2023-11-30 13:00:28
– Shane MacGowan dies aged 65
Shane MacGowan once said that he was given Guinness to help him sleep when he was four years old. Alcohol and then drugs shaped his life. Nevertheless, he became one of the best songwriters of his generation.
Published today at 2:00 p.m
Living at the limit: Shane MacGowan at the Montreux Jazz Festival in 1995.
Photo: Keystone
He wrote about Ireland, about the culture and history of the Emerald Isle and sympathized with nationalist militants. But singer Shane MacGowan from the Anglo-Irish punk band The Pogues became famous with a Christmas song about a city in the USA. “Fairytale Of New York”, sung with Kirsty MacColl, became a global hit.
Now Shane MacGowan is dead, as his wife Victoria Mary Clarke and the Pogues announced on Instagram on Thursday. He died that night at the age of 65 after a long, serious illness. “Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest poets,” said Irish President Michael D. Higgins in tribute to the artist. Singer Nick Cave called him “a true friend and the greatest songwriter of his generation.”
The Pogues formed in the early 1980s. The founding name Pogue Mahone was an anglicization of the Irish Gaelic expression póg mo thói – “kiss my bottom”. They became known as the opening act for The Clash and with their cover version of the song “Dirty Old Town”.
“Fairytale Of New York”, which became a hit, is forever linked to the Pogues. The opening scene of the music video in a sobering-up cell also addresses one of the brilliant musician MacGowan’s biggest problems: alcohol addiction. He once said he started drinking when he was four years old – his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep. But alcohol abuse made him “incredibly creative,” he said in 1990.
Fittingly born on Christmas Day 1957 to Irish emigrants in the southeastern English county of Kent, MacGowan’s lyrical talent was noticed early on. “They put me on the kitchen table to sing and the song was well received,” MacGowan once told the Guardian newspaper. He was three years old at the time. He later received a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster School in London – but was soon expelled for drug possession. Then he wanted to become a priest, but ended up in punk. He was happy then, he said in an interview. He doesn’t see punk as chaos. “I think of it as natural life.”
The punk unpacks
MacGowan caused a stir in 1976 when a picture of him with a wounded ear at a Clash concert was printed in the music magazine “New Musical Express”. He first played in the punk band Nips before later founding Pogue Mahone together with ex-Madness member John Hasler. They dropped the original name to avoid being censored by the BBC. For “Derry Girls” actress Siobhan McSweeney, MacGowan was the “voice of London for us Irish”. “When I was afraid to move here, he lured me with songs about fortune hunters, drunkards, lovers, poets and villains. This is my place, I thought,” she wrote on the short message service X.
“I was ashamed, I never had the courage to join the IRA”
MacGowan long sympathized with the Catholic-Republican terrorist organization IRA. “I was ashamed that I didn’t have the courage to join the IRA. The Pogues were my way of dealing with it,” he once said. The leader of the Sinn Fein party, long seen as the political arm of the IRA, Mary Lou McDonald, praised the musician as a narrator of Irish history. Ireland has lost one of its icons and the world has lost one of its greatest songwriters.
Shane MacGowan at an exhibition in London 2022.
Foto: Scott Garfitt (Invision/AP)
MacGowan’s health suffered enormously in the late 1980s due to his alcohol and drug use. When he didn’t show up for a concert on a Japanese tour in 1991, the band fired him. “In the end I hated every second,” the musician told the Telegraph in 1997. «I didn’t like what we were playing anymore. I refused to bend and become a professional.” But his drug problems were so great that the Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, who died four months ago, reported him in 2000 for heroin possession – in order to get him off the drug. Years later, MacGowan thanked her for it. Now two of Ireland’s most famous musicians have died in the same year. President Higgins therefore spoke of a very special pain.
Shane MacGowan 2013 in Dublin.
Foto: Peter Morrison (AP)
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