SHANE MACGOWAN was a punk with a poet’s soul, who ignited Irish music with manic London energy and gave Britain our favorite Christmas song.
The former Pogues frontman, who has died aged 65, once said his themes were: “God. Devil. Drink. Life. Death. How funny it all is, and how sad.”
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Shane MacGowan of the Pogues has died Credit: Rex
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He fought an eight-year battle with the disease
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Shane was born to Irish people in Kent in 1957. Credit: Splash
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In Fairytale of New York, Shane and Kirsty MacColl gave Britain its favorite Christmas song
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Singers Kirsty and Shane 1987 Credit: Getty – Contributor
His 1987 masterpiece The Fairy Tale of New York covered all these themes at once.
The song about it seems to be about drunks insulting each other, with the least festive lyrics in history (“Scum, worm”) somehow turns into a Christmas love song that still makes people cry.
Since 2005, it has returned to the top 20 every December, and in 2012 it was named the favorite Christmas song of all time.
Meanwhile, Shane has become one of our favorite characters.
His teeth, once described by his dentist as “the stuff of legend”, became a national obsession.
When he finally repaired them in 2015, they were the subject of an entire Sky Arts documentary.
Then came his laugh, comparable to “flushing a portable toilet”.
Most of all, there was his incredible ability to stay alive, despite the apparent ravages of alcohol and drugs, including heroin.
His inevitable death was first talked about in 1988, when he was 31 years old.
Once he got so high in front of his landlady that he started eating an album of the Beach Boys’ greatest hits.
On another occasion, he told the young Kylie Minogue: “Fuck you!”.
He was wild, but somehow never scary – there was always a vulnerability.
And of course there were those songs of love, exile and longing, like A Rainy Night In Soho or A Pair of Brown Eyes.
There were also protest ones, like Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six.
‘ALL IRELAND’
There are few songwriters of rock or traditional Irish ballads who have ever succeeded in bringing together literature and music, the two great strands of Irish identity, so beautifully.
And that was Shane’s identity, even though he was born and raised in England.
His heart was in his parents’ homeland, and in his London accent he often insisted, “I’m fully Irish.”
He was also loved by Ireland: there he was celebrated as a literary and musical great.
Shane’s usual defensive reaction to this compliment was, “I just feel embarrassed and embarrassed, so I had a drink.”
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957 in the village of Pembury, Kent.
His parents had only recently emigrated, after his Dublin father Maurice got a job as a manager at the C&A clothing chain.
His mother, Therese, grew up in a remote part of Tipperary, in a country house where singing and dancing often lasted all weekend.
Young Shane spent all his holidays there: “I did my first performance at the age of three, at the kitchen table.”
His parents were also great readers, and he read whatever they read: by the age of 12, he had polished off James Joyce’s difficult Ulysses.
Teachers at his posh prep school near Tunbridge Wells, Kent, were amazed by his writing. His English teacher called him “brilliant”.
Then, at the age of 13, he received a scholarship to the even more prestigious Westminster School in London, when his family moved to an apartment in the new Barbican complex.
Shane later claimed that the headmaster “was on my back from the start because I was Irish”.
After just one year, the long-haired teenager was expelled for participating in a school drug ring.
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And he began to spend more and more time wandering around “pimps, whores and junkies” in Soho.
In a 2020 documentary, he revealed to his longtime friend, Hollywood star Johnny Depp, that he even made money as a tenant.
But he added: “Only manual work. It was a job in hand.” Then came that laugh: “Hcccccc!”
In 1975, when he was 17, his family sent him to London’s Bethlem psychiatric hospital for six months.
After his release, the first show he attended featured the Sex Pistols as an opening act: “And then I saw God.”
Years later he recalled: “The punk thing changed my life. It didn’t matter that I was ugly. Nothing mattered.”
In October of that year, he first encountered notoriety when he was photographed at a punk gig, with one sticky ear gushing blood where a fellow fan had bitten him.
The headline in the music magazine NME was: “Cannibalism at the Clash gig”.
He went by the name Shane O’Hooligan and joined the punk band The Nipple Erectors – later The Nips – as frontman in 1977.
It failed in 1980, but the very next year he had an idea that would change music and his life.
He still loved the traditional Irish songs he grew up with and wondered how they would sound if played with the energy of punk.
He gathered a group of musician friends and tried it out.
A friend said of their first gig in the spring of 1981: “You knew you were watching something extraordinary.”
By the following year, the group had the name Pogue Mahone, from the Irish phrase “póg mo thóin”, meaning “kiss my ass”.
But after they started getting radio airplay, a BBC producer from Scotland warned his bosses about the translation.
As Shane later explained, “We just switched to The Pogues and got on with it.”
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Shane as a small child. He was born on Christmas Day 1957 to Irish parents in Kent
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Shane started the Pogues in 1981. Credit: Reuters
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Shane with singer Imelda MayCredit: Social Media Collect
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Young Shane back in March 1987
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When he finally fixed his teeth in 2015, they were the subject of an entire documentary
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Shane was known for his drinking
He soon began writing his own songs, adding to their repertoire of ballads and old rebel tunes.
It was the height of the Troubles, with IRA bombs exploding across England.
The Irish in London, even those of the second generation, lived in an atmosphere of suspicion and abuse.
Shane put his experience as “Paddys” into words.
The band achieved its greatest success in 1987 with the album Fairytale of New York.
Shane co-wrote the music with banjo player Jem Finer, but the lyrics were his own.
It took him two years to sort them out, and by then bassist Cait O’Riordan, with whom he planned to sing a duet, had left the band.
So their new producer Steve Lillywhite suggested his wife, singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl.
Shane had already filmed his part, so Kirsty filmed the female part at home.
When Steve played him the score the next day, Shane said, “I have to sing the part again.”
Kirsty had just taken the song to another level and he knew he had to try to reach her heights.
By the end of the recording, Shane was lying in a pool of vomit on the studio floor, and The Pogues had created a masterpiece.
However, it only reached number two in the UK and was held off by a 1987 cover of Pet Shop Boys’ Always On My Mind at number one at Christmas.
Meanwhile, Shane (30) fell in love with the Irish writer and journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, nine years younger than him.
Apart from a break of about seven years, they will be together for the rest of his life. They finally got married in November 2018.
The break was caused by drug use that got out of control after the success of Bajka from New York.
She later said: “It was very scary. It was hell on earth.”
He drank a bottle and a half of gin a day, missed concerts, wandered off halfway to go to a bar or sing another song to the rest of the band.
Finally, during a tour of Japan in the summer of 1991, the other members fired him.
HEAVY DRINKING
He responded with a new group in 1992, Shane MacGowan and the Popes.
He has also collaborated with other musicians, including Sinéad O’Connor, who recorded the single Haunted with him in 1995.
She later recalled, “Shane was nodding his head smack between lines.”
In November 1999, she finally called the police on him: he went to rehab and managed to wean himself off heroin by 2002.
However, he remained a heavy drinker.
The Pogues invited him to rejoin the band in 2001, and he stayed until the band’s breakup in 2014.
But he never again reached the songwriting heights of the group’s early years.
He was also haunted by the horrific death of duet partner Kirsty MacColl, who was mowed down by a speedboat while swimming in December 2000, aged 41.
He said of his favorite song: “I basically stopped singing it when Kirsty left.”
Shane broke his pelvis in a fall in 2015 in Dublin, where he and Victoria eventually moved.
He was confined to a wheelchair for the rest of his life, and in December 2022 he was hospitalized for encephalitis, which causes swelling of the brain.
By July 2023, he was still there, in intensive care.
Shane, who never had children, once admitted: “I lived completely irresponsibly.”
But he also insisted: “I’m just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life.
“Cram as much pleasure into life as you can and fight against the pain you have to suffer because of it.”
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Shane McGowan was famous for his rotten teethCredit: Photocall Ireland
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Shane smoking cigarettes on Dublins South Quays in 2004. Credit: Photocall Ireland
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