Shane MacGowan - poet, genius... the demented shaman of the Irish diaspora
I’m not old enough to have seen The Pogues in their pomp, and my first experience of Shane MacGowan was a long wait in a grubby venue for a shambolic performance.
No matter, it was him. The poet who sang me through my difficult teens, amplifying my catholic, leftie, plastic paddy blues in the protestant Tory south east. I was born to an English mother and a tearaway Irish father, and found myself equally ill at ease in Surrey and Co. Mayo. My salvation was books and music... and somehow Shane had an unsteady foot in both camps: drinking songs that eulogised Brendan Behan, James Joyce and Flann O’Brien. All that, and he was born in Kent!
Much better gigs followed: an annual swig-along with the full Pogues in Brixton reminded us how strong those songs were. From the tender and teary Broad Majestic Shannon to the punch-swinging, bottle-throwing pogo of Transmetropolitan, they are timelessly magnificent. And the shows illustrated the extent to which the whole enterprise of Shane’s genius relied on the astonishing qualities of the rest of the band: Chevron, Finer, Ranken and the rest.
Shane, obviously, was no saint. More a raging, ranting hermit, there to teach the rest of us the fantastic possibilities open to those who embrace excess... and of the dangers that come with that life too. For all the talk of whiskey and beer, it was a period of prodigious LSD intake that seems to have done the most damage. Those songs, though, will last you a lifetime and more. I sang their version of Kitty to all my children through nights they couldn’t sleep. I play Fairytale of New York whenever there is drinking and dancing, and Body of an American whenever anyone I love dies. I’m playing it now.
Shane is best remembered from the dark vantage of a beery South London music hall, flicking Vs at the crowd, belting out magical, mystical, genius verse. Perhaps The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn - let’s make sure we’re down the front for this one, it’s a rowdy belter, about death and drinking and war. Describing one hero’s burial, he sings: “Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior, and shove you in the ground, But you’ll stick your head back out and shout ‘We’ll have another round.’” Slainte.
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