Shane MacGowan and I sat in near silence for two hours last year. We were at his home, just outside Dublin. I’d been warned by his wife, the writer Victoria Mary Clarke, that he was depressed and anxious, not really in the mood to talk. But nothing could prepare me for this. He scoffed at my questions or snorted with contempt. He looked at Victoria despairingly when I asked about his mix of Englishness and Irishness. “God, these questions are fucking …” He decided the sentence wasn’t even worth finishing. I tried to talk about his most famous song, Fairytale of New York. “It pisses me off when people always talk about it,” he said in that famous mumbled slur. I asked if people were right to refer to him as a genius. “Probably, yeah,” he said. What made you a genius? “God! Fucking ridiculous question!” He had a point.
Sometimes he just laughed, like a snore. “Chhhhhhhhhhhhhh.” Throughout, he slurped his gin and tonic noisily from an oversized glass. Schhhhhhlrrrrp.
