Beyond good and evil
Great Irish poet, irresponsible addict, scared little boy and more in this definitive portrait of the former Pogue.
“Chaos and celebration in everdecreasing circles of hell.”
RICHARD BALLS first met Shane MacGowan while working on Be Stiff, his 2014 biography of Stiff Records, when a meeting facilitated by MacGowan’s friend, the actor Paul Ronan, allowed Balls entry into the close inner circle of MacGowan’s family and friends.
As was recently documented in Julian Temple’s MacGowan documentary, Crock Of Gold, this former Pogue and great Irish writer is a complicated interviewee: irascible, contrary, with a deep loathing for discussing himself and his work. Assisted by MacGowan’s family and friends, Balls’ approach is akin to that of a nature documentary, hanging out at his subject’s flat and waiting for the right time when stories about childhood, The Pogues and his philosophy of the world would start to flow.
Such an approach – intimate, cooperative, conciliatory – might suggest a rose-tinted hagiography, but from our first contemporary meeting with MacGowan, leaving a private doctor in Belgravia, “Tall, gangling… a gigantic trail of snot dangling from his nose”, we know something different is about to unfold.
Balls’ intention is to unravel the myths of MacGowan’s life – this Irishman raised just outside Tunbridge Wells and educated at Westminster School – while simultaneously acknowledging that certain life puzzles will remain unresolved. Yet the book’s strength is that he lets MacGowan speak, and speak on, perfectly capturing the lyrical, romantic rhythms beneath that rasped whisper. The stories of MacGowan’s childhood precociousness (reading Dostoevsky aged 10, writing like him aged 11) have always been in doubt, but Balls tracked down his old English teacher, the late Tom Simpson, who confirmed that Shane was a young literary genius. Gradually, we see that child prodigy transformed, soaking up the influences of Irish Catholicism, rock’n’roll, the seemingly bucolic life lived by his aunties and uncles in Tipperary, and the more damaging effects of his parents’ move to London’s Barbican in 1971.
Utilising everything from Woodbines to LSD, Robert Crumb cartoons and the outsider sounds of the MC5 and The Stooges, Shane MacGowan becomes Shane O’Hooligan, the school prankster, teenage drug dealer and punk rocker.
If the next stage of the story, from punk rock to
The Pogues, might be the most familiar, it is also the most visceral and unreliable, with
MacGowan’s increasing drug use lending a phantasmagoric disquiet to proceedings. Balls approaches it with fastidious detail, contrasting stories played off against each other and, importantly, bringing in female voices such as his ex-girlfriends Merrill Heatley and Mary Buxton, former landlady Kathy MacMillan, Sinéad O’Connor and previous biographer Ann Scanlon. The result is a forensic, often blackly comic vision of chaos and celebration in ever decreasing circles of hell, Balls meticulously noting MacGowan’s fellow travellers who die of drugs and drink along the way.
Ultimately, we arrive back in MacGowan’s flat, TV blaring, the portrait as close to finished as it ever could be, of a man who would rather do anything than sit with himself; a man, an addict who, in the chilling words of O’Connor “has no empathy, feels nothing”, yet is also, to quote Scanlon, “a divine being”.
It is to Balls’ credit that both incarnations are brought to life vividly in his writing.