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Friday, November 26, 2004
[Irish Aires] - Shane MacGowan: Old Habits Die Hard
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http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/fridayreview/story/0,12102,1359267,00.html
Shane MacGowan & The Pogues: Old Habits Die Hard
Twenty-five years ago, Shane MacGowan was given six weeks to live. But
he's still here, and so are the Pogues - back to their original lineup
for a new lease of life. Dave Simpson joins them in Dublin to relive the
bad old days
Friday November 26, 2004
The Guardian
We'll meet again... the original lineup of the Pogues
Shane MacGowan doesn't remember much about leaving the Pogues, except
this: "I was glad to get out alive." It was 1991. The band were in Japan,
in the middle of a gruelling tour that had driven all the members to the
brink of insanity and MacGowan was finding it particularly hard to live
up to his reputation as a "songwriting legend". Sake was his chosen
refuge.
"We were on a train," remembers mandolin player Terry Woods. "There were
two vans sent to pick us up and Shane was in such a state he had the
second van all to himself. The Japanese are really polite and this guy
ran around to open the door and Shane was so pissed he just fell out in
the street. He was very bloody and knocked himself out. When we took him
back to the hotel they thought he'd been in a car accident."
Thirteen years later, MacGowan has made it to a Dublin hotel, late and
not exactly unscathed - "I was given six weeks to live, about 25 years
ago!" - but at least he's here. The same can be said of the Pogues,
reunited for the first time in their classic line-up including bassist
Cait O'Riordan, who left in 1985, unable to face any more touring. A
flurry of activity includes the remastering of their entire back
catalogue and live dates in December; there may be more if MacGowan is in
the mood.
Today his mood is playful. Not entirely sober (but certainly not drunk),
he takes delight in treating the interview like a police interrogation
(something with which he is familiar), deliberately mishearing questions
and firing them back.
"I did it for the money," he says of songs that lit up albums like Red
Roses for Me (1983), Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) and 1988's classic
If I Should Fall From Grace With God. He dismisses his legacy with the
words, "I just wrote a few songs." He points out that he didn't write
Dirty Old Town or The Irish Rover. But he did write A Pair of Brown Eyes,
Sally MacLennane, 1987's Christmas hit Fairytale of New York and many
other much-loved songs. Which raises the obvious question of whether
MacGowan will record new songs with the Pogues. "I wouldn't mind," he
admits, before remembering himself. "Do you think I'd tell you cunts?
Hehehehe!" MacGowan hasn't made a new album since 1997's The Crock of
Gold, with his sometime post-Pogues band the Popes. "I've been tired," he
pleads.
However, those around him suggest he's emerging from a "dark period" that
included Sinéad O'Connor reporting him to the police in 1999 for snorting
heroin (a wake-up call which, he has claimed, stopped his use of the
drug), the death of Kirsty MacColl, who partnered him on Fairytale of New
York, and a split from his long-term partner Victoria Clarke, muse for
such songs as Rainy Night in Soho. I've been told that mentioning any of
this is likely to upset him.
MacGowan has always been a complex, contrary so-and-so. His songs are
like the man: uncouth, belligerent but with streaks of insight and
sensitivity. The latter wasn't immediately apparent when he had his first
stab at notoriety as Shane O'Hooligan. MacGowan had arrived in the 1976
London punk scene after growing up in a Tipperary farmhouse (where a
large extended family gave him Guinness aged just five) and a scholarship
at Westminster public school that ended in drug-related disgrace after
six months. Then, as now, his diet was literature (Brendan Behan, Ernest
Hemingway, Oscar Wilde, The A to Z of Communism . . .) washed down with
whatever was available.
His first spell in rehab came at just 17, when, after falling foul of
valium, he admitted himself into the notorious Bethlem hospital. "I've
been lucky," he says. "The first band I saw when I walked out of the
madhouse was the Sex Pistols."
He met Spider Stacy, the Pogues' penny whistle player, at a Ramones gig.
Why did they bond? "Bonk?" he gurgles, before comparing the pair to
"punk's Morecambe and Wise".
MacGowan formed the Nipple Erectors and managed Stacy's band the Millwall
Chainsaws. But the energy had dissipated by 1983. To create their own
excitement, they called themselves the New Republicans, taking the stage
at New Romantic night-spot Cabaret Futura performing Irish rebel songs
before an audience of poseurs and squaddies. "A classic gig," remembers
MacGowan, revealing the remains of dental work.
"We were pelted offstage, but a lot of people were interested. The man
who owned the place, bless him, was Irish and he pulled the plug after
six songs for our safety and the club's reputation. He said 'Great show
lads - never come here again.' " They didn't, but within a year they had
formed the Pogues, who took a similar approach to traditional Irish
music. The difference between them and bands like the Dubliners was, as
MacGowan observes, "We played faster and took more speed." Stacy's job
involved playing tin whistle and banging a beer tray over his head. Irish
musician Noel Hill called them "an abortion of Irish music". And so a
generation fell in love. "I remember one gig where this kid's shirt was
ripped straight off his back," chuckles Terry Woods. "He'd no shoes on
and one leg of his trousers was ripped off, and it was pissing down with
rain. I remember thinking, 'How's he gonna get home?' But he was having a
great time."
Riotous Pogues gigs were almost like acid house raves before their time
(indeed, MacGowan cites the Pogues' later 1989 Peace and Love album as an
Irish take on acid house). English youths draped themselves in Irish
flags. But behind the mayhem was lasting substance. Arguably their most
substantial contribution was to transform the English view of Irish
people and Irish culture. When the Pogues emerged, a climate of suspicion
saw English schoolchildren taught about the Empire and many people
equated Ireland with the IRA. "It was very difficult growing up London-
Irish in the 1970s," remembers Cait O'Riordan, "having this funny name
and parents who had this funny accent, with bombs going off . . ." But
suddenly, a generation was listening to MacGowan songs such as Birmingham
Six (which was banned, then vindicated when the Six were released) and
wondering whether things really were quite as society painted. "The
climate of racism really did change completely, at a social level, when
the Pogues came along," says Spider Stacy.
But MacGowan is unconvinced that his band somehow helped lay the
foundations for everything from Irish pubs to the peace process. "You
still think we're drunken Paddies." He's understandably even more
reluctant to acknowledge any responsibility for introducing binge
drinking to the UK's youth: you certainly didn't get that at gigs by
bands like Duran Duran. "That's because nobody in there was old enough to
drink," he gurgles.
Alcohol fuelled MacGowan's creativity but became a problem for the band
once they relied on it to ease the madness of touring. In Germany, with
media eyes on MacGowan, it wasn't reported that Stacy was given three
weeks to live (these days he doesn't touch a drop). Meanwhile, the
frontman hated his own stardom and the expectations surrounding his
writing gifts, becoming so obliterated that he "couldn't remember the
bloody words." "It became really obvious that Shane didn't want to do it
any more, and that was his way of telling us," says Stacy. After the sake
incident, MacGowan was asked to leave. "It was a relief," he says.
Today, MacGowan sits with a double gin and tonic (which he barely
touches) and insists that many of the subsequent stories about his
drinking are exaggerations. "It's a story," he pleads. "Every time I pick
up a drink there's a photographer and it becomes, 'Oh look, Shane's
pissed again.' " Still, he doesn't always fight preconceptions - in the
new Johnny Depp film, The Libertine, MacGowan plays a drunken minstrel.
Last Christmas, a celebrating O'Riordan had just been thrown out of
Dublin's Shelbourne pub when she came across a familiar figure. "I went,
'Shaaane!' " she laughs. "I used to be in your band." Touchingly,
MacGowan said that he has missed the Pogues and wanted to build on a
previous week-long reunion in 2001 (which was without O'Riordan, who he
clearly adores). He won't say whether he misses the way songs once came
to him "bang, bang, bang . . . like from above, as if I was just the
conduit."
Which brings us back to this apparent creative block. As I tiptoe towards
the "dark period", he refutes any suggestion that he's somehow paying the
price of abuse, particularly of LSD, which for a time was a major
creative tool. "I took my first trip at 14," he snorts. "I've never
stopped taking acid." So why did the songs stop? Finally he snaps.
"Because my fucking girlfriend left me." Can you not put that in song? "I
could, but I'm hoping she'll come back to me." MacGowan looks like he
could punch me. I almost want to hug him.
MacGowan recently moved back to the farmhouse in "Tipp" where he grew up,
and it's been good for him. The black mood vanishes as quickly as it
arrived. He jokes - looking me right in the eye - of "walking in the
fields, shooting trespassers". More candidly, he admits that he has been
unhappy but has been helped by eastern mysticism, and shows me a book
which falls open at the line: "By wiping away ego we can see things as
they are." In May, a new MacGowan composition, Road to Paradise, emerged
on a charity EP in aid of ex-Celtic and Scotland footballer Jimmy
Johnstone, who has motor neurone disease. The situation is further
muddied by Woods' assertion that Shane is happier because he's not under
pressure. "But he does have new material and I know some of it is really
good. He's beginning to come back to what he was."
I ask MacGowan to sign a record sleeve and at first he seems
uncomfortable, saying: "Can't we do it at the gig?" Then he remembers
that he's in a hotel, "the gig" isn't until December and embroiders If I
Should Fall From Grace With God with scrawl. I'm expecting something
offensive, but it reads beautifully, like a lyric: "It's time we began to
laugh and cry about it all again!"
· Red Roses for Me, the Pogues remastered, is out on WEA on December 13.
The tour starts at Glasgow Academy on the same day
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Jay Dooling (rdooling@swbell.net)
Irish Aires - 90.1FM KPFT in Houston Home Page
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