Shane MacGowan the poet musician of dereliction who became a mythic figure
about 2 years in The guardian
The former Pogues frontman created, for a brief period, songs of incisive beauty before addiction led to his ejection from the band, although his genius shone once more with the Popes• Pogues songwriter and Irish music legend dies aged 65• Shane MacGowan – a life in picturesIn 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 phanatasmagoria 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. Continue reading...
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