Roots around my heart
The punky kid upon whose shoulders rested the expectations of a nation,
The Irish musician Shane MacGowan died last week aged 65. I’ve never cried so much for someone I’d never met. I’d have wept if I weren’t driving. It’s a bendy road between Sea Point and Muizenberg no matter which way you go. Semigration to Cape Town means that gridlock arrives around three in the afternoon.
I wonder if any of the Hiluxes around me can see my tears. I know they can’t hear MacGowan’s impeccable diction on The Old Main Drag from the 1985 Pogues album Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash because I myself am struggling. The non-backlit LED strip above the lazy CD slot says MAX but MacGowan sounds more like he did towards the end – you can’t make out the words, but you know they’re brilliant. To my mind, in terms of delivery, he had no equal.
YouTube The Irish Rover to watch how MacGowan falls in at the top of each of his vocal parts: to hit that level of instant force playing live requires ultimate control with enough cool to have it ooze onto the stage around you. Now rewind to the top of the video and watch him closely; behind the loud suit and him being the only one smoking with a drink in hand, there’s a nervousness and complete awareness of what’s coming.
Before the band kicks in, he’s already alert to when they’ll be starting. The moment they do, he does his best to be “on board ”–a vigorous nod of the neck, a cleaning of the lips disguised with a swagger, a posturing puff of his reliable cigarette prop. Here’s Shane MacGowan, the punky kid turned talisman of the next generation of Irish musicians upon whose shoulders will rest the expectations of a nation colonised for 800 years. No pressure then, to get things right.
Consider too that MacGowan here is following the steely Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners, whose delivery must have, at least partially, been forged by the expectations of a nation placed on his person following the passing of Luke Kelly, talismanic front man of the band. At stake in this performance is not so much a passing of an impossibly heavy baton as it is a very public anointment, a formalisation of chemical and liturgical affinity. Broadcast live, digitised decades later and archived on the Cloud for us here, the Pogues performing with the Dubliners live on television in 1987 is a playable document of intra-cultural exchange. It shows us an established past where artistic exchange between distant generations was possible, in this case through music as politics, as attitude and sheer force of will.
If there remains any doubt about the severely political nature of the collaboration, consider on the one hand Kelly’s measured recall of strife on The Town I Loved So Well and, on the other, MacGowan’s Pair of Brown Eyes in all its horror. Here are two touching melodies designed to carry nothing but the full impact of atrocity, to deposit just one more line detailing injustice before the censor or the airwave operator realises that all this sweetness is subversive.
This is Irish Ghoema, militantly on the protest side of punk rock. They might be singing a ditty of a ship that sank — with the captain’s dog and all but they are here for revolution, recompense, repatriation, redress and reparations.
In scanning his obituaries, much is being made of MacGowan’s Englishness, having been born in Kent, England. Everyone mentions his teeth. None so far have spoken of his pristine vocal technique. I’ve always been a secret admirer of the discipline he shows in how he sustains his enns and ells in the choruses of Dirty Old Town. If you can’t hear it, you can feel it. The proof of his technique lies in the music video: watch where he sticks his tongue with every “n” and every “l ”— right up the centre of his gaptoothed palate.
I’d love to pretend that I noticed that only because I’ve been a singer in a punk band too. The truth is, that’s how we were taught to sing in choir practice, while the rest of the boys — the future’s “real men ”— proudly donned their brown military uniforms and practised drill on the rugby field. For me the year was 1992, the town Pretoria and the government Nationalist and white. None of that makes me special. It just makes me regular issue, which is all that punk requires.
What bothers me now about MacGowan’s obituaries is not the predictable misprisions wheeled out about his character and legacy, the most rote possibly being questions around his reclaiming or furthering of the racist “Paddy” stereotype, or the censoring of the word “faggot” in his Fairytale of New York — the world’s only Christmas tune one could actually stand listening to year after year. What bothers me is the open questioning of his roots which, to my mind, smells like the beginnings of an Aristotelian smear campaign.
Allow me to explain myself: by Aristotelian I mean the kind of smear campaign that, in its very understanding of logic, is limited to the most basic comparative distinction available to human reason — affirmation and negation. Considering MacGowan’s English roots in this way, there’s no room for nuance.
Yes, affirmed — MacGowan was Englandborn. But every gardener knows that not all roots are equal in force, where force is a consequence of form. Gardeners know that roots can be extremely affirmative and forceful, but they can also be humble and careful things, especially if they are the roots of weeds, which know they’re pre-destined to find alternative solutions in order to grow.
To understand the roots of Shane MacGowan is a computation-heavy task that might lead any observer to take up the call, to connect with the shovel and the pick, to dig up their history and to return full circle. Such is the centripetal ecstasy of artistic inspiration, the drunken passion of human sensitivity and the rolling, kaleidoscopic delicateness of MacGowan’s Summer of Siam which, even at the worst of times, finds root in the deadest of hearts.
Van Schalkwyk shows with Suburbia Contemporary, Barcelona. His novel ‘The Alibi Club’ was published by Umuzi in 2015. This month, see his artwork at Graham Contemporary in Hyde Park, Joburg, Glen Carlou Gallery, Klapmuts and Max Bagels in Cape Town. He was the front man of obscure Afrikaans punk rock duo Jaco+Z-dog.