A PAST THAT’S NOT SO GOLDEN

Crock Of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan (15) Verdict: It’s no fairytale ★★★★☆

ON a tour of New Zealand, Shane McGowan stayed in a Wellington hotel built on an old Maori graveyard. After taking speed, he heard Maori warriors telling him to strip naked and paint himself blue, so he did — and the suite as well. The Pogues frontman tells the story to his wife Victoria Mary Clarke and their friend Johnny Depp in this riveting but oddly upsetting documentary, and they laugh uproariously, but in truth it wasn’t funny. The singer’s sister Siobhan says that tour was a turning point: ‘He just didn’t come back — not the Shane I knew.’

MacGowan is one of punk and postpunk’s most interesting characters, and a lyricist of poetic accomplishment to rival one of his heroes, Brendan Behan — but just like Behan, he fell in thrall to the temptations that world has to offer.

He certainly had a head start. Living in a farm in Tipperary as a boy, he was given two bottles of Guinness a day every day when he was five. A year later, he moved to England and when the family eventually ended up living in a flat in the Brutalist Barbican complex, he cried himself to sleep every night thinking of Ireland.

Drugs came into his life, and to feed his habit he briefly worked as a rent boy in Soho, before embarking on a crusade to popularise the Irish music of his youth in the UK, with a punk edge. The culmination of all his experience came to gorgeous fruition in Fairytale Of New York; his own life was as picaresque as that of the characters in the song.

Julien Temple’s film captures the essence of Shane, at the height of his fame and now in his more wistful late middle age. Using a mix of animation, archive footage and conversation, , it is as non-linear and disjointed as Shane himself. He seems to have a nice life now, but there are times it is painful to watch the ravages that the trappings of fame and wealth visited upon him.

And, in moments of calm contemplation, also the sense too that he would have traded much of it just to spend his life on the family farm he still owns.

SELECTED cinemas nationwide today and Amazon and iTunes next week.