In Memoriam: Shane MacGowan (or "The Ballad Of Shane O'Hooligan")
Goddamn, that guy could write a song. And he got his training in the early London punk scene.
Upon the occasion of New York Dolls/Heartbreakers drummer Jerry Nolan’s death in 1992, on the heels of both his old bandmate Johnny Thunders’ as well as Stiv Bators’ passing, I wrote something like, “Large parts of my teenage record collection are dying.” Really, I should have changed that possessive pronoun, from “my” to “our.” My writing does have a specific audience, though I’d be hard-pressed to delineate the demographic. But I’d wager all who gather here share some common albums or CDs, and t-shirts and posters to boot.
Recently, those shelves, garment drawers and wall hangings feel like a mausoleum, don’t they? In the space of one week, we have lost The Dictators’ Scott “Top Ten” Kempner, later of The Del Lords, Tex And The Horseheads guitarist Mike Martt, and The Pogues’ poetic rascal Shane MacGowan. Intriguing, since all three brought punk sensibilities to bear on the rise of roots rock in the ‘80s.
MacGowan’s death’s been hitting me the hardest. He achieved the near-impossible: He made Irish folk music palatable to sensibilities like mine. I dunno about you, but despite my own Irish heritage, I could not stomach that sound. Really, I still can’t. I agree with Denis Leary’s jokes about it all sounding like, “And we drink and we drink and we drink and we puke/And we drink and we drink and we drink and we die.” (And let’s be honest — all evidence suggests Shane imbibed accordingly!) Stiff Little Fingers and The Undertones have always been more my idea of Irish music. But with his work in The Pogues, MacGowan could draw the connections between “The Irish Rover” and "God Save The Queen," between Johnny Rotten and Brendan Behan. (Which may be too easy, considering John Lydon, like Shane, is first-generation London Irish.) Or perhaps The Clash is a more apt correspondence? The covers Shane invariably resuscitated – when he wasn’t writing some of the most aching, literate ballads of our times, such as “A Pair Of Brown Eyes” – were Irish rebel songs. And it was his ear that Jane Crockford bit at The Clash’s Royal College of Art gig in 1976, propelling Joe ‘n’ Mick and the boys and the whole of punk into the tabloids, pre-Bill Grundy.
Shane’s old rockabilly-tinged punk band The Nipple Erectors, later The Nips, rocked pretty hard, too.
Reunion gig of the original Nipple Erectors at London’s 100 Club, May 6, 2008.
How could Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan — born Christmas Day 1957 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, UK to parents who’d barely immigrated from Ireland mere months before — ever be anything other than a classic gin-soaked Irish writer, whether it was songs or books? True, he was more of Britain’s Irish diaspora than the actual “drunken Irish bastard” (in Michael Corcoran’s brilliant phrase) he always portrayed himself as. Yet as even the most cursory viewing of Julien Temple’s 2020 Shane documentary Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan reveals, he related more to The Commons, the ancestral manse in Tipperary where he summered as a child, than England as a whole. (BTW, has any other film featuring an English-speaking subject required subtitles, so mush-mouthed and alcoholic his delivery became over time?) He was reading James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoyevsky as a boy. At age 11, MacGowan and his Dad took on reading Finnegan’s Wake as a fun father/son project. And it was during those summers at The Commons that an uncle inaugurated his career in alcoholism, bringing 5-year-old Shane pints of Guinness home from the local pub.
He was educated in private schools, eventually earning a scholarship to prestigious Westminster School, until he was expelled for selling drugs. He spent his 18th birthday in Bethlem psychiatric hospital, where he’d been for months, drying out. He reportedly walked out of his discharge from “Bedlam,” as it was nicknamed, and straight into a Sex Pistols gig.
“It was like fate that one of the first bands I should see when I came out was a buncha people who looked like they ought to be in a loony bin,” he joked in Crock Of Gold.
“Punk was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he continued. “Going to see the Sex Pistols changed my fucking life, changed loads of people’s lives. It didn’t matter if you were ugly. In punk, you were being constantly creative. You were speeding all the time. You were spending your whole life at gigs. There were new bands coming up all the time. Your life was one big fucking rollercoaster ride, one big buzz. It’s the closest there’s ever been to a total overthrow of all the shit, and I’m really glad I was around. We broke all those inhibitions they tried to drum into us. We saw through the fucking conditioning.”
“I was the Face Of ‘77,” he continued, recounting his life after he and his bleeding ear were all over the music weeklies. “I was respected and treated with awe by other punks.” And Shane O’Hooligan, as he was now rechristened punk-stylee, was all over the scene – editing Bondage fanzine, complete with real chains, safety pins, and razor blades affixed to its master layouts; filmed pogoing around in a Union Jack shirt and attacking The Jam’s drum kit, in Don Letts’ The Punk Rock Movie; interviewed in the Evening Standard; and forming The Nipple Erectors with Shanne Bradley.
From punkabilly debut 45 “King Of The Bop” to the end days as The Nips, MacGowan’s innate songwriting talent was immediately evident. It wasn’t yet quite developed into the epic, literate heights of later years, but those Nipple Erectors songs elevated them leagues above most second wave Britpunk outfits. Those songs displayed an innate grasp of ‘50s rock ‘n’ roll song structures as well as those of mid-’60s London r&b, hoisting them thousands of leagues above standard issue ramalama. They got especially effective once MacGowan’s ‘60s pop instincts kicked in later, as on the dole queue sockhop ballad “Venus In Bovver Boots,” and the brilliant “Gabrielle,” which borrowed chords and hooks from The Cars’ “My Best Friend’s Girl,” fitting them into a much-improved song.
So what happened? According to MacGowan in one of those many subtitled Crock Of Gold interviews: “We were alright, nothing to write home about. But at the time, we thought, ‘This is it. We got it sussed.’ But we were all 18 and 19 and 20. Your dreams were like smoke out of an opium pipe. And at the end of punk we were left with a load of old brothel creepers, a couple of bottles of Crazy Color, and our broken dreams. And the dole.”
According to Bradley, “Shane wanted to go more Irish and I didn’t want to join in, mainly because at the tender age of 19 Shane’s dad had intimidated me for many hours with Dubliners records in their smart Tunbridge Wells living room. Though one of the first songs we ever did in The Nips was 'Poor Paddy Works On The Railway.'”
Hence, it’s not surprising that MacGowan’s reaction to the newly emergent New Romantics was a ramalama version of Maurice MacGowan’s treasured Dubliners LPs. And that the name of that reaction was derived from “pogue mahone,” Gaelic for “kiss my arse.” As he put it, “You want Paddy, I’ll give you fucking Paddy!”
But think about The Pogues. They were to Irish folk music what Jason And The Scorchers and The Hickoids were to country music — proof you could take a seemingly alien source material and make blinding, rowdy punk rock out of it. Especially if that wellspring matter values brutal honesty, rebel spirit and a sorta barebones, raw musicality. Just give it a shot of fresh energy and visceral middle finger propulsion, and leave all the ragged edges out there. That’s what fueled those pogo-perfect early Pogues tunes like “The Boys From County Hell.” But what about pure punk Pogue-ian gestures such as their Alex Cox-directed video for “A Pair Of Brown Eyes,” which at root was a short-subject cinematic adaptation of George Orwell’s dystopian classic 1984, starring Margaret Thatcher as Big Brother?
Ultimately, it’s that sensitive, literate, amazing songwriting that drew us all in, alongside MacGowan’s poetically dissolute charisma. No one aside from Charles Bukowski wrote more beautifully of life’s underbelly. That he could apply such savoir faire and romance to a drunken couple spatting in an NYPD drunk tank on my favorite Christmas song “Fairytale Of New York” is just astonishing. Yes, and that includes the language he used that upsets some nowadays. Context is everything, and not every character in the world is very savory or enlightened. And just because a writer may use such terminology in his or her work is not indicative of his own views. He is depicting a situation and giving voice to characters, not stating his opinions. Shane MacGowan achieved pure alchemy with such raw material. This is absolutely beautiful, no matter what the censorious may think of it.
And now he’s gone. It shouldn’t be surprising, considering the man’s legendary appetites. This is no judgment — it’s quite possible the wastrel fed the poet, and vice versa. But we hadn’t seen much of him since he ended up in a wheelchair in 2015, falling down and fracturing his pelvis. And would his body have succumbed to things like encephalitis had he not punished it for years through Olympic gold medal-level hedonism? Hard to say. It was his choice, and you have to admire just how strong his artistry was through it all, and his rebelliousness.
Ultimately, it was the artistry that affected us all so deeply — those gorgeous songs. His dear friend Nick Cave, who performed an emotional “Rainy Night In Soho” at MacGowan’s funeral the other day, called him “the greatest songwriter of his generation.” Bruce Springsteen, appearing on Irish TV talk show The Late Late Show in 2020, remarked, “I truly believe that a hundred years from now most of us will be forgotten. But I do believe that Shane’s music is going to be remembered and sung.” Hard to argue with either.
But is there a more golden salute to the man and his music than hundreds gathered along his funeral procession in Dublin on Friday, singing “Fairytale Of New York?” I don’t think so. Rest in power, you turbo-Paddy. You’re already missed.
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