Tears on our cheeks but the songs will live on

Cavanman's Diary

For close observers of Shane MacGowan, his passing last week wouldn’t have come as a huge surprise.

MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, posted a photo online a couple of weeks ago showing Shane in his hospital bed, with an accompanying note stating that he was getting home. It was sold, at first glance, as a positive development but the picture spoke louder than the caption.

MacGowan looked absolutely dreadful - gaunt, pale, clearly very unwell. It was clear, if you were willing to read between the lines, that he was going home for the last time. I gasped when I saw the photo; my immediate impression was that, in his own words, he wouldn’t see another one.

I’ve been a devotee since my cousin first gave me a CD of If I Should Fall From Grace With God when I was in fourth class. I’m not really a big music fan – no more than the average - but MacGowan was more than a musician.

I wouldn’t say I developed an obsession but I definitely had a deep interest. I devoured his music, his interviews, watched the gigs online and read the books, of which there were several, including one obscure and quite strange effort from an American academic. There were a few documentaries made about MacGowan too which I watched so often that I found I had memorised the words, like his songs.

Something about the man just resonated. Even though he was long past his prime, I went to see him all over; in Dublin a few times, in New York, even in Virginia and Scotshouse. I once travelled to Belgium to see the Pogues only for them to pull out the night before the festival, a not uncommon occurrence.

That time in New York, they played at the Roseland Ballroom, around St Patrick’s Day. I met someone in a bar on the day of the concert who had attended the night before and he said it was awful; Shane slurred his words and missed whole verses as the band kept playing, trying to bring him back in.

So we approached the gig with trepidation – and it turned out to be raucous, just brilliant. MacGowan was on form, the venue was jammed.

I remember going to the merchandise stall and seeing a lovely t-shirt – but the Cavanman in me recoiled when I found out it was $40. No chance was I paying that, holidays or not.

The atmosphere was charged. At a Pogues gig, everyone got drunk – even by the time I started attending them, by which stage many of the crowd were middle-aged and presumably had more sense.

The night descended into a blur. The songs went on though the lights were gone, to quote his own lyric. The drink was flowing, American measures. I woke up in a hotel room the next morning; when I went to the bathroom, I realised I was wearing the 40-dollar t-shirt.

It’s an over-used phrase but I do believe MacGowan was a genius. As a child, his reading was precocious and his school essays – he won a scholarship to Westminster, a prestigious English prep school – were brilliantly-imagined.

But, of course, he was self-destructive. The constant touring schedule after ‘Fall From Grace’ (one year, they had only three weeks off) broke him. His sister, Siobhán, has stated that he never came back from that particular tour.

Eventually, his bandmates sacked him in a hotel room in Japan. His response – “what took you so long?” – was typically droll. Despite his hellraiser image and punk background, he famously hated confrontation.

In hindsight, that was a crossroads. Richard Balls’s biography, A Furious Devotion, casts fresh light on the post-Pogues years and that era does not reflect well on MacGowan.

While most of the Pogues developed issues with alcohol – Spider Stacy, Cait O’Riordan and others all quit the drink, as did Phil Chevron, who died young and was never cut out for that hellraising life anyway – they overcame it. But MacGowan doubled down and became a serious drug addict, too.

From the mid-1990s on, he went into a spiral. In a fog of drink and heroin, there were some shocking episodes; two young men died from overdoses in MacGowan’s flat in London and another in a hotel room in Paris where his new band, The Popes, were touring.

Joey Cashman, also a heroin user at one time and MacGowan’s manager, is quoted heavily in the book. They lived together in Ireland and the picture he paints of that time is particularly grim.

“We shared one room for two years. We just watched films and argued over the remote. I used to say ‘what time is it, Shane?’ and he’d say ‘I don’t f**king know. It’s… ten.’

“And I’d say, ‘Is that the morning or the night?’”

Early in 2004, members of MacGowan’s fan club actually launched a petition calling for Cashman’s removal as manager, a move supported by Shane’s father Maurice.

Producer Steve Lilywhite referred to him as a “true Bohemian” – “if he wakes up at seven o’clock in the morning, it’s purely coincidence” – and his attitude could be summed up in the lyrics of Sunnyside of the Street, from the Hell’s Ditch album.

“As my mother wept,

It was then I swore,

To take my life as I would a whore, I know I’m better than before,

I will not be reconstructed.”

Was he reconstructed? Never – he lived on his own terms but the defiance dimmed and then disappeared almost entirely. O’Riordan once predicted that he would “make old bones” – many of his descendants lived into their 90s – but he seemed to simply lose the will to do so in recent years.

An artist once so alive had been creatively dead for 25 years and, by the end, he just lingered on, in a zombie-like state.

He fell – he was always falling – some years ago and suffered a break. It could have been fixed but it seemed he was unwilling or unable to detox before the surgery. Terry Woods commented that “his body wouldn’t be able to cope with an anaesthetic”.

In the biography, the late Sinéad O’Connor, who, in the words of Pat Kenny, once “shopped him” to the police over his heroin use, painted a grim picture of where MacGowan was at.

Her thesis was that he didn’t want to die but didn’t want to live, either.

“I saw five years ago a man that had given up. His bed is faced towards his television, it looks like a coffin.

“On one side he’s got his drink, on the other side his drugs. He’s got the remote and he just sits there, 24/7,” she said.

In hindsight, there is a pathos to that. O’Connor was wracked by her own demons and is now gone, too. Her beautiful duet with MacGowan, Haunted, will be on heavy rotation in the coming weeks, I’m sure.

While it is presumed MacGowan was financially well off thanks to his publishing royalties, he lived in what his biographer described as a modest rented flat in Dublin 4, rarely leaving it.

He spent his days topping up with wine, watching movies (westerns were his favourite). He adored company but was not a conversationalist; he just liked to know there was someone else there and took comfort in that.

In the book, Sharon Shannon related how, on tour while doing A Rainy Night In Soho, MacGowan would point at her when he sang the line “Some of them fell into Heaven” and at himself for the following one, “Some of them fell into hell.”

“That made me sad for him,” she said, simply.

In the end, as we say in these parts, it was happy for him. MacGowan had a deep faith and believed in the afterlife, despite his obvious hedonism verging on nihilism, his “lust for vomit”.

But his songs will live on. A few weeks back, driving through Tipperary, I saw a sign for Shinrone and it reminded me of The Broad Majestic Shannon, in which the village is mentioned.

A thread runs through most of MacGowan’s songs. He pummels the listener with bleak imagery and dark themes and then, near the end, swaddles them with light. In that one, he talks of “whiskey on Sundays and tears on our cheeks” (what a line) but then:

“Take my hand and dry your tears, babe,

Take my hand, forget your fears, babe,

There’s no pain, there’s no more sorrow,

They’re all gone, gone in the years, babe.”

For the greatest Irish songwriter, the pain is gone. The furious devotion is over. For maybe the first time, MacGowan is at rest.

Main photo: Shane MacGowan and Janet Redmond at the Virginia Pumpkin Festival in 2009. Photo: Adrian Donohoe