Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context (Preface, part two)
To that end we talked a good bit about Irish history. Much of our conversation was about Tipperary history, especially in regard to the Black and Tan War in the 1920s. In one regard Shane was easy to interview. I’d prepared nearly 100 questions just in case he wasn’t talkative or was terse in his answers. I needn’t have worried. He warmed to the subject and talked at length, often going off on tangents for ten or fifteen minutes at a time. At times I was tempted to interrupt him but thought it unwise. I did, however, have to interject periodically to guide the conversation and keep it on track. At times it was difficult to follow his line of thought as he tended to go in several directions without noticeable transitions. Frequently he would stop in mid sentence, searching for just the right word before completing a thought.
Sometimes Shane would cram so much new material into the answer to a question that I was unable to follow up on new topics he referenced. When he told me, with obvious satisfaction, that as a child he had met Dan Breen, I asked a general question about anybody he might have known who had fought in the Irish Revolution or the Irish Civil War. His answer hit on most of the themes this book explores. “My own family were very much involved… They’d all been really young from 1916. Our place was a safe house… In the country the fighting took place everywhere. Practically everybody I knew as a kid, certainly in the country, was active back in the day. The Lynches and the Deans were related somewhere along the line. They were the local – who were – who pulled off a couple of the biggest ambushes on the Black and Tans and Auxies in North Tip. People at the time were also having this huge – it followed the Land League, which was claiming back the land from the landlords, who were generally absentees. My great grandfather was one of the local leaders of the Land League. And the Land League had incited the Young IRB (Irish Republican Brotherhood), which was formerly known as the United Irishman, the Young R&D, various names – White Boys. Supposedly secret organizations, but everybody knew who they were. It was like it was happening yesterday. People were always telling me stories. They always told the right stories about other people. So then you go and check with the other people and they tell you the stories about the first people.”
In one rambling response, which I’ve edited here for brevity, MacGowan touched on themes that permeate his art: the IRB which gave birth to the IRA; the absentee landlords who hired the Irish to farm the confiscated land they’d once owned, a confiscation that led directly to the horrendous potato famine, waves of Irish emigration, and increased hatred of the British; the old Lynch “ramblin’ house” where musicians stopped by all hours of the night, playing and singing while IRA men hid from the British; and the land itself, Ireland. Moreover, he indicated that he was immersed in these themes as a young boy, soaking up the oral tradition of Irish Republicanism in the stories the adults around him told.
MacGowan heard an awful lot of Irish rebel songs in that 350 year-old stone, ramblin’ safe house. For my money, nobody sings an Irish Rebel song like Shane. Most people in the know readily admit that Shane MacGowan is one of the greatest songwriters of our time. Many, however, overlook the power of his singing. Listen to his performance of “Boys of Kilmichael” in London’s Brixton Academy on St. Patrick’s Day, 1994. Then compare that to any other version of the song – Jimmy Crowley, Donie Carroll, or Oliver Kane. There is no comparison. The others are pretty. MacGowan makes you want to go out and kill an Englishman. Isn’t that what Irish rebel songs are supposed to do?
Every country has its share of patriotic war songs. The Irish raised the genre from that of a convenient propaganda vehicle to an art that became intrinsic to a movement, the Republican movement. The closest parallel I know is the American Civil Rights Movement, whose song catalogue pales by comparison. One thing that distinguishes Irish patriotic songs is their universality. Songs like “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” are about kicking butt for God and feeling good about it. But outside of that context, it has limited appeal. The United Methodist saw that several years ago and removed it from their hymnal. Patriotic Irish songs are not narrowly defined. Irish Republicans blame nearly all the island’s problems on the English, perhaps justifiably so. That blame allows songs about emigration, songs about the famine, songs about heartless landlords, and of course songs about battles to fall into the box labeled rebel songs.
The tradition goes back long before the Easter Uprising of 1916. Theobald Wolfe Tone, leader of the 1798 Rebellion, often called the “Father of Irish Republicanism,” wrote rebel songs. In days past the streets and markets of every Irish city were full of singers lamenting the plight of the nation. A German traveler in 1842 wrote in his journal, “In Kilkenny there were literally twice as many ballad singers as lamp posts standing in the street.” In those days less than half of the island’s population could read, so the songs were vital in reporting and propagating resistance against the British. The British did their best to stamp out the rebel songs. Arrests were commonplace. At the trial of a songwriter from Limerick in 1831 the judge concluded that “nothing can be more injurious than inflaming the minds of the lower orders by disseminating ballads…with an intent to create sedition against the government, and disunion among His Majesty’s Protestant and Roman Catholic subjects.” In many cases the seditious words weren’t considered necessary to inflame those lower orders. Dinny Delaney, a blind uilleann piper born in Ballinasloe in 1819 was nicknamed the “Rebel Piper” due to his many arrests for playing “seditious tunes.” In County Limerick, in 1881, a six-year-old child was arrested for whistling “Harvey Duff,” a song famous for infuriating the British. The following year, in the same county, a constable struck and killed an eight-year-old girl with his baton when she whistled the tune.
Given that type of law enforcement it’s not surprising that there was often a fine line between rebels and outlaws celebrated in political ballads. A case in point is “The Lamentation of the Two McCormacks Who Died Innocent in Front of Nenagh Goal.” The song commemorates an infamous case that took place in Shane MacGowan’s beloved Tipperary. In October of 1857 William and Daniel McCormack, brothers in their early twenties, were arrested for the murder of a Mr. Ellis. There was little evidence they shot Ellis, an English landlord’s agent despised in Templemore, the brothers’ hometown. Suspicion fell on the McCormacks since they were thought to be holding a grudge against the English because their teenage sister was pregnant by an Englishman. They maintained their innocence to the end. In May they were hung from the top floor of the Nenagh Prison gatehouse. In the months following the execution public outrage grew, making Republican martyrs of the McCormacks. That summer a rally outside Nenagh Prison drew nearly 15,000 protesters. Many years later, on his deathbed, an Irish immigrant living in New York confessed to the crime.
Rebel songs played a huge part in the Irish Revolution and subsequent Civil War. Padraic Pearse, the teacher-poet who was chosen to proclaim the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office (GPO) during the Easter Uprising, edited an anthology called Songs of the Irish Rebels in 1914. He reported that in fighting lulls during the Easter Uprising, volunteers under siege in the GPO kept up their spirits by singing rebel songs like “A Nation Once Again,” “The Memory of the Dead,” and “God Save Ireland.” New songs were written soon after the events that inspired them. When 15 of the 16 uprising leaders were executed, “Convict 95” was written about Eamon de Valera (he was spared because of his United States citizenship) while he was still incarcerated. Ernie O’Malley, an officer in both the Revolution and the Civil War, was surprised to hear songs about his own recent exploits sung at dances he attended. He wrote that people were moved by “the fierce exultance of song expressing a buried national feeling.”
A basic premise of this book is that Shane MacGowan, throughout his life, has been so moved. Moreover, much of his songwriting and his impassioned vocals on the traditional songs he has covered have so moved others. While in my view this is nearly too evident to bother stating, there was a time when it was a controversial position to take. Throughout the Pogues’ heyday in the 1980s the band members were at pains to play down their Irishness. Given that the IRA was setting off bombs in Belfast and England at the time, that is understandable. Jem Finer told the late Carol Clerk, “To be perceived as an IRA propaganda tool, self-appointed or otherwise, would have been a terrible thing. I mean, it would have been complete rubbish, but it would have been quite a liability to life and limb. I think we were at all pains to point that out.” In 1989 Spider Stacy told the Chicago Tribune, “Only a fascist numbskull would think that when Shane and I played together onstage that it was some kind of political statement.” It is not my contention that Shane MacGowan ever advocated blowing up anything. Nor would I call him anybody’s tool. It is my belief, however, that Shane MacGowan seldom takes the stage without making a political statement. And for the record, I’ve been called much worse than “a fascist numbskull.”
The Pogues publicity in the 1980s frequently pointed out that half of the band had no ties to Ireland, and the rest of the band’s ties were marginal. This book, however, is not about the Pogues. It’s about Shane MacGowan, who is decidedly not a marginal Irishman. He is the reigning monarch in a long line of hard drinking Irish writers. He is a living legend in Ireland, a national treasure, an icon, a household name. In a poll taken to determine what people like most about Ireland he topped the list, beating out James Joyce, Jameson whiskey, and Guinness. In 1981 I was shocked to see Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show casually chatting with Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. That’s it, I thought. Cash is no longer a Country and Western star. He is mainstream. He has hit the big time. He belongs to the ages. I felt the same when I saw Shane MacGowan chatting with Podge and Rodge, the plastic puppet hosts of a popular Irish TV show in late 2006. MacGowan had become far more than a gifted singer-songwriter. It was obvious that while the public perception of MacGowan had changed considerably over the years, Shane remained much the same.
Rodge: Do you think he’d manage a song at all? Do ya?
Podge: No matter how bullocks he is, he can always manage an old song.
Rodge: Oh God, you know what though? It’ll probably be a Brits out song. Wouldn’t it?
Podge: Oh God, you’re right. A bash the Brits and blow them to bits song. We’d never be able to show that! A disaster.
Rodge: Not at all. Not these days. No. They wouldn’t allow it. They wouldn’t put that out.
From there the scene cut to Shane singing “Boys of Kilmichael,” the traditional rebel song celebrating the day Tom Barry’s West Cork Brigade annihilated a platoon of 18 British soldiers.
A last point I want to make is that this book is written from the perspective of an American trying to understand Shane MacGowan’s work. In retrospect, it started in 1971 during the “troubles” in Northern Ireland. I was invited to my father’s friend’s house, John Shanahan, an Irish immigrant from Cork. The Shanahans were seeing off relatives, who after an American visit, were returning to Ireland. John’s young son Tony, now Patti Smith’s bass player, was there. The room where the party took place was cleared, except for a dozen or more straight-backed chairs that lined the walls. The Irish men and women there danced, sang, and told stores in the middle of the bare wooden floor. And they drank. The young parish priest, not long arrived from Ireland, probably drank the most. I’d never experienced anything like it, but I liked what I saw and heard. At one point I mentioned that one of my favorite singers, Van Morrison, was from Ireland.
“Where?” I was asked.
“Belfast,” I replied.
Things got quiet very quickly.
“Belfast is not in Ireland,” I was told.
I was confused. Nearly 40 years later there is still much about Ireland that confuses me. This book is an attempt to better understand Shane MacGowan’s homeland, and in so doing, better understand his work.
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Tue May 03, 2011 6:24 pm
