Shane invites rabble to come rouse with him

[Zuzana]

Shane invites rabble to come rouse with him
Barry Egan
Sunday Independent
Sun, Dec 18, 2005

Full URL (maybe beyond registration)

COME on, dial it. Dial (067) 24421. That's Shane MacGowan's home number in Nenagh, Co Tipperary.

He asked me to print it in the paper. The Irish Charles Bukowski is keen to put on regular acidhouse hooleys/ cultural events - without charge - in the field behind his house in Nenagh and wants to hear from anyone with ideas, equipment, records, bands or "balls". If he thinks you're a crackpot or a religious nut or just a gobshite, Shane won't have any problem telling you to 'pog mo thoin' before slamming the receiver down.

The debauched libertine, it transpires, has a winning way on the telephone. Last Friday at noon, after weeks of umpteen calls to the Pogues's people in Dublin trying to secure an interview with Shane - "forget it, he won't do anything with the press" and "he's in a foul mood" were just two of the answers I was getting back - Shane's muse and ex-girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke gave me a mobile number for a guy called Eddie who was driving him around North London at that very moment.

Indeed, up until that very moment, no one had appeared to know where Shane was. There were reports he was in Morocco. Or Spain. So this was like a tip-off from the CIA about the whereabouts of Bin Laden. Or more possibly MacGowan out of his bin.

With not a second to waste, I nervously dialled the number given and asked Eddie to put me on to Shane. He was, as he always is, shockingly and almost boyishly charming.

Please note: I have known Shane off and on since I first interviewed him as a 19-year-old for In Dublin magazine in Glasgow when he ran naked and drunk around the room. So once you realise that Shane telling you to (a) go f*** yourself, (b) to f*** off, or (c) you're a f***ing c***, are just his way of showing you a weird sort of very real affection, then you will very quickly warm to him and his strange ways. So much so that within two minutes of our phone conversation he was telling me to meet him at 7pm in the pub opposite Pentonville Prison on Brewery Road. You couldn't make it up.

Inside the watering hole - that can best be described as like an X-rated episode of EastEnders - Shane MacGowan was at a table by the wall nursing a double vodka.

He is wearing a black overcoat that has seen better times - his bandmate James Fearnley recently described it succinctly as 'Dickensian'. He is just back from Tangiers (the members of the Pogues whom he was rehearsing with that day for their Christmas reunion tour have started to call him 'The Caliph'). And he wants to go to a Russian restaurant. We pile into the back of fast Eddie's Cortina with Sex Pistol John Lydon pumping on the stereo and career across North London. I don't know where we're going. The Caliph does but isn't saying. "Turn up the f***ing music!" he orders Eddie.

On the journey to this mystery location, Shane remembers meeting ill-fated Sex Pistols bassist Sid Vicious (Shane was, of course, a well-known part of the London punk scene - he appeared on the cover of the music weekly Sounds as the 'Face of 1976'); eulogises the Tibetan Book Of The Dead and William Blake's Jerusalem; praises early Kurt Cobain - and says he would like to bring out a remixed dance track of the increasingly-deranged death threats Courtney Love left on his and Victoria's answerphone a few years ago.

"It would make a great f****ing record!" he hisses with laughter unbridled as we pull up outside a slightly surreal establishment in a part of London I've never been to before - or will possibly never want to be in again. The Russian restaurant doesn't actually exist.

It is an Eastern European bar straight out of a David Lynch movie. I'm still trying to work out which one exactly. The girls working behind the bar look like they could perhaps be double-jobbing as prostitutes. Even in the unlikely event that the tundra blondes behind the bar were in the sex trade, it wouldn't perhaps have been alien to Shane. The great Shane MacGowan myth has it that he was thrown out of Westminster Public School in London at 14 - and later on for a short period earned a few quid as a rent boy in the West End.

"I can't believe you were a rent boy," Lynn Barber once asked him, "who would pay to rent you?" Not surprisingly, Shane's answer quickly put the Observer writer in her place: "You'd be surprised. 'A life worth living is a life where everybody around you is having a good time and you're having a good time'

There are women who would climb over their grandmothers to get to a celebrity."

I order drinks: a diet coke each for myself and Eddie the driver and two double vodkas for Shane. At first the girls don't want to serve The Caliph. It must be something to do with his Dickensian coat.

The bar's bizarre neon Christmas decorations blinding us have possible emotional significance because he was born on Christmas Day, 1957. Of course, Shane wrote one of the most memorable and original Christmas songs ever recorded, The Fairy Tale of New York. The single was re-released this Christmas with the Pogues donating royalties from it to charities for the homeless and to the Justice For Kirsty Campaign. MacColl, who famously duetted with Shane on the song, was killed while holidaying in Cozumel, Mexico, in 2000,swimming with her two children when a speedboat allegedly traveling in an illegal area struck her.

Shane seems genuinely happy and contented with his lot. He is excited about his plans to put on free musical extravaganza in his back garden in Tipperary. "It will be like the spirit of punk," the boozy behemoth says. "Anyone can just turn up and DJ or whatever. You don't have to have a f***ing degree in music. I am doing this because I am bored shitless waiting for somebody else to do it. If Geldof wants to make a difference to the starving millions, he should have saved the money on the four-album-set of his greatest stuff he just put out. He's always been f***ing slagging Ireland. I don't think Ireland is a f***ing banana republic!" he says gulping his double vodka.

Cast to type perhaps, Shane appeared as a drunken minstrel in The Libertine which starred his friend Johnny Depp as the rapacious Earl of Rochester. Shane's movie career isn't over. He returned from New York last month where he met Depp and author JP Donleavy to discuss the filming next year of Dunleavy's masterpiece The Ginger Man. Depp will play the lead while Shane will play Brendan Behan.

When I asked Shane was Dunleavy writing the script, his response was hilarious. "Of course he's going to write the f***ing script for Christmas! He's hardly going to hand it over to f***ing Tom Stoppard!" he laughed. "Or you! Or me! JP is going to expand the Brendan Behan part."

In relation to his family in Tipperary, he remembers singing for his parents "before he was able to talk properly" and the times when "everybody sang and listened to the radio and talked absolute bollocks. But it isn't too late for Ireland to be like that again. We were a great musical, creative, literary country and we can be again," he says.

"It is a community thing that kept rural Ireland going for years when there were hard times and not a lot of money but you could always go out dancing and drinking. Ireland wasn't about how rich you could get or how many houses you could buy. We can get to enjoying ourselves again. Apart from America and here," he says, pointing, meaning London, "Ireland is becoming one of the dullest places you can go. The committees and the town councils are taking over. I am excited about this! Everybody in Ireland just can't sit on their arses counting their money and ripping each other off, do you know what I mean?"

But were we ever really any different to that in Ireland?

"Yeah, we were. A good life isn't about shafting people. A life worth living is a life where everybody around you is having a good time and you're having a good time," he smiles. . It's not f***ing Christianity or karma. It's freedom." The Irish libertine thinks for a moment. "It's freedom as far as death permits."

Anyone who thinks Shane MacGowan is a brainless alco engulfed in a moronic inferno of his own making should have been in that bar that night in London to hear - unbidden - Shane's analysis of Joyce's most difficult book.

"Finnegans Wake isn't judgemental, preachy or even insightful - it is Joyce's deliberate attempt to make up a language that is even stupider than English. You have to just open it anywhere. That's the way to read it. You don't start reading Finnegans Wake on the first page. And if you live long enough you'll finish it one day."

Anyone who still thinks Shane MacGowan is a deadbeat moron on the fasttrack to the morgue should remember that none other than Bono called him the greatest songwriter Ireland has ever produced. With the boyish humility that characterises him, Shane sees it differently.

"I'm just following the Irish tradition of songwriting, the Irish way of life, the human way of life. Cram as much pleasure into life, and rail against the pain you have to suffer as a result. Or scream and rant with the pain, and wait for it to be taken away with beautiful pleasure . . ."

He believes that he is just an ordinary jobbing writer. "I'm a hack and you're a hack because all we do is f***ing comment on things and unleash catarthic crap to a few people for money, right?"

I protest. You can't be a hack and write songs like A Rainy Night In Soho ("We watched our friends grow up together/And we saw them as they fell/Some of them fell into Heaven/Some of them fell into Hell") and A Pair Of Brown Eyes ("But when we got back, labelled parts one to three/There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me").

"Yes, you can. You can be a hack that got f***ing lucky every now and then," he says as the Russian waitresses/hookers perhaps hope to get lucky tonight.

The Pogues play the Point Theatre in Dublin on Friday. Shane MacGowan's hooleys should start in January

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[Paddy Rolling Clone]

Great interview, thanks Zuzana.

[Eyeball_Kid]

great find, Zuzana. I think it manages to capture Shane's spirit quite well.

[Irish Rover]

Cheers for that Zuzana, its a great article.

[Bud Byrne]

Well done Zuzana. Cracking Article. Would you believe I have the paper at home and have'nt even opened it yet.