Photos of Shane MacGowan, the lead singer of The Pogues, in his hospital bed, were doing the rounds on social media recently. Tributes will pour in for the next few days to his brilliance as a songwriter. But there is a sense of waste, too.
By Miles Salter
Feature photo by Steve Pyke via Facebook
Dead at 65. He might have lasted longer had he not abused his body so much when he was young. He looked ghastly in those final photographs – pale, ghostly, a step away from the grave. In a way, it’s impressive that he made it to his mid 60s. “People have given Shane six months to live every year since he’s been 19,” Pogues guitarist Philip Chevron said in 2006.
MacGowan left the world with one of the most universal and moving Christmas songs. Fairytale of New York was originally released in 1987 and has been a stable of the Christmas season ever since.
As the front man of The Pogues, MacGowan became a huge figure in the 1980s. Anarchic, wilful and fixated by booze, he was a kind of pop anti-hero, a million miles from East 17 or Jason Donovan. The band welded the punk raucousness of The Clash with Irish folk music. “God said I’m the little boy he’s going to use to save Irish music and take it to greater popularity than it’s ever had before,” MacGowan said in the documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan. The Pogues, led by MacGowan’s voice and lyrics, were full of attitude but also capable of moments of sublime poetry. Shane knew his stuff – he had worked his way through Irish writers like Joyce, Yeats and Heaney. He was regarded very highly by other songwriters. When he was ill, Bruce Springsteen visited him.
The Pogues enjoyed chart success and anarchic performances. Along the way, MacGowan blazed a trail with booze and drugs. His 1987 masterpiece, Fairytale of New York put more into four minutes of music than most lyricists manage in a lifetimes. The song simmers with humour, melancholy and pathos as a pair of lovers dwell on life’s missed chances. ‘I could have been someone,’ sings MacGowan. ‘Well so could anyone,’ responds Kirsty MacColl. Everybody who hears those lines gets the sense of thwarted ambition, the way life can sometimes be heartless.
Part of what makes the song different is that is celebrates life, with one foot in the grave. It’s beautiful, celebratory and sad – all at once. It echoes life, summarising something of the strange situation we find ourselves in – mortal, but aspirational. Hopeful, but anchored by the human condition. The song makes me cry, but it will be so much sadder this year. David Quantick, the writer and music journalist, met MacGowan several times. “He combined underdog punk attitude with visionary lyricism: sometimes he was in the gutter looking at the stars and sometimes he was in the stars looking at the gutter,” said Quantick.
RIP Shane MacGowan, a brilliant but self-destructive one off.
Miles Salter is a York-based writer and band leader of Miles and The Chain Gang.
