When The Pogues emerged from the north London squat scene in the early 1980s, they appeared to thousands of second-generation Irish like the answer to an unspoken prayer.
At a time of escalating political strife in Northern Ireland, IRA bombings in cities and towns across the UK and increasing anti-Irish racism, The Pogues were a revolutionary concept.
I can still remember the mixture of surprise and instant recognition I felt on hearing a band whose name was Irish for “kiss my arse” blasting out of daytime radio on a spring afternoon in 1984. This wasn’t the London that Ralph McTell had written and sung so beautifully about, this was the dark end of those same streets – a world of pubs and bookies, of rent boys and psychos – all swept along by a band of holy, acoustic joy and a singer with the voice of an unemployed angel.
Pogue Mahone (soon to be rechristened The Pogues) combined the filth and the fury of the Sex Pistols with the deep romanticism of the traditional Irish ballads that seemed to be part of my DNA. Here, at last, was a band who properly spoke to my post-punk heart and to my Irish blood and soul.
“Shane MacGowan was the first voice to give defiant and poetic expression to a community which had never really felt able to proclaim itself,” the Derry journalist and political activist, Eamonn McCann, would eloquently surmise 13 years later.
The fact that MacGowan was born in England, rather than Ireland, was an emotional wound that he would carry throughout his life. His parents, Maurice and Therese, were among the estimated 500,000 men and women who emigrated from Ireland to lands of supposed opportunity between 1945 and 1960. That accident of birth, and the forced dual identity that followed, would turn out to be an incredible blessing for the rest of us.
Born in England, in Pembury, Kent, on Christmas Day in 1957, MacGowan spent his formative years at his maternal grandmother’s home in northwest Tipperary – and that Carney Commons farmhouse became the keystone of his poetic imagination.
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“It was an open house,” he once told me. “There were hundreds of people coming in and out of it all the time. There was lots of gambling, drinking, music, dancing, singing and storytelling in the old-fashioned way . . . The way we were, as they say. I participated in the Rosary and the Angelus, and went to Mass on Sunday. I also participated in the commemoration of 1916 and the republican holidays, and if someone was playing a song I hadn’t heard before, I would ask them to write the lyrics out for me and I would learn it.”
It was in Tipperary, under the guidance of his aunts and uncles, that MacGowan read his first book, Dan Breen’s My Fight For Irish Freedom, and started to write stories, poems and songs about Irish heroes like Cúchulainn. “It was drummed into me from the start to never fall for this inferiority number, that we are a backward nation,” he continued. “I wouldn’t fall for it because of personal experience, which was from the mouth, the oral tradition.”
That oral tradition would be the rock on which MacGowan’s illustrious songbook was founded.
Brought back to England to start school, the six-year-old MacGowan grieved for the loss of Ireland and the company of his elder relatives, and couldn’t wait to get back to Tipperary during his school holidays.
At the age of 13, MacGowan wrote an essay dissecting the work of TS Eliot, which won him a scholarship to the elite public school, Westminster. Clearly an outsider, he was bullied for his accent and the way he looked and was relieved to be expelled a year later.
From then on, the teenage MacGowan spent much of his time wandering the dark streets of London – its seedy Soho underbelly being a particular attraction – and the things he observed and experienced there would eventually be transmuted into songwriting gold.
In April 1976, MacGowan unexpectedly encountered an early Sex Pistols gig, and threw himself headlong into punk. Adopting the name Shane O’Hooligan, he became a key face on the London scene, fronting The Nipple Erectors – later The Nips – and hinting at his future flair for writing romantic ballads when he penned Gabrielle.
By 1979, MacGowan was also doing occasional gigs with the Millwall Chainsaws, a speed and amyl nitrate-fuelled punk band fronted by Spider Stacy. Kindred spirits from the moment they met at a Ramones gig two years previously, MacGowan and Stacy shared a rapier wit and a love of The Dubliners.
Like MacGowan, the Chainsaws lived in a squat in Burton Street – a dead-end Victorian terrace between Euston and King’s Cross, just a two-minute walk from the Woburn Buildings that had been the London residence of WB Yeats.
Like Yeats, MacGowan was passionate about Ireland and the politics of his time. He had long held a deep desire to do something for Ireland, and for the music that he felt naturally emotionally involved with.
[ Shane MacGowan: The tail-end of a great Irish tradition?Opens in new window ]
In May 1979, Margaret Thatcher had been elected prime minister. She famously began her 11-year reign by quoting the peace prayer of St Francis of Assisi, but soon she would be involved in a bitter battle with Irish republican prisoners in the H-Blocks in Long Kesh, who insisted that their crimes were political and were demanding that “special category status” be reinstated.
It was against this background – on a night out in Soho in April 1981 – that MacGowan and Chainsaws drummer Ollie Watts decided that it was the perfect time to take Irish rebel music to the masses, and that Richard Strange’s Cabaret Futura, a performance art club on Wardour Street, was the perfect place.
The Chainsaws renamed themselves The New Republicans for the night, and their five-song set included The Rising Of The Moon, The Patriot Game and The Merry Ploughboy. As it turned out, there was a group of off-duty soldiers in the audience, who pelted the band with beer cans and chips. “Everyone was totally out of their minds on booze and the plugs got pulled and we got thrown out,” MacGowan remembered. “We were thinking of it as a one-off, but we quickly realised that if it caused that many people to be upset, or to wonder what the f**k was going on, then it was worth continuing with.”
By this time, the house that MacGowan and Jem Finer shared in Burton Street had been deemed unsafe to live in, but they’d both been rehomed around King’s Cross. It was there that the two of them carved out a new musical direction, using Irish and country influences and playing acoustic instruments.
MacGowan had moved to a one-bedroom flat, just another short walk from the building where Yeats had lived. Both Yeats’s and MacGowan’s residences looked out on to churches: the former to St Pancras; the latter to the Holy Cross. An aged cobbler had lived beneath Yeats; downstairs from MacGowan was a corner shop. Yeats’s walls were hung with brown paper and engravings by William Blake, Rossetti and Aubrey Beardsley; MacGowan’s were painted red and featured a Paddy Irish Whiskey mirror and a single portrait of Borstal Boy-era Brendan Behan.
The influence of Behan was evident from the start. “Last night as I slept/I dreamt I met with Behan,” MacGowan sang in the opening lines of Streams of Whiskey, the first original song he wrote for the band and one of many compositions to place his writing within the frame of a dream.
Behan’s own words were echoed in “the he-males and the she-males” of MacGowan’s other early original, The Old Main Drag. But there was also something truly unique about the brutal lyrical beauty of his description of an ageing Irish rent boy in Piccadilly Circus.
In these first two songs, MacGowan had aligned himself with the great London visionaries, from William Blake to Arthur Machen, who saw the city as a sacred place, capable of revealing the glories of heaven while simultaneously exposing the pits of hell.
Machen had been drawn to the same part of north London in 1923, and had declared: “He who cannot find wonder, mystery, awe, the sense of a new world and an undiscovered realm in the places by the Gray’s Inn Road will never find those secrets elsewhere . . . All the wonders lie within a stone’s throw of King’s Cross Station.”
The psychogeography boded well for Pogue Mahone’s first gig, which took place on the Gray’s Inn Road, at The Pindar of Wakefield (now The Water Rats), on October 4th, 1982.
(The stars must have truly aligned that night as another band of Irish extraction who would make an equally significant impact on the 1980s were also making their debut in Manchester: The Smiths.)
“There was an energy there, an energy that wasn’t going on at the time,” MacGowan told me later. “I don’t think we were any raunchier than The Dubliners or The Clancys or hundreds of bands who play up in Belfast or Derry, we were just putting a lot of aggression and youth into it and we were doing it in a highly charged atmosphere.”
Between 1984 and 1988, The Pogues released three wonderful albums – Red Roses for Me, Rum Sodomy & The Lash and If I Should Fall from Grace with God – and established themselves as one of the most exciting live acts in the world.
During this time, MacGowan’s songwriting had been increasingly influenced by the old Irish poets, particularly Aodhagán Ó Rathaille and Brian Merriman’s The Midnight Court. “Irish poetry is an oral tradition carried by the people,” he told me in 1987. “It doesn’t come from intellectual thought, it comes from the connection between emotion and seeing and feeling. The English language tradition of Irish poetry isn’t capable of transmitting the feeling, it just switches it into another language. I could go on about it for hours.”
It was clear that MacGowan was an extraordinary modern exemplar of that ancient Irish tradition. His songs revealed his love for names – placenames as well as personal ones: Dalling Road, Leeson Strip; Somers Town, a Sligo shore; Whitehall, Westport; Birmingham, Guildford; Arsenal reds, Tottenham blues; John McCormack, Johnny Cash; Ray Lynam, Richard Tauber; Brendan Behan, James Clarence Mangan; Shanne Bradley, Victoria.
The solemnisation of the seasons and specific dates also came naturally to MacGowan, and they often appeared in his opening lines. “One summer evening drunk to hell” (A Pair of Brown Eyes) and “As I walked down by the riverside one evening in the spring” (Lullaby of London). Then there’s “On the first day of March it was raining, it was raining worse than you could ever see” (Boys from County Hell), perhaps a particularly infernal cross on MacGowan’s mental calendar, as it was on that date in 1981 that Bobby Sands, the IRA’s leader in the H-Blocks and soon-to-be MP for Fermanagh and South Tyrone, began his fatal hunger strike. And more upliftingly, of course, there’s the immortal: “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank,” commemorating the night before MacGowan’s own birthday, and what a spectacular festive gift he gave to us in Fairytale of New York.
MacGowan’s 60th birthday celebration at the National Concert Hall in Dublin in January 2018 was an unforgettable occasion when the best of his songbook was performed by various friends, including Bono, Nick Cave, Sinéad O’Connor, Finbar Furey and Johnny Depp. At the end of the evening, MacGowan was visibly moved, his face tear-streaked, when he was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award by President Michael D Higgins. When the ecstatic crowd sang Happy Birthday to him, he left them with five words: “Ar son Dé agus Éireann.”
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan: For God and Ireland. A destiny fulfilled, and a legacy that will live forever.
