SHANE MACGOWAN
Julien Temple tells us about his new documentary on The Pogues’ complicated figurehead and the contradictions that keep him warm.
WHEN DIRECTOR Julien Temple agreed to make a film about The Pogues’ irascible frontman Shane MacGowan, now 62 and wheelchair-bound, he was determined it wouldn’t be your standard-issue ‘rockumentary’. What he didn’t predict, however, was it becoming more like wildlife photography.
“It was like David Attenborough filming a snow leopard,” laughs Temple. “He just wouldn’t turn up. Once we waited three days for him in Tipperary, but he chose to stay in a pub five miles away. But the fact Shane made it difficult forced the film-making to be more imaginative and inventive.”
And inventive Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan certainly is. Robbed of a conventional commentary from its subject – “the first thing Shane said to me was, ‘I’m not doing any fucking interviews,’” says Temple – the singer’s journey from Westminster School rebel to punk scenester to dissolute, IRA-supporting superstar is told via dreamlike reconstructions, cartoon animation, vintage interviews and concert footage, and, crucially, informal conversations between MacGowan and three selected friends: former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams, actor Johnny Depp (also one of the film’s producers) and Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie.
“Those people brought out different aspects of Shane,” explains Temple, who also scooped fascinating interviews with MacGowan’s sister Siobhan and father Maurice (though the other Pogues “refused to do it”). “With Gerry Adams, he looked up to him with admiration, as a commander; they’d talk about Irish history and literature. With
Bobby Gillespie he comes across like a mob capo, verbally dangerous, his mood turning on a sixpence; with Johnny Depp he’s more of an equal. But it wasn’t easy: with Johnny, I shot eight and a half hours of footage but used three minutes.”
Revelations about MacGowan’s early life include his drug-triggered mental disintegration as a pre-punk teenager, leading to a spell in an institution he calls ‘Bedlam’, and his difficulties reconciling a middle-class Home Counties upbringing with his Irish roots.
“That connection to Ireland is vital,” says the director, who includes his 1976 filmed interview with a peroxide punk MacGowan. “Not just Irish literature, but the struggle for independence. That contradiction – the Irishness but the London-ness; he’s British but he hates the British. I knew he had a bad rep, but I also didn’t know how friendly and generous he can be as well. The spectrum of Shane is pretty immense. He’s a fascinating, impressive guy.”
In other Shane news, according to a report in the Irish Sun, earlier this year the singer recorded five tracks for a new solo album with musician brothers Johnny and Mick Cronin; they described the songs as “raw timeless punk”. In 2018 the paper also announced that a MacGowan biopic, starring Barry Keoghan in the leading role, was in production: Shane’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke said he’d be recording music for the soundtrack. More immediately, MacGowan biography A Furious Devotion, written by author Richard Balls, is out in 2021 via Omnibus Press.
“He’s British but he hates the British.”
JULIEN TEMPLE
Pat Gilbert
Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan is released in UK cinemas on November 20 and on DVD and digital formats from December 7.