It’s Shane Ink.
Exhibition at the Bob Dylan Center shows many never-seen-before items belonging to MacGowan
A MUCH-loved hurl used time and time again on pitches close to his uncle’s farm in Tipperary, a ‘badly drawn’ portrait of Bono, and the original handwritten lyrics of Fairytale Of New York are among the never-seen-before items featured in the first exhibition ever staged about Shane MacGowan and his band The Pogues in the US.
The rare pieces were chosen from the late singer-songwriter’s belongings by his widow, Victoria Mary Clarke, after she was approached by the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, earlier this year.
And according to Steve Higgins – who runs the Dylan museum – the exhibition has already attracted as much attention from music fans as the grand opening two years ago of the centre dedicated to the Nobel Prizewinning musician.
Mr Higgins, who is managing director of the American Song Archives, told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘The exhibition opened on March 7 and the response has been fantastic. It’s been our best exhibit opening since the Grand Opening of the Bob Dylan Center in May 2022.
‘We’ve had a marvellous response from Pogues fans from all over the US… People came from as far away as Vermont, California, and Montana just to be here on the opening night.
‘As well as countless others around the world, we were saddened by the loss of Shane MacGowan and we had the idea that the Bob Dylan Center should be the first institution to exhibit material from Shane’s personal archive,’ he said.
‘And I think the section that Victoria Mary curated for us adds an entirely new dimension.’
The exhibition at the Bob Dylan Center is a combination of Shane’s personal belongings together with items on loan from Dublin’s EPIC Museum.
As well as Shane’s hurl, it also features a neverseen-before portrait of his
Fairy Tale Of New York side kick, the late Kirsty MacColl, essays penned by
The Pogues frontman when he was a schoolboy, as well as unique set of photographs dating from his childhood and until he became world-famous.
Describing the rarity of the pieces that form part the exhibit, Mr Higgins said: ‘Shane was also a visual artist and an illustrator.
‘There’s a portrait of Kirsty MacColl, there’s a portrait of Bono that he titled Badly Drawn Bono, and there are essays from his school days when you see some of the subject matter he is concerned about throughout his life starting to take shape even as a young student.
‘The sport of hurling was very important to Shane. There’s an essay about hurling and we have a broken hurley that belonged to him when he was around 11 years old,’ he said.
Although Bob Dylan and Shane MacGowan were born a generation apart and on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean, it seems they had much in common.
Some Dylan devotees maintain MacGowan’s revitalising of Irish traditional music by combining it with punk was comparable to Bob Dylan abandoning his acoustic guitar folk tunes for an electric rock and roll sound in the 1960s.
But according to the Bob Dylan Center, the similarities do not end there. During his last concert in Dublin in November 2022, Dylan took the opportunity to tell his fans that Shane MacGowan was one of his favourite song writers, before adding how much Fairy Tale Of New York meant to him.
The Pogues frontman died last November after battling years of ill health. He was 65 years old.
According to his widow, Bob Dylan was such a fan of MacGowan’s that, back in the 1980s, he asked The Pogues to join him on a tour of America. But the tour didn’t happen because of MacGowan’s drug taking.
Victoria Mary Clarke told the MoS: ‘In the 80s Bob Dylan invited The Pogues to support him on tour… so the band showed up but Shane was busy taking acid and we couldn’t get him on the plane.
‘I tried very hard but we just couldn’t get him on the plane.’
Describing what the months since her husband’s death have been like, she said: ‘I don’t think anyone can really know what it’s like until they have gone through it. You can’t really be prepared for something like this…. There’s a lot of physical pain. You feel like you can’t stop crying. It’s very intense.’
Ms Clarke believes the exhibition will help Shane to attract a new army of fans.
‘I’m sure there are people discovering him now because of the Bob Dylan Center… They might have gone there to see Bob Dylan stuff and then they realise “oh here, there’s other stuff which we didn’t know about”.
‘Ever since I met Shane, he wanted to bring Irish music and the Irish traditions to a much wider audience because he felt they deserved to be seen and heard all over the world.’
The exhibition will run at the Bob Dylan Center until May 12.
Next week musicians will commemorate Shane and the late Sinéad O’Connor when they gather at New York’s Carnegie Hall.
Among those who will pay tribute to the singers, who both died last year, will be Shane’s former band mate Cáit O’Riordan, who once described MacGowan as ‘one of the greatest poets of the 20th century’.
‘Pogues fans have come from all over the US’
‘Hurling was very important to Shane’