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Born: December 25th, 1957
Died: November 30th, 2023
Shane MacGowan, who has died at the age of 65, made an extraordinary journey from being a rank outsider to one of Ireland’s most feted sons. Misunderstood initially and charged with disrespecting the country’s traditional music, The Pogues became a source of immense pride for Irish people across the globe and their wild-eyed frontman revered as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. His 60th birthday celebrations at the National Concert Hall in 2018 saw President Michael D Higgins present him with a Lifetime Achievement Award and an all-star cast turn out to pay their tributes. Despite having not released any original material for 25 years at the time of his death, his place in the country’s hall of fame had long been secured.
Facts proved hard to come by when it came to his back story, not helped by MacGowan’s own mythologising about his early days. Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born in Pembury Hospital, near Tunbridge Wells in Kent, on December 25th, 1957, and his arrival was reported in the local paper. “Because he was the Christmas baby, the matron, the doctors, the nurses, the mayor actually, came to give him gifts,” his mother Therese later recalled. “And he was photographed and hung up on the wall in the hospital – a sign of things to come.”
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Therese and her husband Maurice were already living in London when their first child arrived. Maurice, a Dubliner, had been offered a job in the personnel department of retail chain C&A at its headquarters in Marble Arch. So that summer, with Therese pregnant, they had followed in the footsteps of so many in Ireland by emigrating to England. They moved around and for a time lived on the Sussex coast before eventually buying their own home in Langton Green, a quintessential middle-class suburb, near Tunbridge Wells. By then, Shane’s sister Siobhan had been born, and it was in this detached house the family settled and became part of the local community.
Therese was ambitious for her son and rather than enrolling him at the local primary school, he was sent to the fee-paying Holmewood House. Set in 12 hectares (30 acres) of rolling countryside, it had opened as a boys’ school just after the second World War and had boarders, although Shane joined as a “day boy”. The headmaster Robert Bairamian was a flamboyant figure who Shane remembers as being “heavily into Irish books” and he was quick to identify the literary prowess of his young charge. His English master Tom Simpson was astonished by Shane’s writing and the books he was reading at home, which included Dostoyevsky, DH Lawrence and James Joyce. Tellingly, he kept Shane’s schoolbooks and essays, something he had done with no other pupil.
[ Shane MacGowan’s boyhood: ‘At 11 he was reading Dostoyevsky’ ]
“I said to Bob, ‘We have an amazing young man here and we have got to do something about it’,” Simpson said in an interview for my biography of Shane. “I think Shane did enjoy his last few years at Holmewood because eventually the rest of the staff began to realise how brilliant he was.” Some of Shane’s writing was published in the Holmewoodian, the school journal, and when he was 13, one of his stories won a prize after being entered for a competition in the Daily Mirror.
If the words he penned at school presaged his future path, it was during his regular visits to his mother’s family in Tipperary that his imagination was fired and the seeds of The Pogues were sown. The Commons, a cottage in the townland of Carney, near Borrisokane, was a microcosm of bucolic life in rural Ireland and a world away from suburban Kent. And it was in this pastoral setting, wrapped in the warm embrace of his adoring aunts and assimilated into farm life by his uncles, that Shane found his identity. He took part in music sessions in its ancient kitchen, listened to stories about the Irish rebellion and was taken to Mass, instilling a deep faith that he would cherish to the end. His sister and author Siobhan MacGowan recalled: “He would stay there for six weeks, and we’d pick him up off the bus and he’d smell of the fire and he’d have the cap on an all that kind of stuff. So, he did stretch it out, he did love it there, [he] was very influenced by it all.”
In 1971, an already music-obsessed Shane went to his first live concert, a thunderous show by Mott The Hoople at Tunbridge Wells Town Hall, and the family traded their large suburban home for a flat in the Barbican. This move and Shane’s next educational one proved disastrous. Westminster School was one of the most respected in the country and had produced six British prime ministers and a rollcall of other notables. However, for a long-haired teenager dabbling in drugs and drawn to the seamier side of life, such a staunchly traditional institution was a wholly unsuitable choice. “Westminster was awful – they were such w**kers,” Shane told me. “I didn’t want to go but Holmewood wanted to get me in. It was good for me and he [Bairamian] liked the idea of a ‘foreigner’ getting into an English gentleman’s school.”
Shane was highly intelligent and capable but had no interest in academic achievement. His time was spent hanging around in London’s West End, buying drugs and then distributing them around the school. Struggling with it at home, his parents believed a lenient attitude to his experimentation with drugs might work best, but when he and a friend were caught in possession, the police did not. Fifteen-year-old Shane found himself up before the juvenile court and he was fined and put on probation. For Westminster, this was the final straw, and he was expelled. One final throw of the dice was made when he enrolled at Hammersmith College of Further Education in September 1974. There, his attendance was sporadic, and he was thrown out for drawing on the walls of a corridor with a felt pen. His colourful interaction with education was over.
What came next, however, dealt him a far heavier blow and left a legacy that would last his entire life. His preoccupation with drugs was having a serious impact on his mental health and while the Valium prescribed by the family GP helped him sleep, he was in an increasingly fragile state. So much so that when his parents asked if he thought he needed professional help, he agreed. He spent six whole months, including his 18th birthday, receiving psychiatric treatment at Bethlem Royal Hospital and surrounded by people receiving ECT (electroconvulsive therapy). The experience haunted him. “He was always fearful of being sectioned,” recalled Pogues bassist Darryl Hunt. “I remember when I first met him in the early days, he talked about that. His biggest horror was being sectioned because it’s your own family putting you into a serious space – quite frightening.”
By the time he came out, Therese had temporarily gone to live in Tunbridge Wells and Maurice and Siobhan had moved into a flat off Oxford Street. Shane was in limbo, recovering from his time in hospital, and picking up odd jobs. He urgently needed a new direction, and it came in the back room of The Nashville in Kensington in April 1976. Shane had headed there to see Joe Strummer’s band The 101′ers, but when he saw support band The Sex Pistols, it was an epiphany.
Renowned as a heavy-drinking hellraiser, Shane was in private a shy, introvert who loved nothing more than the company of friends and a good movie
He hacked and dyed his hair and hurled himself into punk’s vortex. In clubs and venues around Soho, the self-styled Shane O’Hooligan became a scenester and his notoriety went to another level when he was photographed at a Clash gig in a clinch with a female friend and blood pouring from his ear. Desperate to be on stage rather than looking up at it, Shane joined his friend Shanne Bradley’s group The Nipple Erectors, later renamed The Nips. As it did for so many others, punk provided a launchpad for Shane and the songs started to flow. Eventually, the band became lost in the maelstrom, but Shane had got the taste for performing and his next move would bring him the recognition he craved.
While Britain was swooning to the sounds of the New Romantics, Pogue Mahone were breaking into pop’s car and hotwiring Irish traditional music with the rebel spirit of punk. They gained traction in pub backrooms and were picked up by Stiff Records boss Dave Robinson. Rebranded as The Pogues, they were invited to provide tour support for Elvis Costello & The Attractions in the autumn of 1984, the perfect platform to promote their debut album Red Roses For Me. Commercially, it made little impact, but awareness had been built and the follow-up Rum Sodomy & The Lash, produced by Costello, earned them mainstream success. Their irresistible cover of Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town got them on Top of the Pops, and the album was hailed by the critics.
Manager Frank Murray’s recruitment of experienced Irish musician Terry Woods precipitated a progression of the band’s sound from a traditional to a more experimental one. This period of transition also coincided with the completion of a song by Shane and banjo player Jem Finer, which they had spent a couple of years working up. Fairytale of New York was recorded as part of the sessions for the album If I Should Fall from Grace with God and was a masterclass in storytelling, told through the experience of two Irish emigrants. The single made number two in the UK, but reached the top spot in Ireland, something of which Shane was immensely proud. A framed disc marking one million sales of the record hangs proudly in the Ballsbridge flat that he shared with his wife Victoria Clarke.
Fame came at a heavy price for Shane’s physical and mental health, and gruelling tours made him want out of the group. He was sectioned and treated at St John of God in Dublin after a doctor told his sister he had weeks to live if his drug and alcohol intake continued. The band’s tolerance over his behaviour had worn thin and snapped during a tour of Japan in 1991. Shane was summoned to a hotel room and relieved of his duties. “What took you so long, tsscchh?” he replied.
As The Pogues teamed up with former Clash frontman Joe Strummer, Shane re-emerged with The Popes, a group of musicians who would back him on his songs. They made two albums – The Snake and The Crock of Gold – and were a popular live act. But while Shane continued to play with them and later re-joined The Pogues, his offstage activities seemed to have stunted his creativity. A fall in 2015 then left him unable to walk and the bulk of his time was spent watching films – one of his greatest pleasures – and being cared for by Victoria.
Despite his severe mobility issues and frequent spells in hospital, Shane still made the occasional public appearance. Indeed, the final chapter of his life saw a series of significant events.
In January 2018, he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by National Concert Hall patron and President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, on a night when guests including Johnny Depp, Bono and Nick Cave performed his songs. A few months later he was in London receiving an Ivor Novello inspiration award in another nod to his songwriting genius. The recognition of his extraordinary contribution to music was completed the following year when The Late Late Show broadcast a special tribute, underlining Shane’s significance in the story of Irish music and the intrinsic relationship between his songs and those he heard via RTÉ and Raidió na Gaeltachta during those childhood visits to Tipperary.
The most personal event to take place in his final years was his marriage to Victoria, 35 years after they first met. Out of the blue they flew to Copenhagen in November 2018 and were married in the town hall in front of a select gathering of family and friends. “I think Shane was genuinely moved by it, really moved, and he became different after it,” said Victoria afterwards. “He actually softened, and I think he felt more loved because of it.”
Renowned as a heavy-drinking hellraiser, Shane was in private a shy introvert who loved nothing more than the company of friends and a good movie. He had a generous, kind spirit and through his life exhibited the values of old Ireland that he picked up at The Commons.
He will be forever synonymous with Christmas and New York, thanks to his unforgettable and unorthodox contribution to the festive songbook. However, his legacy stands taller than the Empire State Building and broader than his beloved River Shannon, so momentous was the impact of his writing and the rebel spirit of The Pogues. MacGowan kicked open the door to Irish music for millions who might never have experienced it, instilled pride among the Irish in Britain at a time when so many felt cowed and made Ireland itself cool. From the Dropkick Murphys and The Libertines to Fontaines DC, he was an inspirational figure, and the timeless nature of his songs and their preoccupation with the human experience mean they will resonate with generations to come.
Richard Balls is the author of A Furious Devotion: The Authorised Story of Shane MacGowan, published by Omnibus Press