With his broken teeth and large ears, Shane MacGowan, who has died aged 65, might have seemed the most unlikely frontman for a pop group. But the Pogues never set out to become teen idols. They grafted punk style and attitude on to the raucous end of Irish folk music, as typified by their heroes the Dubliners, and Shane, in particular, gave the band a reputation for drunkenness.
Just like the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, who revolutionised Irish folk music from the distance of the New York diaspora, the first-generation, London-based Irish community spawned the Pogues. Indeed, MacGowan astutely observed that the band could not have originated in Ireland.
The key to the Pogues’ success was the songwriting of MacGowan, in such masterpieces as Streams of Whiskey and A Rainy Night in Soho, but above all in Fairytale of New York, on which he duetted with Kirsty MacColl.
The song, first released in 1987, when it reached No 2 in the charts, became a highlight of the band’s Christmas gigs, with rereleased recordings becoming more poignant after MacColl’s death in a speedboat accident in 2000. Fairytale of New York has subsequently re-entered the charts many times, and is frequently voted one of Britain’s favourite Christmas songs.
MacGowan was born on Christmas Day in Pembury, Kent, while his parents were visiting relatives. He grew up in Tunbridge Wells, often visiting family back in County Tipperary. His mother, Therese (nee Cahill), was a prize-winning Irish dancer and singer and former model, and his father, Maurice MacGowan, an executive at the C&A retail chain, loved literature and poetry. Shane was an avid reader; he attended the fee-paying Holmewood House prep school, near Tunbridge Wells, where his creative writing skills were first identified. He then won a scholarship to Westminster school in London at the age of 14, but a year later was found to be in possession of drugs and expelled.
MacGowan was by now already a keen music fan, and he drifted through casual jobs in a record store and as a barman, living in a succession of squats and shared flats. In 1976, he achieved notoriety when a girlfriend cut his earlobe with a broken bottle during an early Clash gig. Photographs of MacGowan, his head covered in blood, appeared in the press.
By the following year, MacGowan had formed his own band, the Nipple Erectors, later renamed the Nips. They released four singles and an album, but never made much of an impression beyond London pubs and clubs.
MacGowan had a problem with the names of his next two bands. Singing Irish rebel songs to a pub full of off-duty British soldiers when your band is called the New Republicans was not a good career move, and they should perhaps have stuck with the original name, the Millwall Chainsaws. The third band was originally called Pogue Mahone, which in Gaelic means “kiss my arse”, a clear expression of their Irish heritage and punk attitude.
MacGowan was knowledgable about a broad range of Irish folk music, but he found bands such as the Chieftains and De Dannan too clean-cut, much preferring the atmosphere of a rowdy pub session and the raucousness of the Irish folk band the Dubliners, who influenced his new band’s style and repertoire. But, in any case, the folk scene was an irrelevance to Pogue Mahone, whose natural constituency was the young, first-generation Irish community in London.
The band made its debut in October 1982 at what was then the Pindar of Wakefield pub in Gray’s Inn Road. The performance was described in the rock journalist Carol Clerk’s history of the band as “shambolic but spirited”. At first, the band members could scarcely play their chosen or allotted instruments, but they were all keen to learn and soon attracted a local fanbase in London. By the end of 1983 they were voted “band most likely to succeed” by the trade paper Music Week, although at the time they had not secured a record deal. Pressure from the BBC and their newly arranged record label led to a slight name change, and they became the Pogues.
Only half of the Pogues had any connection with Ireland – none of the original members had been born there. Though often described as an “Irish band”, they were really a London band who drew on an emigrant Irish experience for both style and repertoire. This was seen most markedly in MacGowan’s own songwriting – he was writing as an outsider in his own community.
Their repertoire of Irish traditional songs was largely suggested by MacGowan, and many of them came from the Dubliners, such as The Auld Triangle, Muirsheen Durkin and Waxie’s Dargle. Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town, originally written (in 1949) about Salford, is now often thought to refer to Dublin after MacGowan’s rendition with the Pogues. The band’s folk instrumentation, which included banjo, accordion and tin whistle, were unusual in the rock and pop venues in which they performed.
Photograph: GAB Archive/Redferns
Alongside the Irish traditional material were MacGowan’s songs. Appearances were deceptive – MacGowan was well read, with a sound knowledge of Irish literature, which he used to good effect in his songwriting. He was seen, and perhaps regarded himself, as the latest in a line of Irish literary figures – such as Brendan Behan – whose creativity was boosted by alcohol.
MacGowan was lauded as one of the best songwriters of the late 20th century. His early songs, such as Streams of Whiskey, Boys from the County Hell, A Pair of Brown Eyes, A Rainy Night in Soho, The Sick Bed of Cúchulaínn, The Old Main Drag and Sally MacLennane, all display similar themes – alcohol-fuelled, often with a hint of despair, set in the seedy side of London life. Yet the fast-paced tunes and MacGowan’s growling, in-your-face delivery, gave a celebratory atmosphere to the songs, suggesting that the lifestyle portrayed – often close to MacGowan’s own – was unapologetic.
Clerk summed it up: “A large part of the Pogues’ appeal was the whiff of the bar-room wafting through their lyrics, the irrepressible gallop of their up-tempos and the teardrops in their ballads.”
Their first three albums were for Stiff Records: Red Roses for Me (1984), Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall from Grace With God (1988) contained a rich mixture of Irish folk and songs by MacGowan, each one better than its predecessor, with Fall from Grace reaching No 3 in the album charts. Their transition from the world of London clubs and pubs to international concert halls had been aided by the group’s bass player Cait O’Riordan’s romance with Elvis Costello, with whom the Pogues toured. He also produced their second album.
Through 1984 and the whole of 1985 they gigged in Britain, Ireland and continental Europe, and performed at Glastonbury. They subsequently toured the US, Australia, New Zealand and Japan. At the Vienna folk festival in 1985, the Pogues met up with the Dubliners, and this led, in 1987, to a joint single, The Irish Rover, which reached No 8 in the UK singles charts in March. Further chart success followed in December, when Jem Finer and MacGowan’s Fairytale of New York reached No 2 (but was kept off the Christmas No 1 spot that year by the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Always on My Mind).
The heavy drinking that affected some of the other band and crew members became contained by performance demands, but MacGowan was a loose cannon. He frequently missed flights, rehearsals, photoshoots and sometimes even gigs. As the fame of the Pogues and the critical acclaim of his songs reached their height, MacGowan’s cocktail of alcohol and drugs was a matter of serious concern. On tour in New Zealand in 1988, he painted his hotel room, face and chest blue, apparently because “the Maoris were talking to me”. Shane and his girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, were spending free time in Thailand, where drugs were plentiful, but during the year he was hospitalised in Dublin and London.
MacGowan was gradually withdrawing from his close involvement in the band; he was more erratic on stage and brought fewer songs to the studio for their fourth album, Peace and Love (1989), which gave the rest of the band an opportunity to develop their own writing. By now his drug use had extended to acid, but he was still capable of writing good songs, such as White City, a homage to the London greyhound track.
But in 1989, MacGowan missed a six-concert tour with Bob Dylan in California, when the airline refused to let him on the plane. The Pogues’ next album, Hell’s Ditch (1990), included a Thailand trilogy of songs that seemed to indicate he had lost the basis of his London Irish pub-based inspiration.
Matters came to a head in September 1991 when on tour in Japan. MacGowan missed two of the four concerts, and the rest of the band sacked him. He was not surprised – “What took you so long?” he asked. The band soldiered on, but the cracks had already been revealed. The Pogues could not have continued with MacGowan, but they also could not continue without him. After several band members left, they disbanded in 1996.
Meanwhile, MacGowan was involved in collaborations, with artists including Nick Cave, the Breton singer Alan Stivell, Van Morrison, Christy Moore and the Jesus and Mary Chain, before forming a new band, the Popes. His album The Snake (1994) included his love song Aisling and – on the extended edition the following year – a reworking, featuring a duet with Sinéad O’Connor, of the Pogues’ Haunted. The single That Woman’s Got Me Drinking featured the actor Johnny Depp on guitar. There was a further Popes album in 1997, The Crock of Gold.
There was no let-up in the drink and drugs, and MacGowan suffered with stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis. In 1999, O’Connor reported him to the police for heroin use and, although MacGowan was furious, it served as a wake-up call.
A Pogues reunion tour, with MacGowan back as the band’s frontman, prior to Christmas 2001, led to occasional gigs in 2002, another tour in 2004, and appearances in Japan, Spain, the US, Ireland and the UK in the years following. There were no new recordings – the audiences were happy with their extensive back catalogue.
A biography, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, written by MacGowan and Clarke in the form of a conversation between them, was published in 2001, and the documentary If I Should Fall from Grace: The Shane MacGowan Story, had a cinema and then DVD release, also in 2001.
A further film documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan, aired on BBC television in 2021, and a new biography, A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan, by Richard Balls, was published the same year. A limited-edition book of his artwork and handwritten lyrics, The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold, was published in 2022.
MacGowan fractured his pelvis in 2015 and thereafter used a wheelchair. Six years later he broke his right knee and then tore the ligaments in his left knee. In January 2018, the National Concert Hall in Dublin hosted a celebratory concert for MacGowan’s 60th birthday, with the performers including Cave, Bono, Depp and O’Connor. As a finale, MacGowan himself sang the folk song Wild Mountain Thyme, before the Irish president, Michael D Higgins, presented him with a lifetime achievement award.
Later that year, MacGowan married Clarke. She survives him, along with his sister, Siobhan, and his father.
• Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan, singer and songwriter, born 25 December 1957; died 30 November 2023
