Fast-living, hard-drinking lead singer of Irish-folk punk band the Pogues
b December 25, 1957 d November 30, 2023
Shane MacGowan, a songwriter and singer who channelled an Irish brand of defiance and vulnerability as frontman of the Celtic punk band the Pogues in the 1980s, but whose own addictions drove him from the group at its height, died on November 30 at the age of 65. His death was announced by his wife, journalist Victoria Mary Clarke. MacGowan was hospitalised last year in Dublin with viral encephalitis and spent months in intensive care.
He was widely credited with helping create a distinctive fusion – combining the raw power of rock and punk with the lilting rhythms of Gaelic folk melodies, inspiring bands such as the Cranberries in Ireland and the Dropkick Murphys in Boston. In his songwriting, MacGowan often drew from Irish literature, mythology and strains of nationalism from Ireland’s centuries-old conflicts with Britain. The intent, he said in a 1983 interview, was music that “had roots” but also “more real anger and emotion”. Part of that tableau was tapping into the history of struggle and discrimination that was part of the Irish immigrant experience, particularly among the large Irish community in Britain.
“I was ashamed I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA,” he said in a 2020 documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, referring to the Irish Republican Army and its battles against British rule in Northern Ireland. “The Pogues was my way of overcoming that.”
MacGowan found his muse in London’s punk scene in the 1970s as bands such as the Clash and the Sex Pistols helped created a genre embracing rebellion and anarchy. MacGowan adopted the stage name Shane O’Hooligan as a founder of a punk band, the Nipple Erectors, which later was shortened to the Nips. “You call it chaos. I don’t regard it as chaos,“he said of the early punk era. “I regard it as natural living.“His sister, Siobhan MacGowan, described how MacGowan went full punkpersona in the summer of 1976 when he “hacked off his regulation hippy hair and dyed it ghost-white”.
“My mum screamed,” she wrote. The Nips’ deeply ironic Happy Song (1980) has MacGowan mocking society and conformity with a chorus that imitated sheep: “Bababa/babababa.”
In the early 1980s, he joined with Peter “Spider” Stacy and other members of a punk band called the Millwall Chainsaws to form Pogue Mahone, a corruption of the Gaelic insult “póg mo thóin,” or “kiss my arse”. They changed the band’s name to the Pogues to avoid confronting censorship rules by the BBC and others.
MacGowan established himself as the band’s chief songwriter and polestar. “His defiant, drunken truculence quickly made him an idol to legions of Irish, nearly Irish and wannabe Irish,” music journalist Stephen Lemons wrote in Salon in 2001.
Success came steadily. The Pogues rose from London pub gigs to playing major arenas by the late 1980s. A 1987 holidaythemed lament, Fairytale of New York, became one of the band’s most popular songs – with MacGowan and guest artist Kirsty MacColl in a duet, swapping stories of melancholy, broken dreams and drinking. (Christmas was also MacGowan’s birthday.)
MacGowan begins:
It was Christmas Eve, babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
The band’s fifth album, Hell’s Ditch, in 1990, was its last with MacGowan. He had been missing gigs and rehearsals as his alcohol and drug abuse deepened. When he did perform, he sometimes slurred his speech, and fans noticed now many more of his teeth were missing. His health was in steep decline from complications of hepatitis, but MacGowan reportedly refused physicians’ orders to stop drinking.
He told journalists that, as a compromise, he switched to white wine.
The band voted to kick out MacGowan in 1991 after he failed to show for concert dates during a tour in Japan.
MacGowan later formed the band Shane MacGowan and the Popes, which recorded two studio albums and experimented with influences of rockabilly and traditional Irish music. (Actor and musician Johnny Depp played guest guitar on the band’s 1994 song That Woman’s Got Me Drinking.) MacGowan was back with the Pogues on occasion for reunion concerts.
“Joining the Pogues was one of the best things that ever happened to me, and leaving them was one of the best things that ever happened to me,” he told the Daily Telegraph in 1997.
“By the end of it, I hated every second of it,” he continued. “They’d moved so far away from what we were doing in the first place. I didn’t like what we were playing any more. I refused to knuckle under and become professional. They were all becoming professionals and growing huge egos.”
Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born in Pembury, in southeastern England’s Kent countryside, on December 25, 1957. His parents were Irish immigrants working in Britain and returned to Tipperary, Ireland, when MacGowan was young. His father played the accordion and concertina, and MacGowan started performing publicly at the age of 3 after an informal family audition. “They put me up on the kitchen table to sing and the song went down very well,” he told the Guardian.
His family returned to London while he was in grade school. He filled notebooks with stories about mythological figures and the gritty scenes he witnessed on the streets and in pubs. (He said he tasted his first Guinness when he was 5.) At 13, he received an award from the Daily Mirror for a story that he described as two “Irish dossers sitting on a bench” that was similar to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. “But realistic,” he added.
He was awarded a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster School in London but was expelled for drug use.
During MacGowan’s downward spiral with the Pogues, he once lectured the band on the dark side of human nature after brawls broke out in the audience during a gig in Carlow, Ireland, wrote the band's accordionist, James Fearnley, in his 2012 memoir Here Comes Everybody. In MacGowan’s view, people were always just one step away from mayhem. “Dog eat dog everywhere you look,” Fearnley recounted MacGowan as saying.
Fearnley called it a defining moment in his understanding of MacGowan. How could someone with such pessimism also “write songs of such incisive beauty, full of chastening self-pity for the human condition?” Fearnley wrote.
In MacGowan’s The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn" (1985), the song winds through Irish legends, allusions to the rise of Nazism, an IRA guerrilla and the Spanish Civil War. “The ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil’s in the chair, whoa!” MacGowan sang. His Dark Streets of London (1984) describes MacGowan's mental health crises when he was a teenager and treatment in a psychiatric hospital with “drugged-up psychos with death in their eyes”.
The Irish and the country’s vast diaspora could see itself in MacGowan’s music. A Pair of Brown Eyes in 1985 tugs at the threads of emigration: “And a rovin, a rovin, a rovin I’ll go.” On Streams of Whiskey (1984), the narrator is damaged and running low on luck, but defiant and ready for whatever comes next.
In 2000, Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor reportedly prompted police to arrest MacGowan for heroin possession, seeking to get him into rehabilitation to kick the addiction. MacGowan later expressed gratitude for the intervention.
That same year, MacGowan’s co-vocalist in Fairytale of New York was killed after being struck by a motorboat off Cozumel, Mexico. The boat that hit MacColl, the daughter of renowned Scottish folk singer Ewan MacColl, was owned by a powerful Mexican business family. The punishment given by the Mexican courts – a modest fine to a boat hand who said he was in control of the craft – stirred outrage in Britain, Ireland and elsewhere. A Mexican prosecutor was later found liable for breach of authority in the case.
MacGowan married his long-time girlfriend, Clarke, in 2018. In addition to his wife, survivors include his father and sister.
Reflecting on his career, MacGowan once described the Pogues as a “bar band. We play music for people to dance to, to fall in love to, to groove to, to have a few drinks to, to cry a little over, and to get a little sentimental over”.
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