Shane MacGowan, who has died aged 65, was the fierce, hard-working frontman of the Pogues; He was revered for his dark, brutal yet lyrical vision of Irish life, as well as his excessive consumption of alcohol.
His growling vocals, emerging from crooked, rotten teeth, explored the dark side of the Irish diaspora. A girlfriend claimed he lost his front teeth when he ate a copy of the Beach Boys’ Greatest Hits Volume 3 while under the influence of LSD. In October 2006, two more people got out of a car to get sick in Ireland and bit the dust when they crashed over a wall.
MacGowan revived traditional Irish song with a punk-rock attitude, stirring up the stagnant cultural stagnation of folk music and inspiring a new generation of Irish musicians to experiment with new musical styles. But the British-born former public schoolboy who has become the epitome of the proud, working-class Irish has diluted his songwriting genius with gallons of Guinness, whiskey and Martinis.
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born to Irish parents – but sadly in England, in Pembury, Kent, on Christmas Day 1957. His father, Maurice, worked in a department store, while his mother, Therese, was a singer and traditional dancer who modeled in Dublin.
At the age of three months, he was taken to his mother’s family home in Tipperary while his parents were working in England. He was raised by his Aunt Nora, who introduced him to drink, cigarettes, religion and the seminal effects of the Irish Lottery at an early age. He later claimed that Aunt Nora turned him into “a religious maniac and a complete hedonist”, dooming him to vacillate between piety and sin for the rest of his life.
At the age of six, MacGowan’s Irish idyll came to an end when he was sent to live with his parents in London. He described the following years as “a miserable, smelly, boring, useless waste of time.”
MacGowan’s father was a heavy drinker and his mother, who worked as a typist, was often bedridden with arthritis and depression, forcing her sons to care for herself and her younger sister, Siobhan. At the age of eight, MacGowan was introduced to Powers’ whiskey, and by the age of 14 he was rarely having a sober day.
He attended Holmeswood House preparatory school near Tunbridge Wells, then won a scholarship to Westminster School. Robert Bairamian, head of the prep school, recalled: “He really was a very extraordinary person, one of the most extraordinary personalities I have ever met. I thought he would appear on the drama stage. They asked if I had written his English paper at Westminster School. “They said they had never seen anything like this before.”
But he only spent a year in Westminster before being deported for drug use. He later worked illegally at the Indian embassy as a shelf loader, stockroom clerk, maintenance man and, inevitably, a bartender. At the age of 17, he suffered a mental breakdown caused by drink and drugs and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six months. He was diagnosed with acute situational anxiety and blamed it on living in London.
MacGowan found his calling in music while working another odd job; In a record store, he discovered the shocking new sound of punk rock. He threw himself headlong into London’s emerging punk scene, and in 1976 a photograph appeared in a newspaper of him covered in blood after his ear had been bitten off at a concert. He struck up friendships with the Sex Pistols and the Clash, and sang (as Shane O sang ‘Hooligan) with his own band, the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to Nips), who supported Jam and the Clash.
Spider met Stacy at a Ramones concert and occasionally performed with Stacy’s band, the Millwall Chainsaws; this group renamed themselves the New Republicans. They played a gig as part of Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura, but their Irish rebel songs went largely unappreciated: the audience started pelting them with chips, so management pulled the plug on them.
MacGowan also played in another band with Jem Finer, and the duo began rehearsing their songs together; At one point they applied for a bus in Covent Garden but were rejected. They were joined by Stacy and former Nips guitarist James Fearnley.
Looking for a name, Stacey came up with Pogue Mahone (“a—” in Gaelic); They played their first concert in October 1982, and were soon joined by Cait O’Riordan on bass. In 1984, the band released their first single, The Dark Streets of London. Their names were diplomatically shortened when David “Kid” Jensen began calling them the Pogues on his radio show after reportedly saying “kiss my a—–” on live radio.
Their debut album, Red Roses for Me, angered purists who accused them of disparaging Irish music. But by imbuing it with punk-like enthusiasm and irreverence, they brought it to a new audience and inspired an Irish musical renaissance.
MacGowan was the principal songwriter on the Pogues’ two best albums of 1985, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (the title was Sir Winston Churchill’s brief summary of life in the Navy) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1987). These included the chart-topping Christmas song Fairy Tale of New York, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, which became a standard performed wherever Irish people gathered around the world.
Despite their recording success, the Pogues remained a live band at heart, and MacGowan’s charming drunken, bumbling, onstage antics became legendary. But by the late 1980s he was beginning to suffer for his excesses. He collapsed at Heathrow Airport in 1988 and missed the first 10 days of his US tour.
He started forgetting lyrics on stage, vomited a lot, and had trouble finding the microphone. Rumors were circulating that she had only six months to live, that she had 25 percent of her liver left, and that she was living on pure alcohol. At the height of speculation, Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? A book titled:
Tensions within the band came to a head during a tour of Japan in 1991. A sake drink left MacGowan unable to sing, and he was fired after falling off his tour bus, damaging his already ruined face. The following year he recuperated at the Martello Tower in Bray as a guest of his owner, U2 frontman Bono. He also traveled, spending extended periods in Thailand, Portugal and Spain.
In 1994, MacGowan formed the Popes, whose first two albums, The Snake (1994) and The Crock of Gold (1997), were moderately successful. MacGowan made several attempts to combat his addictions and became a regular at the Priory clinic in London and the institutional home of St John of God in Dublin.
But he continued to take heavy doses of prescription tranquilizers and drink pints of Martinis. In 1999, fellow singer Sinead O’Connor reported him to the police after finding him in a heroin-induced coma. She claimed she was relaxing on her sofa, drinking a gin and tonic, and that no charges were brought.
By the late 1990s, MacGowan’s musical talents appeared to be overshadowed by his alcohol-fueled fame. He felt uneasy in the new, economically prosperous Ireland, incompatible with the booze and gaiety of his songs. He became a nostalgic figure, the last link in Ireland’s history of drunken bards; his distinctive voice was drowned out by the roar of the “Celtic Tiger”.
However, in 2001 the Pogues reformed and remained together until 2014; The following year, MacGowan asked if they were still together, to which he replied: “We’re not, no… we’re starting to hate each other again… As long as we’re not touring together, we’re friends.” .”
MacGowan fell while leaving a studio in Dublin in 2015 and broke his pelvis, leaving him confined to a wheelchair. That year, at his insistence, he had his teeth fixed, including a gold tooth. The dentist who undertook the Herculean task described the treatment process as the “Everest of dentistry”. The following year, he announced that he had finally quit drinking.
In 1999, MacGowan published Poguetry, in which he collected the lyrics, and in 2001, he published the memoir A Drink With Shane MacGowan, which he wrote with his long-term girlfriend, journalist and author Victoria Mary Clarke. They eventually got married in a ceremony in Copenhagen in 2018. City Hall, where his friend Johnny Depp plays guitar.
MacGowan’s 60th birthday was celebrated at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, where he was presented with the Lifetime Achievement Award by the president of Ireland, Michael Higgins. In 2020, Depp appeared in Julien Temple’s documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, which also featured Gerry Adams and Tony Blair.
Shane MacGowan is survived by his wife Victoria. He is believed to have fathered several other women, although he never knew how many children he had, but they had no children.
Shane MacGowan was born on December 25, 1957, his death was announced on November 30, 2023.