Shane MacGowan: the poet-musician of dereliction who became a mythic figure

In accordionist James Fearnley’s memoir of his time with the Pogues, Here Comes Everybody, there is a description of the band’s first headlining tour of Ireland, and in particular, a gig in Carlow during which a mass brawl breaks out in the audience. Afterwards, Fearnley is horrified, both by the crowd’s behaviour and frontman Shane MacGowan’s reaction, which involves turning on his bandmates and delivering them a lecture on human nature. “People are just this much away from murdering each other, this much away from raping each other, this much away from knifing, shooting, massacring, garrotting … It’s fucking dog-eat-dog everywhere you look … It’s what they want to do and if it’s what they want to do, they’re going to do it anyway no matter how much fucking whingeing you do.”

Fearnley is baffled: how, he wonders, can anyone who thinks like that also “write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening self-pity for the human condition”? He has a point: the songs that seemed to pour out of MacGowan between 1984 and 1987 – the period covering the Pogues’ first three albums and most of the music on which his reputation rests – really were as extraordinary as Fearnley suggests. He could write things like The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn, which opened 1985’s Rum Sodomy & the Lash – a gripping, chaotic phantasmagoria that lasts barely three minutes, but manages to touch on pre-Christian Irish mythology, the disabled 18th-century criminal Billy Davis, Austrian tenor Richard Tauber and the saga of Frank Ryan, an Irish Republican who became a Nazi collaborator. And he could write songs like Streams of Whiskey or Sally MacLennane, which, at least while they played, made a life of permanent alcoholic stupefaction seem hugely exciting and inviting.

Songs that ‘made a life of permanent alcoholic stupefaction seem hugely exciting and inviting’ … Shane MacGowan in March 2022. Photograph: Ellius Grace/The Guardian

He could write, too, furious political songs about the Troubles, most notably 1988’s Birmingham Six, which was recorded as a medley with fellow Pogue Terry Woods’ more measured Streets of Sorrow. And he could write extremely funny songs, including The Body of an American’s vivid depiction of an Irish-American wake: “The men all started telling jokes and the women they got frisky / By five o’clock in the evening every bastard there was pissky.”

But his real speciality was the kind of song that shone a light into ruined lives, a stall he set out on the Pogues’ debut single, Dark Streets of London, self-released in 1984, when they were still called Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for “kiss my arse”). It’s a song that takes place against a backdrop of “pubs and the bookies”, and draws on MacGowan’s own experience of mental illness – he had spent a period in a psychiatric hospital as a teenager. “Every time that I look on the first day of summer,” he sings, “Takes me back to the place where they gave me ECT / And the drugged-up psychos with death in their eyes … I’m buggered to damnation and I haven’t got a penny”.

Shane MacGowan, far left, with the Pogues in 1984. Photograph: Steve Rapport/Getty Images

Bookies, pubs, drugs, mental illness, penury, the grimness of London: this was the milieu to which Shane MacGowan would keep returning, the world that seems to lurk in the background of even his sweetest lyrics, including the beautiful love song A Rainy Night in Soho. The standard bore’s dismissal of MacGowan involves pointing out that he was educated at the same Tunbridge Wells prep school as plummy actor Dan Stevens and, briefly, at Westminster school, but that misses the point completely. He never set himself up as a poet of the working class: what he wrote about, again and again, was a kind of underclass of outcasts (“the junkies, the drunks, the pimps, the whores”, as The Boys from the County Hell put it), a subsection of society in which people from all walks of life can end up. He wrote about its inhabitants with a startling empathy and tenderness, drawing the listener into their stories: the dying rent boy of The Old Main Drag, who’s been “shat on and spat on and raped and abused”; the drunk, pitifully spilling out his story of lost love and war in A Pair of Brown Eyes; the dissipated, quarrelling couple in the deathless Fairytale of New York, surely the most improbable subject for a perennial Christmas hit in history. “I’m very, very aware that there but for the grace of God go I,” he once suggested. “I’m just lucky. Because I’m no different from them. I just get to behave like they do in front of 24,000 people, that’s all.”

Moreover, MacGowan set his lyrics to tunes that sounded as though they had been around for ever. Musically, at least, it was often hard to distinguish the Pogues’ originals from the traditional material they charged through at such a ferocious clip that some voices in Ireland suggested they were desecrating the music rather than performing it. (The alternative point of view being that the Pogues’ other great achievement, besides MacGowan’s songs, was making folk music seem vital and exciting to a post-punk audience at a moment in history when the folk scene was supposed to be in terminal decline.)

MacGowan at 19 as editor of punk rock magazine Bondage at his office in London. Photograph: Sydney O’Meara/Getty Images

How he did it all remains something of a mystery. In Fearnley’s telling, one minute MacGowan was desperately casting around for ideas for a new band, after the collapse of his rockabilly infused punk quartet the Nips – at one particularly desperate juncture, he floated the idea of playing “Cretan music” while dressed as Roman gladiators – the next, he handed the accordionist a tape containing a selection of songs that would become Pogues anthems.

For the next few years, MacGowan wrote one great song after another, until eventually – and perhaps inevitably – his notorious lifestyle started having an effect on his creativity. He had, by all accounts, begun supplementing his vast alcohol intake with equally vast quantities of LSD as well as harder drugs. There are still fantastic MacGowan-penned tracks on the last two albums he made with the Pogues – White City on 1989’s Peace and Love; Summer in Siam on 1990’s Hell’s Ditch – but it’s hard not to notice that the highlights on the former are the work of his bandmates, most notably Jem Finer’s Misty Morning, Albert Bridge, and that MacGowan’s vocals on the latter are a slurred, largely incomprehensible mush: producer Joe Strummer apparently had to edit them together syllable by syllable, which makes you wonder what they originally sounded like. The Pogues fired MacGowan on the subsequent tour.

MacGowan with his then girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke in London in 1999. Photograph: Dave Benett/Getty Images

He seemed to pull himself together long enough to record another fantastic album with his new band the Popes, whose approach was noticeably rockier: 1994’s The Snake was home to the frantically thrilling That Woman’s Got Me Drinking and Haunted, an old Pogues song rerecorded as a duet with Sinéad O’Connor that suggested MacGowan could come up with, of all things, a stadium rock anthem if he set his mind to it. But diminishing returns set in on the follow-up, The Crock of Gold, on which MacGowan sounded exhausted, and that was more or less that. For the remainder of his life, MacGowan vacillated between lucrative reunion tours with the Pogues, sporadic solo live performances and guest appearances, occasionally with bands who had the Pogues’ music somewhere in their DNA: American “Celtic punk” band Dropkick Murphys, Irish “folk metal” quintet Cruachan. More sporadically still, he threatened to make a new album – with a backing band called the Shane Gang, and, most recently, Irish indie-rockers Cronin – which never materialised.

He also gave occasional interviews, which were invariably sullen or bad-tempered – Julien Temple’s 2020 feature-length documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan gave the wider public an idea of just how sullen and bad-tempered the musician could be – and which never shone any light on the process or inspiration behind the incredible burst of creativity he’d essayed in the mid-80s.

Behind the cartoonish popular image, there was something unknowable about Shane MacGowan, which was clearly exactly what he wanted. After all, the Pogues had always dealt in mythology: from the besuited image MacGowan described as equal parts “Brendan Behan and typical Irish grandad” to the Irish legends his lyrics relocated to the back streets and pubs of north London, to the persistent rock’n’roll fable of the damned, beautiful loser. It made sense that their frontman became a mythic figure himself.