Interview with Shane...New album??

[Fr. McGreer]

Victoria's podcast interview with Shane. He talks about a new album.........

Mundy also joins in.

http://victoriamaryclarke.podomatic.com/

[James Murphy]

Nice one, cheers. Been a long time since I've heard a new Shane interview.

[James Murphy]

As for the new album, I've burnt through all my hopes on that over the years, as they get smashed against the rocks. I'll get excited about it when I actually order it.

[Fr. McGreer]

As for the new album, I've burnt through all my hopes on that over the years, as they get smashed against the rocks. I'll get excited about it when I actually order it.

I Think it'll be 22nd Century Paddy at this rate

I love the bit in the interview when he says Hank Williams wasn't talking about stew when he wrote "Hey good lookin', what ya got cookin'?"

[Low D]

As for the new album, I've burnt through all my hopes on that over the years, as they get smashed against the rocks. I'll get excited about it when I actually order it.

I Think it'll be 22nd Century Paddy at this rate

Yeah, and there's been a whole other promise/attempt at an album since that one, where they actually went away and recorded (with "The Shane Gang", the In Tua Nua guys). This'll be number three. I plan not to get excited unless a release date is announced.

[Deisecelt]

Just listened to it there cheers But if there's not gonna be any songs about cooking or gardening I don't wanna know about it!!!

[James Murphy]

As for the new album, I've burnt through all my hopes on that over the years, as they get smashed against the rocks. I'll get excited about it when I actually order it.

I Think it'll be 22nd Century Paddy at this rate

I love the bit in the interview when he says Hank Williams wasn't talking about stew when he wrote "Hey good lookin', what ya got cookin'?"

I liked how, after half an hour of repetitive, half asleep sounding banter, he launched into a quick, apt description of the Eastern Roman Empire. There's still a few claws on the tiger, which is one of the reasons I'm always a little obsessive about checking new Shane interviews.

[NewJerseyRich]

oh no, you're not luring me down that road again Shane!

[addseo1115]

Glad to be here.
I am new member.
Thanks for sharing the great interview news.

[Fr. McGreer]

Glad to be here.
I am new member.
Thanks for sharing the great interview news.

Welcome on board the Raft

[johnfoyle]

http://www.matureliving.ie/leinster.html


Shane MacGowan: is God taking care of “the miracle man”



Catherine Gilmartin speaks to legendary Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan when he supported a gig for the homeless in Mountmellick, Co. Laois.




It has been said renowned hell-raiser Shane MacGowan would never talk about anything serious; but the hedonistic singer showed that this wasn’t strictly true when we met up recently at a fund-raising dinner in Mountmellick, Laois. The dinner was in aid of PATH, (Portlaoise action to homelessness), which is committed to reaching and assisting people forgotten by society throughout Ireland.

McGowan welcomes me to the dinner by taking my hand and kissing it! He still has a roguish charm and a rock star air about him; the ever-present cigarette makes a constant trip from his nicotine-stained fingers to his mouth, while he slowly sips some white wine from a tea cup. It has been said that God takes care of fools and drunks; if that’s true, God must have been working overtime the last thirty years taking care of MacGowan!! As the former front man and principal songwriter of the Irish rock band the Pogues, MacGowan is as famous for his alcohol consumption and other addictive substances as he is for his song-writing ability.

Whether MacGowan is just lucky or God is looking after him, it doesn’t take away the fact that he has been called Ireland’s greatest living poet. Shane’s best writing brings to mind the poetry of William Blake, “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” MacGowan replies: “If you’re asking whether drink and drugs have worked for me, I’ve got to say they have. I’m one with William Blake on this one. Drink and drugs and all that shit, it’s a short cut to the subconscious,” he throws back his head and laughs, a distinctive throat-clearing cackle followed by what sounds like a snake’s hiss......

As a fellow London Irish person Shane chats to me about the 1980’s and knocking around London. He recalls “I have memories of great times with my good friend, Chrissie Hynde (lead singer of rock band Pretenders), and I remember we used to frequent the White Lion in Covent Garden. They would let us go upstairs in the pub to escape mankind and be on our own to watch ourselves on TV; but the bloody staff would all come up on their break to look at us and we were looking at us!” Laughs his distinctive laugh again.......:

I am pleasantly surprised how well he looks considering the wild rock star life he has led for the last forty years! No wonder he is known as the ‘Miracle Man’. In the 1980s and 1990s there were so many rumours of MacGowan’s imminent death that Tim Bradford, (English author), wrote a book called ‘Is Shane MacGowan still Alive?’ No one, certainly not MacGowan, takes talk of his mortality seriously anymore. He says: “For the last 35 years I was supposed to have been dead in six months; but when all these bastards say you’re going to be dead in six months it tends to give you an incentive not to be. ...Let’s face it, I’ve got a charmed life. I’m a lucky bastard, know what I mean?” His distinctive laugh follows...

He reflects on his life and says he was born on Christmas Day to Irish parents in England in 1957. (Could this have been the inspiration for the famous worldwide hit ‘Fairytale of New York’ which be wrote and released in 1987?) This Christmas classic sung with Kirsty MacColl was named “Britain’s favourite Christmas song” by the ITV television network and was a Top Ten hit world wide. It rose to Number Two on the British pop charts in 1987 and remains the commercial and artistic peak of the Pogues’ career. Step into an Irish pub anywhere in December and at some point people will be raising a glass to the chorus.
Shane says his early childhood was spent living with relatives on the family’s ancestral farmhouse in County Tipperary. It was a deeply religious household, like most in rural Ireland in the 1960s.

In the evenings, MacGowan remembers, his aunts and uncles would gather in the parlour to pray the rosary together. He says: “Their wish was to have a priest in the family, instead of a drunk,” he recalls. “It was one step up for everybody if I became a priest.”

At six, he joined his parents, who had been forced to go to England in search of work, and left Ireland only coming back in the holidays.

Shane picks up the story: “I was brought up mainly by my mother’s family in Tipperary, because although my parents both had jobs in England, they were very unhappy there and wanted me to have as much happiness as possible before I had to go to school. The family home in Tipperary was a safe house for the old IRA, during the Black and Tans war; my uncle Mick had been the local commandant. It was always an open house – people would come around at all hours and there would be dancing and card-playing and boozing and singing. It was like living in a pub. I was smoking and drinking and gambling before I could talk. And that is how I became a religious maniac and a total hedonist at the same time”.

He continues: “My sister Siobhan arrived when I was five. I was jealous as hell because she got all the attention and I wanted it. I called her “it” for most of her childhood. But I think that is a natural thing for kids. We get on very well now: I can’t imagine a better sister”.

His family were all very literate; his father had gone to university and was very well read. Shane learned to read when he was very young and was regarded as a gifted child. He won a scholarship to Westminster school by writing essays. He continues the story: “At Westminster, I started doing pills and acid and going to the pub. I didn’t last there very long. I got nicked for smoking a joint and was kicked out”.

As the child of immigrants, MacGowan grew up between worlds, not fully Irish by virtue of his accent, not fully English by virtue of his last name and, crucially, his religion. “Irish kids of my age got split down the middle, really heavily,” he says. They either decided that they would never be English... or they became ashamed of their own parents and their own roots. He was determined to resist becoming English, he would never be at home in what he viewed as an alien and enemy culture and he was fanatical about hurling and the IRA.

MacGowan experienced being an Irish Catholic teenager in London during the 1970s, and at the height of the troubles in Northern Ireland. He says: “I always felt guilty because I didn’t lay down my life for Ireland, I felt ashamed that I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA, so the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt.” The Pogues 1988’s “Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six,” tells of a group of Belfast men tortured and wrongly imprisoned for the horrific 1974 bombing of two central Birmingham pubs that killed 21 and injured 182. MacGowan says the men were guilty of nothing more than “being Irish in the wrong place and at the wrong time.” The song was banned by British radio.

Many of his songs are influenced by Irish nationalism, Irish history, the experiences of the Irish in London and London life in general. These influences are documented in the biography, Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context. MacGowan has often cited the 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and Brendan Behan as influences.

In early 2000, Shane’s heroin abuse was reported to the London police by his friend, Sinead O’Connor. MacGowan was furious and refused to speak to her but eventually made it up with her when he realised she only did it because she was so worried about his declining health. A rehab stint in London’s Priory Hospital followed but it was a waste of time for the unrepentant and unreformed MacGowan. Still the Pogues took him back in 2001 and their shows continued to be a sell-out.
In 2012, the Pogues recorded a live CD/DVD in Paris to mark their 30th anniversary as a band. What Pogues fans really want, though, is a new album of original songs, something that MacGowan hasn’t been able to deliver in 17 years. He is now nearer 60 than 50 and no one will be surprised if he doesn’t make it; then again, he may outlive us all!

MacGowan describes his adult faith as “free-thinking Catholicism.” He has a special devotion to Saint Francis of Assisi and Saint Martin de Porres. When a teenager he considered the priesthood, even if it was driven more by his appetite for drink than by the spirit of self-sacrifice and devotion that the Church prefers: “Like every house I went to visit they’d give me loads of booze, know what I mean? . . . And I was religious, so I mean, I wouldn’t have to fake it.”

Shane says: “I owe my career entirely to my family and to the way I was brought up. I am very grateful to them and to Christ and His Holy Mother and all the saints. And, of course, I am grateful to Victoria, my muse. Without whom I might well be dead by now.”

For all his wild ways it is obvious that Shane MacGowan is a man of integrity and there is a spiritual beauty about him that I found endearing. Fans will be delighted to hear that his parting words are “Watch this space - I will be bringing out an album this year”. Let’s hope its not the drink talking . . . we are waiting, Shane!

[Mike from Boston]

"Promoting a Healthy and Positive Lifestyle"

[Kilmichael]

"Promoting a Healthy and Positive Lifestyle"

That's what Shane's done throughout his entire career!

[johnfoyle]

It looks like the above is a rip off of this 2014 feature -

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0314mh.html


See-

https://twitter.com/MattHennessey/statu ... 0667027456

[Mike from Boston]

It looks like the above is a rip off of this 2014 feature -

http://www.city-journal.org/2014/bc0314mh.html


See-

https://twitter.com/MattHennessey/statu ... 0667027456

So based on this, Catherine Gilmartin probably had her picture taken with him, could hardly understand him and then submitted a Reader's Digest Condensed version of the Matt Hennessey interview!