Shane MacGowan is dead at 65 and it seems like a miracle he made it that far. It wasn’t just the boozing, which started when he had his first Guinness at 5 years of age in Tipperary, it was a lifetime of reckless behaviour. There was the time he jumped out of a moving car onto a motorway while on LSD. Or when he fell off a train in Japan in 1991 after too much sake and was promptly fired by The Pogues. His wife Victoria resuscitated him “a couple of times”, he said. Basically, he could have died any year since 1976 and no-one would have been surprised, but it came this year, at a point where he was appreciated, revered actually, as the great artist he was.
