http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/public/culture/You'd have to give Murdoch money to read Camilla Long's review in today's Sunday Times online ; I've scanned 'n pasted it from the print edition -James Fearnley’s descriptions of Shane MacGowan, the front man of the Irish folk-rock band the Pogues, suppurate with pure deliciousness. MacGowan’s hair is “filthy”. His face is “the colour of grout”. One of his teeth is “a tiny brown prong”. He vomits, he collapses, he screams noxiously at friends who try to carry him home. Amazingly, his genitals wait until page 194 for their first appearance — by which time Fearnley is disgusted by his drunken band mate, tired of his flakiness and his forgetfulness, even his inability to pee.
“He adopted no stance,” he says, of a moment they get out of the tour van to relieve themselves on a fir tree in northern Finland. “He didn’t even pull his foreskin back to piss, but allowed the rush to gout from the tan rosette, unconcerned about the drips going on his shoes or the leg of his trousers.”
By 1991, Fearnley “had ended up hating” the morphine-stained “Miss Havisham” figure who sat in a darkened hotel room, painting his face silver and refusing to go on stage — and yet his memoir is funny and affectionate, a cackling expectoration of a mad decade as part of the band. He charts their rise from post-punk obscurity in the early 1980s to the height of their fame as a scabrous tornado of banjos and phlegm who toured with U2 and owned the anarchic alternative music scene, produced the, album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash (1985), and released their most enduring record, Fairytale of New York, with Kirsty MacColl, in 1987.
In many ways, Fearnley is the best person to write this memoir - as the band’s unassuming accordionist, he can actually remember things, and is self- effacing enough to realise that MacGowan is the star, letting him whistle in and out of the action like a dyspeptic poltergeist "Shane O’Hooligan” was already famous when they first met at an audition in King’s Cross in 1980— a former scholarship boy from Westminster who had had his ear bitten off at a Clash gig in 1976. He was brilliant but chaotic, and ‘seemed to think that C and F and G were all the chords you needed”, screeching into the mike in such a way that Fearnley couldn’t figure out if he was “a genius or a f**ing idiot”. He asked Fearnley to join his band, the Nipple Erectors, and they started hanging out in squats and dives, playing pubs and grimy clubs, watching the audience retreat “behind pillars” as MacGowan, dressed in a ‘plum-coloured, quilted smoking jacket”, flung himself into the empty space arid writhed on the floor “as if at the nether end of an exorcism”
They tried different looks — MacGowan thought togas were “well sexy” — and riffled through books back at his flat, a decaying hole filled with dirty dishes and“encrusted” mugs “befouled with something that made water bead”.
They also went drinking — epic benders around Bloomsbury and Euston that erupt off the page in a rainbow of toxicity, port and lemon, cider and gin. In Camden, Fearnley watched, aghast, as MacGowan drained a “Black Zombie” — a plastic pint glass filled with an iridescent purple-black liquid, consisting of double shots of gin, vodka, tequila, Bacardi, pastis, and topped off with Coke.“The clop of the plastic glass on the counter signalled the end of my naive and besotted expectation of any real brotherhood with Shane. ‘I’m getting another one,’ he said. ‘You?’”
In 1982, they founded the Pogues. Named after the Irish expression for “kiss my arse”, the band traded heavily on folk connections — MacGowan’s parents were Irish. They were immediately successful, opening for the Clash and hiring Elvis Costello as their producer, in spite of MacGowan’s drunken behaviour - after one appearance on television, Fearnley’s father telephoned to say, “Your singer’s a moron, I’m afraid.” They started making serious money, too, touring Europe, and America, where Feamley’s hair started falling out from drinking so much. Not that he slowed down —a remark “about us all getting blow jobs”, says Feamley, had “put me in a fever of anticipation”. He helped himself to schoolgirls and blondes, to actresses and models — he even had a relationship with one of his band mates, or at least I think that’s what he’s getting at when he says he enjoyed “nightly embraces” with the group’s gay banjoist, Philip Chevron. They shared a room on tour until Fearnley got fed up with the other’s neediness and asked to change. He is unspecific about the details — perhaps he is, embarrassed? Either way, he seems to think that most of it is Chevron’s
fault and that he only responded out of exasperation and pity.
There are other things he misses out, too. There is hardly any mention of drugs — unbelievable, given that MacGowan once claimed he took 50 tabs of acid a day — and only thin descriptions of key events, such as a gig with
the Clash. The recording of Fairy Tale of New York gets under a page; the world tour with U2 is a few paragraphs. He can sound like a member of Coldplay, too, rum-tee-tumming about instruments and the development of songs. He relies heavily on his thesaurus, using mad words such as “pellucid” and “bituminous” and, in one particularly dense
sentence, says that “the bile that came out of Spider’s mouth was prodigious, and Shane’s contumely” — oh dear — “protean”.
On other occasions, his writing is brilliant. His accordion, with microphones and wires hanging down, is an “udder”. A woman by a pool in Spain has skin that “hung in bronzed silken folds from her arse down”. There are laughs — the band’ “office” was a biscuit tin; MacGowan would argue about anything, “whether a tomato is a vegetable, whether dogs could think” — and fights, particularly with the bassist Cait O’Riordan, a petulant and self- important drama queen who
overdoses on the day of another band mate's wedding. I was shocked that Fearnley refused to accompany her to hospital — but this is a world of knives and flesh, of bile and zeal, of grime, bad teeth and execrable behaviour, and it is gripping. He describes the vomiting and the ulcers with Elizabethan lust, “a gastric outburst that dashed the walls of the bathroom in the hotel with blood and” (gasp) “excrement” — not to mention the deaths and drama and sheer bloody-mindedness of
MacGowan, who is variously run over, shouted at, pushed, punched and nutted, and at one point simply vanishes ahead of a concert supporting Bob Dylan, to everyone’s horror.
He only just makes it to Fearnley’s wedding in the Cotswolds, because he has tried every village of the same name in four counties “except Kent”. In 1991, the band finally sacked him — “What took you so long?” asked a sheepish MacGowan — but a decade later, they reformed, and still play several gigs every year. In his own way, MacGowan is the ideal protagonist — talented, inspired, halitotic, flawed. “My dreams have featured Shane more often than my dad for some time now,” writes Fearnley, touchingly. Read it, and exhale.
