How The Pogues Shane MacGowan survived his battle with addiction

A true Christmas miracle for punk rock’s wildest star: How The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan survived his battle with addiction and a brain infection fight to retain his status as the unlikely patron saint of Yuletide

• Shane MacGowan found stardom difficult, and turned to alcohol and drugs 
• In 2000 he was put into rehab into life-saving rehab for heroin use
• Earlier this month he was admitted to hospital suffering from viral encephalitis
• Now he is back at home and on the road to recovery

Never mind the Spirit of Christmas Past… the Pogues’ drunken frontman Shane MacGowan is the eternal spirit of Christmas plastered.

Born on December 25, the belligerent former junkie with a book of poetry in one hand and a bottle of Bushmills whiskey in the other has become the unlikely patron saint of Yuletide.

His festive hit, Fairytale Of New York, is bellowed out at pub parties across the land with more gusto and raw emotion than any traditional carol.

No one sings Silent Night or The First Noel with the same ferocious glee as they do stumbling through MacGowan’s ode to the Big Apple’s seamy side, recorded with the late, great singer-songwriter Kirsty McColl:

Heroin addiction, drunken fights, falling out of a speeding car – and a recent hospitalisation with a brain infection haven’t managed to see off the Pogues star

‘You’re a bum, You’re a punk, You’re an old slut on junk, Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed.

‘You scumbag, You maggot, You cheap lousy faggot, Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.’

For a few worrying days earlier this month, it looked as though this Christmas might really be 64-year-old MacGowan’s last.

His wife, the music journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, urged fans to ‘send prayers and healing vibes’ as he was admitted to hospital suffering from viral encephalitis, which causes inflammation in the brain.

It was touch and go, but on Wednesday afternoon, to her great joy, he was allowed to leave. ‘Shane is home and we are going to watch the football!’ she wrote on Twitter. ‘Thank you everyone who has been messaging and blessings to everyone who has a loved one in hospital and who is in hospital themselves and blessings to the doctors and nurses!’

This latest illness — exacerbated by shingles that spread to his eye — is just one of a series of medical mishaps to hit the Pogues frontman in recent years.

He was sacked as lead singer of the Pogues in 1991, when the rest of the band couldn’t cope with his hell-raising any longer

In 2016, he fell and broke his pelvis while dancing and has had to use a wheelchair or Zimmer frame ever since. Another fall left him with a broken right knee and he subsequently tore ligaments in his left knee. Irish journalist Clarke is now his carer. He says he does not expect him to walk again.

It’s a terribly sad situation for a man who was once the wildest of the punk rock generation — though it’s remarkable he is alive at all, after surviving heroin addiction, a high-speed fall from a car on a motorway and numerous drunken fights.

Sacked as lead singer of the Pogues in 1991, when the rest of the band couldn’t cope with his hell-raising any longer, the defiant Irishman has often boasted of his IRA connections and his sexual excesses on tour.

But like a drunk on Christmas Eve whose personality flips from raucous extrovert to maudlin cry-baby at the flick of a switch, there’s a surprising hidden side to Shane MacGowan.

For a start, he was born in England . . . outside Royal Tunbridge Wells, of all places.

In 1957, his parents were visiting dad Maurice’s sister in Kent, when mum Therese went into labour unexpectedly. Shane, their first child, was born in Pembury maternity hospital.

He spent the first few weeks of his life sleeping in a drawer in his auntie’s bedroom, before they returned to the family farmhouse in Tipperary, Ireland.

Therese was a singer and imbued the boy with a passion for music. Maurice, a Dubliner, was a great reader. The family believed Shane’s gift with words emerged after a bout of measles, aged four: ‘The spots never came out, they went to my head and I went completely mad for a month. That’s when I started making up stories and poems and songs.’

Shane’s hero was his Uncle John: ‘He was a Zen master in the art of cursing. The rest of the time, he remained completely and absolutely silent. He grunted, rather than saying yes or no.’

It was a technique his nephew perfected. Rock journalists throughout the Pogues’ career were stymied by the singer’s intransigent silence during interviews, punctuated by unprintable outbursts.

While he was growing up on the farm, both his parents were away working in England. Shane’s aunts and uncles treated him with indulgence, starting him on Guinness when he was just four years old.

Fairytale romance? MacGowan with his wife Victoria, whom he’s been with for 36 years

When he was eight, he got drunk on whiskey for the first time. He remembers falling about laughing in the farmyard, convinced that he could understand what the geese were saying.

He claimed the farm was an IRA safehouse at the start of the Troubles in the 1960s — but rather than send him to the Christian Brothers school in Tipperary, his parents enrolled him in an English prep school, Holmewood House in Langton Green, Kent.

The villages around Tunbridge Wells were an unlikely hotbed of punk. Sid Vicious (whose name was then John Ritchie) was in the same year at the nearby Sandown Court school.

Young Shane won a literary competition in a national newspaper, and then a scholarship to Westminster, one of the most prestigious public schools in the country.

As a London schoolboy he discovered marijuana, grew his hair long like a hippie, and got hooked on prescription tranquilisers. When the boys at Westminster were encouraged to hold a mock general election, Shane was appointed to the Cabinet, as Minister for Torture. He was expelled a year later. The official explanation was that he’d been caught smoking.

After a brief spell at art college, he suffered a drug-induced breakdown and spent six months in a mental hospital, being weaned off Valium.

When he emerged, he hacked off his hair and dyed the spiky remnants white. His name, he announced, was now Shane O’Hooligan.

By 1976, he was a regular at the Roxy, the Marquee and the 100 Club, all the early punk venues. To cash in, he launched a fanzine called Bondage. It ran for one issue, which was all he needed to crowbar his way into the in-crowd.

At an early Clash gig, he was photographed at the edge of the stage snogging his girlfriend, bass player Jane Crockford of the all-girl band The Mo-dettes. When they were pulled apart, she’d bitten his earlobe and his face was smeared with blood.

The photo ran in the New Musical Express, captioned: ‘These people are cannibals!’

With his next girlfriend, he launched his own band, The Nipple Erectors. Known as The Nips, they released four singles but failed to dent the charts — though one of their drummers, Jon Moss, went on to be a founder member of Culture Club.

MacGowan’s next band, Pogue Mahone, appeared to be destined for equal obscurity . . . their unpronouncable name translated from the Gaelic as ‘kiss my backside’.

But their sweaty, stomping blend of Irish folk music and rockabilly started to gain a following on London’s pub circuit, and after a 1984 tour supporting The Clash they landed a record deal . . . as the Pogues.

‘When I saw the Pogues for the first time, I was shocked,’ Victoria said. ‘It was crazy. Everyone was throwing chairs and throwing drinks. It was dangerous, for the band as well as the audience.’

Elvis Costello produced their second album, Rum, Sodomy And The Lash, and though he and the band grew to loathe each other during the recording, it yielded their first hit single — a cover version of Ewan MacColl’s Dirty Old Town.

Goading them in the bar at Dublin’s Blooms Hotel, Costello bet the band they couldn’t write a Christmas song without turning into a schmaltzy pop variety act, all twinkles and knitwear.

Winning the bet took nearly two years, but in December 1987 MacGowan and his sister Siobhan were huddled round a transistor radio at the farmhouse in Tipperary, listening avidly to Radio 1’s chart show. Fairytale Of New York was No 2 in the UK, No 1 in Ireland.

Sell-out tours followed, but MacGowan found life on the road gruelling. Sustaining himself with alcohol and drugs, he became increasingly paranoid.

Though he’d been in a long-term relationship with Victoria since she was 16, he stumbled into hotel beds with anyone willing to sleep with him. ‘I never bothered with the ones you had to talk to,’ he said. ‘Whoever had the energy to capture me and drag me back to the hotel got the lollipop.’

He began to believe his lyrics were dictated to him by ghosts. ‘I actually see people dictating to me, behind me, through . . . they call it the third eye. I’ve seen ghosts behind me in period costume on a couple of occasions.’

In 1991, after too many missed flights and drunken collapses, he was kicked out of his own band. He retaliated by forming The Popes, which was effectively a tribute band to himself.

‘Shane took a lot of drugs,’ said Victoria, ‘and the effects became more unpredictable and more disturbing. When he answered the door to me after having missed his flight to the U.S. to open for Bob Dylan, and there was blood pouring out of his mouth because he had eaten a Beach Boys record, it looked as though it was the 100 tabs of acid that were the problem and not the gin and tonic.’

By now living on the fumes of his reputation, he recorded with Nick Cave, performed on the BBC’s Children In Need single Perfect Day with Lou Reed, David Bowie and Bono, and sang in French on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album.

But after a performance with singer Sinead O’Connor in 2000 he was reported to the police for his heroin habit. It probably saved his life — he and Victoria both went into rehab, one for drug addiction and the other to be treated for depression.

Famous for his mouthful of rotten teeth, in 2015 he underwent extensive dental surgery to replace them with implants. Victoria chose the whitest available, inspied by a photograph of actor Michael Fassbender.

MacGowan, remembering how he once got drunk with a bunch of fishermen in Greece with glittering smiles, insisted on having one solid gold tooth.

He married Victoria in 2018, after they’d been together, with periodic break-ups, for 36 years. ‘I’ve been lucky,’ he admitted, meaning he was lucky still to be alive. ‘I’ve been beaten up a lot, I’ve had a lot of illnesses and accidents, I’ve been run over three times.’

Earlier this year he published a book of his paintings and drawings in a limited edition called The Eternal Buzz And The Crock Of Gold: 1,000 copies at £1,000 each.

Actor Johnny Depp, who was best man at his wedding, calls him ‘one of the most important poets of the 20th century’. But it is that rebellious, contrary, angry, lyrical Christmas ballad which will always be his great achievement.

MacGowan became defensive when an online student magazine called The Tab blasted it in 2019 as ‘homophobic’ because it included the insult ‘faggot’ — used in the U.S. as a derogatory word for a gay man.

The word, sung by MacColl, was ‘used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak. She is not supposed to be a nice person . . . Not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable,’ he said. Yet, as we approach another Christmas, no doubt the debate will be rehashed once more.

Though MacGowan has said the song leaves him ‘bored’, if pushed, he will admit he does like it.

So, now back at home and on the road to recovery, perhaps he can bathe in its reflected glory for yet another year.

Source: Read Full Article