

He, with no shortage of what can only be described as bizarre, out-of-kilter energy, was pissed. It was 11am.

Later that evening, he displayed a similar amount of off-kilter energy singing with The Pogues at a sold-out Barrowlands concert.

Another time, in the mid 1990s, I met him, at his suggestion, at a pub beside Wormwood Scrubs in north-east London. When I asked could I get him a drink, his order was: “Two pints of vodka.”

Gargantuan vodkas duly dispatched, he took me on a tour of London, stopping regularly for pints of vodka. He had a guy driving him around, while he sat in the back talking about The Tibetan Book of the Dead and asking the driver to play the music louder.

“If God didn’t mean us to take drugs, he wouldn’t have created them in the first place,” he believed. “I don’t go for all those bollocks about sin."

It would appear not.

In 2008 he vomited over a white tux jacket that he was photographed in for the Sunday Independent’s LIFE magazine. “I loved that jacket, but the barman gave me a dodgy drink,” he later claimed. It might have been more to do with the heroin he was taking.

I sat in the bar of a hotel for 30 minutes minding Shane’s bag while he was in the toilet.

The manager of the hotel, which will go unnamed, eventually came over to ask what Shane was doing in there that took him so long. The answer was supplied when he stumbled out in our direction and vomited into the bag of his stuff I was holding. He was fine after that, though the manager of the hotel wasn’t.

Still, MacGowan was full of craic (and doubtless sometimes even crack).

He was not, however, a saint. In 2000, Sinéad O’Connor, who recorded a duet, Haunted, on his album, The Snake, with his band The Popes in 1994, was to report MacGowan to Kentish Town police apropos the heroin abuse she witnessed.

“I love Shane,” the late singer said, “and it makes me angry to see him destroy himself.”

She contacted the police, she explained, “to stop him dying”.

“Others around him are not so lucky,” wrote Pat Carty in Hot Press.

On the night of March 6, 1995, in Paris, after The Popes’ show at the Elysee Montmartre in Paris, producer Dave Jordan was found dead at the band’s hotel, the Regynes, from a heroin overdose. He was 40. The police believed the body had been moved. In any event, the band had already left the hotel for London by the time they arrived.

On July 3, 1995, the body of 25-year-old Dubliner Bryan Ging was found against a chest of drawers in MacGowan’s flat on Blackstock Road in north London. He had died of a morphine overdose and acute alcohol poisoning.

She wanted me to mix with the f***ing English middle class who were trying to be upper class

Ging, who was educated in St Mary’s College, had come to London and started to hang out with him and his crew. It wasn’t the last fatality of a young man at a flat that MacGowan lived in.

On May 17, 1999, 24-year-old Robbie O’Neill died from a heroin overdose. He had known Robbie since he was 13. He would sometimes stay with Robbie and his dad, the Pogues’ PR man Terry O’Neill, at their home in Dundrum.

Educated in Taney School and then at Newpark Comprehensive, he moved to London and in time ended up moved in with MacGowan at 82 Savernake Road, Gospel Oak, north London.

The post-mortem revealed there was no heroin in his urine, which indicated that Robbie had never taken heroin before and when he did that night, he was dead within half an hour. MacGowan’s account of the night from his witness statement to the coroner’s inquest, read:

Long-time friend actor Johnny Depp with singer Shane MacGowan in 1994. Photo: Getty Images

“On Monday, May 17, between midnight and 2am, Robbie came home, and he was happy and he was messing about. We chatted and watched a video, The Wild Bunch. I went to bed because I was tired. Robbie was still awake. I slept for 22 hours as I was awake two days [previously] wrestling and trying to do work. Then Robbie seemed happy enough, mucking about. On Tuesday, May 18, at around 1am I woke up and found Robbie in the living room. I thought he was asleep, and I tried to wake him up, but he did not respond. I could not see him breathing and noted that he felt cold. I tried to move him, but he was stiff.”

MacGowan then rang an ambulance. He never went to the inquest and was late for the memorial.

He was born Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan on Christmas Day, 1957, in Pembury in Kent to Maurice and Therese – from Dublin and Tipperary respectively. They had emigrated to England four months earlier. He went to Holmewood House in Langton Green, a fee-paying public school, in 1964.

“My mother dragged me in,” he said in A Furious Devotion: The Authorised Story of Shane MacGowan, Richard Balls’s recent, and brilliant, book. “She wanted me to mix with the f***ing English middle class who were trying to be upper class, like the nouveau riche, trying to get there. But most of them were too thick.”

Shane was the opposite of thick, reading James Joyce, Seán O’Casey, DH Lawrence from the age of 11.

In 1972, when the MacGowans moved to London, Shane started at Westminster, a traditional private prep school as a dayboy.

“Westminster was awful,” MacGowan recalled to Balls. “They were such w**kers.”

In his early teens he was taking drugs and getting in trouble with the police. At 15, he appeared before the juvenile court in Tower Hamlets. He was eventually expelled from Westminster for dealing drugs in the school and went to Hammersmith College of Further Education in 1974.

Three years later, as a consequence of all the LSD and pills he had been taking from an early age, he had a nervous breakdown and was having hallucinations. His concerned parents brought him to see a doctor in Harley Street who put the then 17-year-old on 100 milligrams of Valium a day. He was subsequently admitted to Bethlem Royal Hospital for six months, where he recalled his parents visiting on his 18th birthday. Things didn’t improve when he got out of Bethlem.

He was asked to leave Hammersmith College for coming into class under the influence of drugs. However, his life did improve, not immediately, with music. MacGowan became famous when on October 23, 1976, at a Clash concert he had his earlobe bitten off at the ICA at the Mall in London by punk queen Mad Jane.

Shane MacGowan was a fan of James Joyce’s ‘Finnegans Wake’

In April 1977, he was on the cover of weekly music newspaper, Sounds, for a story about new wave, in relation to his post-punk band The Nipple Erectors, later renamed The Nips, with his then-girlfriend Shanne Bradley. He was known as Shane O’Hooligan.

In 1981, he formed Pogue Mahone, an Anglicisation of the Irish ‘póg mo thóin’ - “kiss my ass”. The music was a blow-blowing snakebite of punk-rock and Irish traditional music.

On October 4, they played their first show at The Pindar of Wakefield. Changing their name to The Pogues, they released their debut album, Red Roses for Me, in 1984.

By the following year, on Channel 4’s flagship music show The Tube, they were playing a 19th-century trad Irish song about oul’ wans, Waxie’s Dargle, and Poor Paddy, an old song about an Irish worker working on a railroad, complete with Spider Stacy smashing himself in the head with a beer tray.

Within years – as a result of his global fame coupled with his worryingly excessive drinking and taking of drugs – it was MacGowan who seemed whacked in the head with a metaphorical beer tray by life. In 1988, on tour in New Zealand he consumed 20 tablets of LSD.

He was convinced he was communicating with the ghosts of the Maoris. At the end of that tour, a clearly unwell MacGowan told his sister Siobhan: “I want to leave. I can’t handle it.”

When she said, “Well, leave”, he answered: “I can’t let them down.”

Later that year, he suffered a nervous breakdown in Dublin.

Siobhan contacted Shane’s doctor Dr [Niall] Joyce, who told her: “If your brother goes on like this, he will have six months to live.”

I also believe in the fairies. There are lots of fairy rings around the countryside in Ireland

When Shane tried to jump out of a moving car, Siobhan called the doctor again. With the words “Look, Shane, I’m doing what Phil Lynott’s sister wishes she had done”, she had had him committed to St John of God, the psychiatric hospital in Stillorgan.

In 1991, on tour in Japan, The Pogues finally sacked Shane from the band after he fell unconscious and bloody onto the street and had to be carried into the hotel; the polite Japanese manager assuming MacGowan had been in a car crash. He was in a heroin binge.

Being re-acquainted with his P-45 by the band he founded was, it appeared, the best thing that ever happened to him. He and Victoria moved into Bono’s converted Martello tower in Bray where the former lead singer of The Pogues would say good morning to his neighbours “by waving my donger”.

He seemed happy to just do as little as possible, and not be in a famous band any more. It suited his personality to be idle.

Shane MacGowan and Victoria Mary Clarke

Steve Lillywhite, who was married to the late Kirsty MacColl, who duetted with MacGowan on Fairytale of New York which he produced, once said: “I lived in New York for about 15 years. I used to love going to Irish bars. I got a lot more ‘wow factor’ that I worked with The Pogues than the fact that I worked with U2. I’ve known Bono since he was 18 but it was, ‘Wow, you worked with The Pogues, you’re cool. Bono is the world’s biggest overachiever. Shane is one the world’s biggest underachievers.”

He was perhaps too much of an underachiever romantically for Victoria.

In 2000, they broke up, seemingly for good. But in a 2004 TV interview on The Frank Skinner Show, a despondent MacGowan told the host: “I had a 20-year relationship with a young lady and I’d like to patch it up.

In 2006, they reunited at Spider Stacy’s wedding in Las Vegas. In 2007, Victoria was on The Late Late Show proudly showing host Pat Kenny her new engagement ring. She announced: “Shane’s certainly no Brad Pitt, but he is my sweet pea and I’m marrying him.”

Nine years later, she and the libertine she first met In 1982 – then 16 – in a pub in Golders Green, north London, had still not married.

In 2016, they split up, again, albeit briefly. In 2017, he broke his pelvis during a fall at home, leaving his knee fractured also (and was in a wheelchair ever since). In November 2018 they finally got married; in Denmark at Copenhagen City Hall with their VBF Johnny Depp playing the guitar during the ceremony.

I once asked him did he believe in God. He nodded in the affirmative before adding his own take on the afterlife and God. “I believe but not in the sense of a bearded guy in the sky, but for all I know it could be that when I get up there,” he hissed with that Muttley chuckle. “I also believe in the fairies. There are lots of fairy rings around the countryside in Ireland.”

The actor Cillian Murphy probably best summed up Shane and our relationship with him. “We see him as an iconoclast, a rebel. And I think we worry about him and have spent the last 30 years as a nation worrying about him, but he kept proving us wrong.”

We’ll not see his like again.

Shane MacGowan (RIP)

Barry Egan: Hara-kiri, heroin and Haughey – Shane MacGowan left me with colourful memories from his life of pain, pleasure, poetry and punk

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The Indo Daily: Poet, punk, performer extraordinaire - Shane Mac Gowan has left us

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