Shane MacGowan: ‘A lot of rock stars become assholes’

About a decade ago, I travelled to the town of Nenagh in County Tipperary to meet Shane MacGowan. After carrying out a search mission through the town’s pubs, I eventually found him standing at a bar, an elaborate array of drinks in front of him, enthusiastically buying rounds for everyone in the place. When the interview finally happened, at five in the morning, deep in the woods, at a chaotic, tumbledown cottage that had been in the Pogues singer’s family for generations, he was happy to talk about anything — Irish literature, the IRA, the lethal dangers of entering a nearby haunted woodland called the Fairy Fort — apart from songwriting. He hadn’t written a song in years. He had forsaken productivity to take up a full-time role as Ireland’s favourite drunken genius madman, and the lack of productivity clearly rankled him. Then he fell into a ditch.

On meeting MacGowan at his flat in Dublin with his vivacious partner, Victoria Mary Clarke — an author and journalist who met MacGowan when she was 16 and he was 26, and as far as I can tell can be credited with saving his life — I see that a few things have changed. He has cut down on his drinking dramatically. He and Clarke have collected together a lifetime’s worth of his drawings, essays and photographs for a vast folio art book called The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold.

A new set of teeth has changed the shape of his face, and at 64, with the pale white intensity of his skin and a seal-like curtain of hair, he looks handsome in a vampiric, semi-frozen way. A bad fall in 2016 has left him in a wheelchair, which he sits in with his head tilted to one side, wild eyes staring out as if he’s still trying to work out what happened to him. And he’s been making music again for the first time in years.

“I just did an album with a bunch of guys called the Cronins,” MacGowan says with a slur.

“Is he allowed to hear it?” Clarke asks.

“It’s very rough. It’s not finished. I can always do a few old songs, can’t I? You get writers’ credit by rearranging old stuff. Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains did that. But he doesn’t drink. And he’s a dwarf.” He’s also dead.

Despite the protests, MacGowan allows me to hear his new album. The old magic from the man who first had the idea of combining punk spirit with Irish literary romanticism, who came up with such ragged masterpieces as Fairytale of New York and A Pair of Brown Eyes, is still there. There is a raw but affecting version of the traditional ballad Wild Mountain Thyme; a musical reading of Yeats’s Down By the Salley Gardens; and some new songs by MacGowan including a rock’n’roller called Gino’s Place, which sounds a bit like Sam Cooke. The new music is very good: raw, vital, exactly what you want from MacGowan.

“Thanks,” he mumbles.

“You got a thanks,” Clarke says. “That’s massive.”

MacGowan is propped up before a large television, surrounded by statuettes of saints and Buddhas. Still looking like a rock star in sunglasses and a black shirt with a huge silver crucifix around his neck, he starts off as sullen and uninterested, but gets increasingly irreverent and raucous as our hour and a half together draws on. Drawings and paintings by him and Clarke cover the walls, and there is a framed painting of them both by their friend Bono.

The art collected in the book is not the usual rock star fare. It has far more character, imagination and mischief than, say, those overly serious renderings by Bob Dylan or Ronnie Wood. There is a scratchy line drawing of Bono as the Australian outlaw Ned Kelly, a lot of self-portraits, grotesque leering leprechauns and a whole section of bizarre pornographic fantasias. “A lot of large penises,” Clarke says.

There is a drawing of a large-breasted woman with one eye in the middle of her forehead who is being penetrated by an overexcited teddy boy. I ask MacGowan about it. “A person with one eye in the middle of their forehead is called a Cyclops,” he explains, employing the kind of patience typically reserved for unusually dim children. “You get a Cyclops in Greek mythology, Roman mythology . . .”

Did he ever think that these drawings would be collected and presented as art? “Not in a million years. I was just doing them when I wasn’t doing anything else, drawing them on sick bags on aeroplanes or in pubs. I was too busy being a hard-working rock star, answering lots of stupid questions from interviewers. I kept it polite for as long as I could and then I exploded.”

I’m not sure if this is a warning to me on what to expect if I ask him how he feels about, say, Fairytale of New York becoming a Christmas perennial, but that’s when Clarke announces she has to leave to pick up her vintage Mercedes, which broke down an hour previously. For the first time there is real fear in MacGowan’s glassy, grey-blue eyes. “You’re not going to help me with this guy?” he asks, pleadingly. When she confirms that she will indeed leave to meet the man from the AA, he turns to me and asks, really quite gently: “Can you roll me a joint?”

“Of course he can roll you a joint,” says Clarke as she makes her way out of the door. “Look at him. He’s a hippy.”

“He thinks he’s Marc Bolan,” MacGowan grumbles. Be that as it may, I did acquire joint-rolling skills at some point during my misspent youth, and employing them to stick one joint after another into his mouth and light them for him appears to mellow MacGowan out somewhat. After a while he opens up about how music and drink have shaped the course of his life. It started in childhood, when his extended family would sing Irish rebel songs during family holidays at the cottage in Nenagh.

“My aunts, uncles, grand aunts, grand uncles all played an instrument or sang, and if you were on the run, for Republican activities let’s say, they would hide you. We would hide you.” He lets out his famous death rattle of a laugh, which brings to mind an old radiator being bled of trapped air. “We did a lot of drinking, singing and card playing with those IRA guys. I remember a guy called Paddy. He got really pissed one night and then he said he was off to do a bombing or a shooting or whatever. Everyone went, ‘Ah, don’t listen to him, he’s making it up.’ He was killed a few weeks later.”

MacGowan says he discovered drinking at the age of four. By the age of eight he was conducting animated conversations with the farmyard animals after getting hold of a bottle of whisky. “I couldn’t wait to grow up. I went to the pub when I was a kid. My uncle, who looked after the farm, would bring me bottles of Guinness from the boozer. I would drink them very slowly as the night went on and feel better and better.”

The Eternal Buzz and The Crock of Gold features drawings of leprechauns, fairies and other magical figures, which brings to mind the Fairy Fort that MacGowan warned me against on that night in Nenagh. “Hardly anyone ever goes in there, but I know two people who did,” he says, solemnly. “One had to be carted straight off to the loony bin. The other guy’s hair went white, and he was stuttering about how he heard hundreds of voices screaming at him, saying different riddles, and every time he tried to answer one there would be another. That’s why it’s dangerous — instant f***ing insanity. It’s just down the road from the house.”

MacGowan is really a London Irishman and the Pogues are a band born of the London Irish experience. His parents moved to Kent before he was born and he even had a spell at the establishment hotbed Westminster School, although he got chucked out in his second year after being caught with cannabis. In London he discovered punk, forming a band in 1976 called the Nipple Erectors, which became the Nips, before the Pogues got together in 1982.

“I was going to Sex Pistols gigs for about a year. I was doing a Johnny Rotten impersonation and that’s how I ended up being a lead singer.” Wasn’t calling his band the Nipple Erectors asking for trouble? “That was the girl’s idea [MacGowan’s bandmate Shanne Bradley]. She thought it up and everyone thought I was being sexist. She was nothing but trouble.”

The early days of the Pogues were fantastic, he says. Each day brought something they had never done before. “Everything was exciting. The first time we stayed in a hotel and discovered room service — that was exciting. We took Irish music and speeded it up a bit, which you can hear in A Pair of Brown Eyes — exciting. It changed our lives. But going around America got to be a real drag.”

What was the worst of it? “Running out of booze and drugs.” The bleeding radiator laugh sounds as if it is spitting water everywhere. “Once Fairytale got big it was really boring and you get real sick of it. You’re walking out on stage and they’re applauding like mad before you’ve done anything, yeah? It gets frightening. We did loads of bad gigs, most of them in the States.”

Things took a turn for the worse in 1985 when Cait O’Riordan, the Pogues’ original bassist, got romantically involved with Elvis Costello. “It was quite repulsive, actually. Elvis Costello was screwing her on a rickety sofa in the recording studio and he was really fat, so it was horrible. She had to leave the group to marry Elvis, which really pissed me off. I liked his very early stuff, but by then he was putting out shit.”

I suggest to MacGowan that things tend to get boring around the time people lose their inspiration. “Lots of people just run out of time. Their number is up. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the list is endless. A lot of rock stars become assholes, but the most amazing one I ever met was Lou Reed. He was really smart.” He was also the most unpleasant person I have ever interviewed. “Yeah, but I’m not a reporter so he was a real gent to me. I have that tendency with reporters too, but if it gets your name and photograph in the papers then there’s no such thing as bad press.”

That’s when I realise that, for all his chaos and truculence, MacGowan is a classic diva. He loves attention, good or bad. Clarke returns with some roses and says: “So he hasn’t eaten you? That’s good.” He looks at the roses with disdain and asks, “Who are these for?” When she replies that they are for him, he allows himself a bashful smile and says, “Thanks, luv”. With Clarke by his side he’s sufficiently relaxed to tell some hilariously indiscreet stories, like the time they rented Bono’s house on the Dublin coast, right next to a railway line.

“Bono put in a glass roof and wall,” MacGowan says. “I used to wave my willy at the train as it passed and hope that they thought it was Bono’s.”

“Bono was very patient,” Clarke says. “We had the police round all the time because Shane kept setting off the alarm. Eventually he asked us to move out.”

An hour or so later we head out to a restaurant in a nearby hotel with MacGowan’s nurse, a no-nonsense woman from South Africa who is working hard to get him to do the physiotherapy that could get him walking again. That’s where, after battling to make an extremely stoic Ukrainian waitress understand that he wants an entire bottle of rosé and not just a glass, he takes his napkin, folds it carefully into a square, and puts it underneath his plate. Clarke asks him why he did it.

“Because he did it,” he says, pointing at me, although I didn’t. “He seems like a polite person who knows what to do about table manners.”

“You got him stoned,” the nurse says to me. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

The bleeding radiator laugh explodes all over the restaurant.
The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold is at Andipa, 162 Walton Street, SW3, October 12 to 29 andipa.com. The book The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold is available at shanemacgowan.com