Unique and spellbinding... Shane MacGowan leaves a lasting legacy
Others passed too, but the deaths of Sinéad O’Connor and Shane MacGowan resonated very deeply for many, and I’ve been thinking about both a lot lately. It was almost inevitable Shane would pass on the approach to Christmas, a time where his best-known song became ubiquitous, but thankfully much of the coverage of his death has been dominated by the sheer breath of artistry he displayed.
Like his pal Sinéad, Shane had often been lazily tagged as troublesome and even as a wasted talent, but there is hardly anyone in Ireland who ever wrote so many classic songs.
Songs that will be sung 100 years from now; that’s hardly much of a waste. His health battles were well documented, as were his many decades struggling with addiction.
The one time I shared a stage with Shane, he was at a very low ebb. He was performing in the Savoy, with a broken leg, around 20 years or so ago — and it was a shambles. Very late to the stage and a bit of a caricature of himself, I found it very sad that the crowd played along as he poured a pint over his own head. DJing after, I couldn’t help thinking back to the previous time I saw him live, not long after his peak in the late 80s/early 90s on the Peace and Love tour. The Pogues were in buoyant form that night in the City Hall, at one of my first ever gigs.
The cracks were showing behind the scenes by that point, but to those of us in the crowd, it was a fantastic gig.
Like many who grew up in my era, I loved The Pogues, and they spoke to my generation very accurately. They were post-punk but probably more punk than anyone, and they were working with music genres that were very out of fashion when it came to the coolness stakes. Irish traditional music is very in vogue lately, but The Pogues were playing it in an era where mainstream pop and rock was as pompous as you could imagine. They were very authentic and a breath of fresh air, really.
As I drove around to gigs this last week, I was playing back many of my old favourites. My personal choices were usually the ballads and slower tracks, but the band’s genius was evident in the diversity of music genres they recorded.
They transmitted the energy of small dingy pubs to the world, and you could nearly smell the music. The songwriting and delivery was unique and spellbinding. Even a track as overplayed as ‘Fairytale of New York’ can still stir the soul 35 years on.
Creating timeless music makes an artist achieve immortality, and we will always think of Shane and Kirsty MacColl every Christmas.
Shane found a way to even make cover songs his own, though. I spent most of my adult life thinking it was he who had written ‘And the Band played Waltzing Matilda’, a track that sounds more spellbinding than ever in 2023 as pointless wars wage worldwide once again.
I listened to Eric Bogle's original recently, but it was Shane who made it his own with his version. Like Aretha Franklin taking over ‘Respect’ from Otis Redding, it rendered the original obsolete, as he sang about the futility of war with stoic disdain.
As for his own songs? What can I say? This is the man who wrote more iconic songs about London than even Joe Strummer and Mick Jones. He wrote about the emigrant experience from both sides, and he tapped into the alienation of the 80s as well as anyone. But the songs were always full of love as well as pain. I can’t hope to even try and explain how much these songs mean to me and I’m sure if you are a fan they’ll mean the same to you too. ‘Rainy Night in Soho’, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’, ‘Lullaby of London’, ‘Summer In Siam’, ‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, ‘Haunted’ and many more are songs that will be celebrated and sung forever.
What more can a songwriter ask for?
