Tom Dunne: Shane MacGowan was the greatest songwriter of his generation
Shane MacGowan at 19. (Photo by Sydney O'Meara/Getty Images)
When will 2023 be done with us? First Christy from Aslan, then our beloved Sinéad, now Shane MacGowan, the greatest song writer of his generation. The boy who, born on Christmas Day, spent his 18th Christmas “anxious and upset” in a psychiatric hospital in London, but who would later write the greatest Christmas song of all time. And now he has left us, just before the Christmas that would have marked his 66th birthday.
In the hubbub and confusion of The Pogues’ success and live shows, it sometimes took a while for the din to settle and the songs to come through. But when they did, they were startling. “He wrote these?” you found yourself asking.
Shane managed to put into words and music the Irish emigrant experience, not just in the UK, but worldwide. And it wasn’t just loneliness and regret; it was heady excitement and adventure, “streams of whiskey”, hooleys and bad company, youth, and wild passion. It was the morning brought the loneliness.
He was a man of seemingly endless contradictions. He was born in the UK for a start, in Pembury, near Tunbridge Wells. He attended a fee-paying primary school and won a scholarship to Westminster in the precincts of Westminster Abbey, a school that has produced three British prime ministers, and Helena Bonham Carter.
Encouraged by his father, Maurice, he was an advanced reader at an early age, and a gifted writer from the off. A schoolteacher, so impressed by an essay Shane wrote aged nine, decided to keep it for posterity.
He developed a strong connection to his mum’s Irish roots and would spend his early years and later summers at a cottage in Co Tipperary called The Commons. It was the setting for many a traditional late night hooley at which, Shane claims, by the age of six he was standing on a table singing rebel songs and drinking Guinness.
That may or may not be true, but six months after leaving the psychiatric hospital he found himself at a club in London, where Joe Strummer’s band, The 101ers, were supported by a then unknown band called The Sex Pistols.
He said it was the band he’d been waiting for all his life. Injured at a punk gig one night, a photo of his face, steaming blood, made him a punk icon. His band The Nips didn’t quite make it and he drifted into late night sessions in London flats where the idea of band playing Irish music with a punk rock attitude took root.
It was an idea as brilliant as it was simple: The Pogues were born.
They had the good luck to fall under the production skills of Elvis Costello for their second album, Rum Sodomy and The Lash. It, and in particular two songs, ‘A Rainy Night in Soho’ and ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, coupled with the single ‘Fairytale of New York’, catapulted the Pogues to huge international success.
It was not a success Shane could really handle. His sister did not want him to go on the subsequent three-year tour. In truth, the brother she had known and loved was about to disappear.
Shane had developed a literary skill early in life, he listened to conversations around him, watched the lives of others. He was part punk, part poet, part Behan. It was a heady mix. He wrote with a beauty and an eye for our common humanity that was startling to behold.
Shane MacGowan will be as much a part of our Christmases as Dickens or Capra, forever, and we will think of him then and raise a glass.
