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Kate Moss told them to get engaged, Kylie Minogue was at the stag and Johnny Depp led the singsong – an exclusive look inside the ‘magical’ wedding of the punk legend and his devoted wife
THE bride wore red, the groom wore slippers and Hollywood star Johnny Depp started the sing-song. When Victoria Mary Clarke and Pogues leader Shane MacGowan tied the knot in Copenhagen last November the day was as madcap and magical as you would expect of a Celtic punk legend and his angel-channeling muse.
‘It was just the perfect day because it was sunny and cold and Christmassy and full of Christmas trees and lights and snowmen,’ says media coach Victoria, of their reception for 20 family and close friends at a restaurant in the city’s Tivoli Gardens amusement park.
First Shane, 61, and Victoria, 52, made their 32-year relationship official in the registry office at the Town Hall. ‘We forgot to tell them Johnny Depp would be there so there were around 15 paparazzi — who follow him everywhere — outside.’
Afterwards, the wedding party repaired to a nearby restaurant which Victoria had only booked the previous day.
‘We partied until the evening and it was really nice because the Tivoli Gardens is the oldest funfair in Europe and it’s got lots of old rollercoasters and big wheels but they’re nice, they’re not too scary or ridiculous. So you can go on them without screaming. Shane just hung out in the [restaurant] which was gorgeous. They had that glogg, that mulled wine and we were drinking that and it was snowy looking and really beautiful,’ she smiles.
‘You couldn’t have made a Disney scene look better. And then when you’ve got the Pirates of the Caribbean dude and there was a big pirate ship — we had the whole thing!’
Victoria looked stunning in a red Vneck, long-sleeved dress by British designer Bella Freud.
‘Shane’s known her and her sisters since he was 18 or something. I was looking on her website and I saw that dress and thought, well that would be really nice because it’s not a wedding dress. So I said I’d like it and she said, “Have it!”’
She teamed it with ‘just ankle boots because the dress was very long so it was okay to wear ankle boots which was good because it was very cold’.
Shane looked dapper in a dark blue suit and trilby, chosen by his snazzy friends, musicians The Cronins. ‘Except for the slippers. We wanted him to wear Vans but he said, “The slippers are more comfortable”.’
Depp and the Cronins provided the music but Shane was not always in favour of their song choices.
‘I wanted Johnny to do Astral Weeks which he did. Then he said, “What about Rainy Night in Soho?” and I said, “Yeah, that’s my favourite”. They started playing it and Shane was like, “No, I never want to hear that!”
‘So they had to stop, which was hilarious,’ she laughs.
Most of the guests were Victoria’s family and friends — her sisters Jenny and Vanessa, nieces and nephews, parents Orla and Dave, and friends like Marina Guinness.
‘Shane’s father was ill at the time
because he was in hospital so his sis ter couldn’t come. And there wasn’t really anyone else,’ she says, his mother Therese, 87, having died tragically in a road accident early last year.
‘So there wasn’t really anyone from his family. He had Johnny and he had The Cronins and he had another friend, Gerry O’Boyle,’ she adds of the London-based publican. Coincidentally it was while drinking with supermodel Kate Moss in O’Boyle’s pub The Boogaloo in 2007 that Shane and Victoria decided to get engaged.
‘Kate said, “you should get married”. We were like, “yeah, why not”. I think she was kind of keen to marry Pete Doherty at the time,’ giggles Victoria. ‘It was her idea. She said to Shane, “You should get her a ring”.’
Victoria shows off the garnet and ruby ring they bought while on tour in Vienna not long afterwards. And though the engagment was low-key, Victoria’s initial wedding plans were wild. ‘I pictured it like a festival with burger vans and a big tent and lots of bands. And I wanted everyone to wear a wedding dress.’
But the logistics were a nightmare. ‘It just became too stressful to think about and we basically parked it. We had kind of had it in our minds to do it at some point. Shane was always afraid that if we got married then the next thing we would do was get divorced. He thought it would jinx it. He’d say, “But people who get married get divorced”. So somehow he let go of that and we decided, let’s just do it.
‘Because life is short,’ she says, adding that turning 60 last
year might have been the catalyst for Shane.
Their eventual wedding was much more low-key.
‘My sister Jenny said “I’m going to get you flowers, I’m getting you a cake”. I said, “No I don’t need any of that”.
‘And she said, “I’m doing that”,’ says Victoria, who was touched by the ‘amazing’ generosity of her sisters. Vanessa hosted a hen party the week before in her shop the Good Food Store on Dublin’s George’s Street.
‘I didn’t tell anyone it was a hen party. I just said it was a party where you have to wear a wedding dress. So we all wore wedding dresses and we had a competition where you got toilet paper and you had to make a dress in a few minutes and model it... I put pictures on Facebook and nobody guessed!’
Victoria’s expectations for her secret wedding had been so low she admits to having had ‘a meltdown’ the night before.
‘I was freaked out about the idea of loads of people, the whole thing of the dress and all that stuff. God, it just seemed such a stressful thing to do and so fussy. I’m not really a party person.’
Her friend Sofia who is ‘a breatharian’ which means ‘she doesn’t eat at all’ tried for hours to calm her down.
‘She was just saying, “What is it you’re worried about? What can go wrong?” But I can worry about everything. Will we get to the thing on time? Will the dress look okay? Will Shane be okay? Will everyone turn up?’
Having booked the restaurant on a whim she feared it would be ‘a
disaster’. Was she crying? ‘Oh yeah, of course’.
Panicking? ‘Yeah. I had tried to minimise it by keeping the numbers as small as possible and to do it in a place where we didn’t know anyone and I just wanted it to be casual. But then you don’t really want it to be casual because it does mean something. So you discover in yourself a desire to make it special.’
Sofia consoled her friend by musing that opening the heart to more love unsettles other emotions.
‘She kind of talked me down. Then we were like, “**** , it’s 4am, we’d better get some sleep!”’
The night before his nuptials went notably smoother for Shane.
‘We met Kylie Minogue in the hotel... I was chatting to her and she remembered Shane and she was really sweet and she put us on the guest list.
‘When she came back from the gig she hung out with Shane and my nephew drinking. That was really nice. It was like a stag party with Kylie — what more could you want?’
The following morning, a cold, sunny Monday, Victoria was ‘still anxious’ when she awoke. Her teenage niece Rosa helped her to get ready and put her at ease.
‘As soon as I stepped into the lobby of the hotel, saw my mum, saw my sisters, I thought, this is going to be fine.
‘The day just got better and better,’ she says. ‘The vibe between me and Shane was more connected, more love. I was so happy. I just felt great.
‘I loved it. I loved the whole thing. And I loved when they sang and it was so funny when Shane was
annoyed. It was so lovely walking around outside — the snow and snowmen. It was just magic.’
Over the course of their long courtship, Shane and Victoria have had many ups and downs. But she says their ‘connection’ has kept them together.
‘He’s never wanted to break up with me but I have with him over the years a number of times. Sometimes I found the drinking and the drugs were just too hard.
‘It’s so tempting to try and fix somebody and change them but you actually can’t. It has to come from them.’
Shane has now ‘reduced his consumption of alcohol’, switching spirits for wine and cider. He quit smoking and vapes instead. Their life together in a groundfloor apartment in Ballsbridge, Dublin 4, sounds like domestic bliss. ‘We played backgammon last night,’ says Victoria. ‘He also likes to gossip, that’s important too. If you don’t have that, what are you going to do?
‘He’s always telling me how beautiful I look. And he’ll notice everything — the shoes, the clothes, the hair. He’s really into clothes and I am as well so it’s good to have that in common.’
As for their wedding, she says, ‘If we’d had months to plan it, I don’t think it would have gone any better. I felt that somehow the angels had stepped in and gone, “Right, we’re taking care of it. We’re going to organise it, it’s all going to be lovely, don’t worry.”
‘And it really felt angelic, the whole thing. Magical.’
VICTORIA will be taking part in Celebrity Globetrotters, which starts on RTÉ One this Thursday at 8.30pm