Shane MacGowan, who has died aged 65, was the ruthless, hard-living singer of the Pogues; he was revered as much for his excessive alcohol consumption as for his dark, ruthless but lyrical vision of Irish life.
His growling vocals, drawn through crooked, rotten teeth, explored the dark side of the Irish diaspora. His front teeth, a friend claimed, were lost 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 bit the dust when he fell over a wall in Ireland after getting out of a car because he was ill.
MacGowan enlivened traditional Irish songs with a punk rock attitude, fueling the stagnant cultural hinterland of folk music and inspiring a new generation of Irish musicians to experiment with new musical styles. But the British-born ex-public schoolboy, who became the epitome of the proud working-class Irishman, diluted his songwriting genius in gallons of Guinness, whiskey and Martini.
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957 to Irish parents – but to his chagrin, in England, in Pembury in Kent. His father, Maurice, worked in a department store, while his mother, Therese, was a singer and traditional dancer who had been a model in Dublin.
When he was three months old, he was taken to his mother’s family home in Tipperary while his parents worked in England. He was raised by his aunt Nora, who introduced him to the influences of drink, cigarettes, religion and the Irish Sweepstakes at an early age. Aunt Nora, he later claimed, turned him into “a religious maniac and a total bon vivant,” condemning him to oscillate between piety and sin for the rest of his life.
At the age of six, MacGowan’s Irish idyll ended when he was sent to live with his parents in London. He described the years that followed as “a miserable, stinking, boring, useless waste of time.”
MacGowan’s father was a heavy drinker and his mother, who worked as a typist, was often bedridden due to arthritis and depression, leaving their son to fend for himself and his younger sister, Siobhan. At the age of eight, MacGowan was introduced to Powers’ whiskey and by the time he was fourteen, he rarely spent a day sober.
He attended Holmewood House preparatory school, near Tunbridge Wells, and subsequently won a scholarship to Westminster School. His high school principal, Robert Bairamian, recalled, “He was very unusual indeed, one of the most unusual personalities I have ever met. I thought he was going to be in the drama scene. At Westminster School they asked if I had written his English paper. They said they had never seen anything like it before.”
However, he only spent a year in Westminster before being deported for drug use. He then worked illegally as a shelf stocker, a warehouseman, a maintenance man at the Indian embassy and, inevitably, as a bartender. At the age of 17, he suffered a nervous breakdown caused by alcohol and drugs and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six months. He was diagnosed with acute situational anxiety, which he blamed on living in London.
MacGowan found his musical calling while working a job at a record store, where he discovered the shocking new sound of punk rock. He threw himself headlong into London’s emerging punk scene, and in 1976 a photo appeared in a newspaper of him pouring in blood after his ear was bitten during a gig. He formed friendships with the Sex Pistols and the Clash and sang (as Shane O. ‘Hooligan) with his own band, the Nipple Erectors (later shortened to the Nips), who supported the Jam and the Clash.
He met Spider Stacy at a Ramones gig and occasionally performed with Stacy’s band, the Millwall Chainsaws, who 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 crowd started pelting them with chips, so the management pulled the plug.
MacGowan also played in another band with Jem Finer, and the pair began rehearsing his songs together; at one point they applied to be buskers 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 (“kiss my a—” in Gaelic); they played their first gig 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 name was diplomatically shortened when David “Kid” Jensen started calling them the Pogues on his radio show after being told he said “kiss my a—” on live radio.
Their first album, Red Roses for Me, angered purists who accused them of demeaning Irish music. But by injecting it with punkish verve and irreverence, they brought it to a new audience and inspired an Irish musical renaissance.
MacGowan was the principal lyricist on the Pogues’ two best albums, 1985’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (the title was Sir Winston Churchill’s succinct summary of life in the Navy) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1987) , which included the chart-topping Christmas song Fairy Tale of New York, a duet with Kirsty MacColl, which has become a standard performed wherever the Irish gather around the world.
Despite their recording success, the Pogues remained a quintessential live band and MacGowan’s captivating drunken, clumsy onstage antics became legendary. But in the late 1980s he began to suffer from his excesses. In 1988 he collapsed at Heathrow Airport and missed the first ten days of a US tour.
He began to forget the lyrics on stage, vomited violently and had difficulty locating the microphone. Rumors circulated that he had six months to live, had 25 percent of his liver left and was living on a pure alcohol drip. At the height of the speculation, a book was published entitled Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?
Tensions within the band came to a head in 1991 during a tour of Japan. A sake binge left MacGowan unable to sing, and after falling from the tour bus and damaging his already devastated face, he was fired. The following year he recuperated in a Martello Tower in Bray, as a guest of the owner, the singer of U2, Bono. He also traveled and spent long 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 tackle his addictions and became a regular at the Priory clinic in London and the desiccating St. John of God home in Dublin.
However, he continued to take heavy doses of prescription tranquilizers and drink entire pints of martinis. In 1999, his fellow singer, Sinead O’Connor, reported him to the police after finding him in a heroin-induced coma. He claimed he was resting on his couch and drinking gin and tonic, and no charges were filed.
By the late 1990s, MacGowan’s musical gifts seemed to have been overshadowed by his alcohol-soaked reputation. He was uncomfortable in the new, economically prosperous Ireland, which was at odds with the booze and bonhomie of his songs. He became a nostalgic figure, the last link in Ireland’s history of drunken bards, his distinctive voice 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 and replied, “We’re not, no… we’ve started hating each other all over again… We’re friends as long as we’re not on tour together.” .”
In 2015, MacGowan fell as he left a studio in Dublin and broke his pelvis, leaving him in a wheelchair. That year he had his teeth repaired – including, at his insistence, one gold tooth. The dentist who took on the Herculean task described the course of the treatment as “the Everest of dentistry”. The following year he announced that he had finally stopped drinking.
By 1999, MacGowan had published Poguetry, his collected texts, and in 2001 a memoir, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, written with his long-term girlfriend, the journalist and writer Victoria Mary Clarke. They eventually got married in 2018 in a ceremony in Copenhagen. City Hall where his friend Johnny Depp played guitar.
MacGowan’s 60th birthday was celebrated at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, where he received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Irish President 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. They had no children, although he is believed to have fathered several children with other women, although he never knew how many.
Shane MacGowan, born December 25, 1957, death announced November 30, 2023