‘We’d roll joints and watch Netflix with him!’ Irish folk artists on the creative genius of Shane MacGowan

‘There would be all sorts of rumours flying around. ‘He’s in Eamonn Doran’s with Huey from the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. They’ve been on the lash for three days, and they’re still going …’”

Daragh Lynch of Irish folk group Lankum is reminiscing about his teenage years speculating on the movements of Shane MacGowan in Dublin. As a Rimbaudian rogue and colossus of Celtic song, MacGowan packed millennia of rare magic into his 65 years. Now, as one of the most luminous calendar years for Irish music in an age nears a close, Lynch is just one of several folk music heroes saluting an outlier who forged the path forward.

“With Shane, there was just an absolute lack of pretence on every single level,” he says. “At no point was he trying to be anything for anyone. He never tried to fit into some sort of category. From the first moment to the last, he was a pure artist coming from a genuine place. That’s much rarer than you might think.”

Although he was born in Kent, MacGowan’s aversion to artifice was nurtured by Irish music. Spending six years of his childhood immersed in the sound of traditional folk song in his mother’s home in rural County Tipperary, he gained a deep gratitude for a lineage on which he and the Pogues would, 20-odd years later, masterfully flip the script with the albums Rum, Sodomy & the Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace With God.

Among the young Irish folk upsetters who consider MacGowan’s verse in songs such as A Rainy Night in Soho and A Pair of Brown Eyes akin to holy writ is Andrew Hendy of Dundalk balladeers the Mary Wallopers. While teenage Lynch mainly relied on Dublin whispers on his whereabouts, Hendy and his brother, and fellow Mary Wallopers’ member Charles, got a little more up close and personal with the man behind the lore.

Up close and personal … The Mary Wallopers. Photograph: Sorcha Frances Ryder

“We used to go to Shane’s house and roll joints for him,” says Andrew. “We would watch Netflix with him. He’d be sitting there watching Ancient Aliens, laughing at all these conspiracy theorists. It was all incredibly normal and comfortable to hang out with him watching telly. I think he was surrounded by a lot of people who wanted to kiss his ass, which he found patronising. We told him to fuck off a few times, as he did us. That’s called friendship here in Ireland.”

It’s unclear if it stretched to a mutual appreciation of Ancient Aliens but Lisa O’Neill is another musician who spent quality time with MacGowan. Having named her album Heard a Long Gone Song after a line in one of her favourite Pogues’ songs, Lullaby of London, it’s hard to think of an Irish folk artist who has so filtered the imagery and sheer incision of MacGowan’s craft in recent years.

“I think he was one of the best songwriters that has ever lived,” says O’Neill. “He was a genius and a true poet. He was brave and bold and wrote about the side of life that he saw. He was emotionally intelligent and socially informed. He had compassion and empathy for the underdog. And he didn’t really write about himself. He wrote about the point of view of others – people in poverty, homeless people, old people, hunger strikers, prostitutes and rent boys. Shane saw it all and he said it all.”

‘Shane was part of a great lineage that included the Dubliners’ … John Francis Flynn. Photograph: Steve Gullick

Alongside O’Neill, John Francis Flynn – whose masterfully surreal second album Look Over the Wall, See the Sky is garnering huge acclaim – is another soloist drawing from an almost scholarly knowledge of Irish musical tradition. He sees MacGowan’s power as rooted in a certain resistance.

“So much of how Irish music is framed is contrived,” says Flynn. “There’s often so much paddywhackery and misrepresentation, but Shane was always so honest with it. That was key. He was part of a great lineage that included the Dubliners. They were two artists who pushed their music but knew it was all about the source material and the source spirit. The essence of Ireland is actually in there.”

It’s an energy that hung heavy in the air at Shane MacGowan’s 60th at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in 2018. Doubling as a kind of unspoken canonisation, it was a star-studded musical celebration in the company of everyone from Bono and Nick Cave to Sinéad O’Connor and Irish president Michael Higgins. Among the lucky few handpicked to perform for MacGowan and a sold-out crowd was O’Neill, who performed a sorcerous take on Fairytale of New York alongside Glen Hansard and members of the Pogues.

“I was pinching myself,” reflects O’Neill. “I had a grin that I don’t think I’ve seen ever since. There was just so much love for Shane in the room. Everybody who took on his songs that night put their heart and soul into it. I remember thinking, ‘He wrote all of that.’ And still, we’re only covering some of it. I’m so glad he got to hear and feel that that night.”

‘He was one of the best songwriters that has ever lived’ … Lisa O’Neill. Photograph: Claire Leadbitter

The fabled knees-up looms large in the memory of all those in attendance, invited or otherwise, like the gatecrashing John Francis Flynn (“Daragh Lynch snuck me and a mate in the back door”). Lankum stunned with a version of the Pogues’ perennial ode to emptiness and awareness, The Old Main Drag.

“We showed up late, which fucked the schedule a bit,” recalls Lynch. “There was a big dinner and the last two people to sit at this big, circular table were me and my brother Ian. Sat there across from us was Shane, who wouldn’t take his eyes off us the whole time we were trying to eat. It was one of those stares where you feel like it was burning through your soul.”

This was just another aspect of MacGowan being, as Flynn puts it in perfect Irish, “a gas [or funny] character”. At the beating heart of that temperament was a warmth that Lisa O’Neill had first-hand experience of in recent years.

I always felt so honoured to be in his company. Anyone who met him knew he was a really lovely manLisa O’Neill

“Last Christmas was the last time I saw him,” she says. “We were singing to raise money for the Simon Community for the homeless, which Shane did each year. I also did it over the last few years, so I would always see him at Christmas. It would usually be followed by a bit of a session and some songs afterwards. We got on well, and I always felt so honoured to be in his company. Anyone who met him knew he was a really lovely man.”

As various end-of-year lists will likely no doubt soon reveal, Irish folk music has been blossoming since that fabled night at the National Concert Hall in Dublin five years ago. Firmly at the fore is Flynn, whose recent album includes Kitty, a Pogues album closer and folk standard that MacGowan saved from obscurity back in Tipperary.

“I was talking to Spider Stacy at a Lankum gig recently,” says Flynn. “He told me that Shane’s sister, Siobhan, had told him the history of the song. It has travelled so far in time; it’s reached out and touched so many lives. When you sing traditional songs, you’re connected with people from the past. Everyone just sang them, but no one knows who wrote them, so you’re connecting with all those people when you’re singing. That’s what Shane was doing as well.”

Like the average Irish wake, MacGowan’s best work married sadness and revelry, and more often than not, it aligned with a social conscience. A seer who left pretence at the door, he knew that the daily life of the common person – not least for those living in a diaspora – was anything but quotidian. Listening back to Pogues’ songs like Thousands are Sailing (“Where e’er we go, we celebrate / The land that makes us refugees”) each second verse feels like a friend to the marginalised.

In a way, he was able to continue the Irish folk tradition because he spent a long time away from IrelandAndrew Hendy

It’s a defining part of MacGowan’s legacy on which President Higgins shone a bright light on Thursday. Posting on social media, he mused on how the genius of MacGowan’s music was how it captured “the measure of our dreams”, specifying the challenges of the emigrant experience. It was a pitch-perfect tribute highlighting that, for MacGowan, national pride was never a hall pass for bigotry or exclusion.

Hendy, of the Mary Wallopers, sees that deeply lyrical celebration of the human experience, whether in Ireland or far beyond it, as a vital part of the magic. “In a way, he was able to continue the Irish folk tradition because he spent a long time away from Ireland,” says Hendy, whose band’s searing second album, Irish Rock N Roll, was released in October. “He had heard all this incredible traditional music growing up. The next thing he was over in London in the pub scene, writing songs like Streams of Whiskey, where he dreams of shaking [writer and Republican activist] Brendan Behan’s hand. Shane had the special ability of being able to look at it all from both the inside and the outside.”

‘He was a pure artist coming from a genuine place’ … Lankum, with Darragh Lynch second from left. Photograph: Patrick Bolger/The Guardian

Lynch echoes the theory of distance as muse. When Lynch’s brother Ian moved to London to live in squats, the parallels became clear. “Being an Irish person in London, he got homesick and suddenly found himself listening more to artists like the Pogues, Christy Moore and the Dubliners,” Lynch says. “I think that’s the same thing that Shane experienced with his lyric writing.”

As Christmas Day – which would have been MacGowan’s 66th birthday – hurtles into view, there’s the small matter of what’s certain to be the ramped-up ubiquity of Fairytale of New York. She may have done it justice and then some back in 2018, but O’Neill sees it as a special opportunity to appreciate the majesty of the bigger picture.

“It’s one the best songs ever written but Shane wrote songs better than that,” she says. “It’s established, and it’s amazing, but there’s also the likes of Rainy Night in Soho, Lullaby of London, and Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six. I just hope that in the coming days the media will have a percentage of the intelligence that Shane had to use this time to look at his life’s work. It really is very special, and it’ll serve as an education for future songwriters and poets.”