Remembering Shane MacGowan

My only encounter with the late Shane MacGowan was not of the close kind. It was 2012, after The Pogues had played Tanzbrunnen in Cologne and I had arranged an interview with Pogues accordion player James Fearnley who had just published a book on the Band. To quote Fearnley in the interview “I rang Shane up to tell him that I was finally writing a book about us and that I would probably be on the unstinting side, he said: ‘I don’t give a fuck about that.’“. The atmosphere backstage was not, you won’t be surprised to hear, particularly cosy. The doorman had told all the fans who asked for autographs outside that Shane had already gone back to the hotel – those astute enough to point out they could plainly see his reflection in the mirror inside were answered with a tired “Do I have eyes in the back of my head?” Until the next fan asked and got the same answer.

Inside and interview over I decided to go for broke and ask for an autograph (hey, the press are sometimes fans too!). There was a small group of men chatting with Shane, but his wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, was quickest to spot my arrival with a concerned eye. It was clear no one knew who I was (James had disappeared by this time). Undaunted, I asked Shane to sign a photo that I’d taken and dedicate it to my girlfriend. He was clearly not firing on all cylinders, but smiled a typical Shane MacGowan smile that immediately settled all the nervous faces around him and, as the ‘XXX’s’ he was writing went up the arm of my photo, I said “Steady on Shane – that’s my girlfriend you know” to which he gave a MacGowan laugh from the heart.

In those few minutes of meeting him, he seemed like a little boy lost. Not the man who wrote songs that even his bandmates initially thought were Irish traditional ones because they seemed so authentic. Not the Man who wrote the most realistic Christmas song of all time. Not a man whose charisma captured entire audiences and whose words spoke for the down-at-heart and down-on-their-luck teenagers of a generation in Ireland, London and beyond.

I was just reading an interview with Shane from 1989 in Hot Press Magazine where his major plan was to get rich, give up touring and do nothing – preferably in Thailand where the bars are open all day and night. Even then he hated the relentless touring. There was of course a brief Shaneless Pogues attempt but it didn’t work out. I could see why when the band played at Bonn Museumsplatz in 2011. He wasn’t always stable on his legs or coherent in his vocals – but for the twenty minutes or so that they played without him the Pogues were just a good band – nothing more or less. His presence took them up a notch. I almost saw them in Portsmouth on an early tour (when Cait“ O’Riordan was bass player) but they were too punk for me in those days. What a whirling dervish of a man MacGowan must have been then – and how I still kick myself for my poor judgement!

A fall in 2015 put MacGowan in a wheelchair and effectively put paid to future touring and Pogues concerts. He got that free time he craved, never having to be somewhere for a tour or a recording. He got too that steady income from ‘Fairytale in New York’. But at a cost to his health that he could never recover from. In that 1989 interview, MacGowan says he never wrote when he was sober, but insisted that eventually the body adjusts to the alcohol intake. Did all those great songs come out of a bottle so to speak? and why did they suddenly stop? Ian Hunter once told me that songs have to come to you, you can’t rush them. Why did they stop coming to Shane MacGowan? Such a genius, such a conundrum.

“I could have been someone. Well so could anyone” But no one could ever be, or will ever be, quite like Shane MacGowan.