Shane

So I’m sitting and listening to music with my son on this gloomy day, and the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing” comes on. My kid starts bouncing around and shouting “and we dance to the music!” And I start bawling, like, full-on ugly crying, for the first time in a long time. Shane MacGowan is dead.

This will be one of the most personal, intimate and honest entries I ever write here. In a way, I’ve been writing it in my head for the last 15 years. Everyone’s going to talk about Shane and his titanic genius, but I want to talk about what Shane means to me. And be warned: it’s not all wine and roses.

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Aside from my parents, there is no-one who had a more profound effect on my identity than Shane MacGowan. I grew up hearing a couple of Pogues albums, I casually listened to them high school. But one moment, and one moment alone, catapulted me into the weird, wild and wonderful world of folk-punk and forever changed who I was.

It was Canada Day, 1999, in Ottawa, and I was drinking with wonderful new college friends on the patio at the legendary Heart and Crown. Joel, Amanda, Jordan. It was a glorious afternoon; celebration and mirth everywhere, sunshine beaming off of happy faces, a bagpiper wandering the streets blaring Canadian songs. The air was filled with this electric sense of possibility. Joel was fast becoming my best friend; we had the obligatory shitty college band together and years later I would record a celtic-rock song about him. Fair emerald-eyed Amanda would soon become my girlfriend. Youth—in all of its careless, happy glory—was coursing through me.

I went in to get a round of beers for the table, and carried them back through the jam-packed crowd. And I stopped to listen as a certain familiar song was playing. People were singing along. I started to sing along as well, and looked across the room. And I locked eyes with a woman, much older than me but still arrestingly beautiful in that moment, and we sang together:

the boys of the NYPD Choir,
were singing Galway Bay
and the bells were ringing out
for Christmas Day

Like a puzzle piece sliding towards its proper place, something in me just went: click. As I shambled home around 9pm that evening I stopped and bought a 2l Jug of wine and If I Should Fall From Grace With God on CD . Once home, I plugged my headphones in and listened to the whole thing three times through, getting drunker and happier and drunker and happier. I fell asleep to “Thousands are Sailing” on repeat. And I awoke with the words “and we dance to the music” blaring in my ears. Knowing that I had to play this music.

The resulting tale is too long to tell, involving too many adventures, too many wonderful people and too many startlingly bad decisions to talk about here. The list of amazing and brilliant people I would have never met without Shane’s influence is like 300 names long.

But from a purely musical perspective, there was nothing again that would ever be as exciting and electrifying as the next few months, where I sought out and bought everything the Pogues had ever recorded. Listening to MacGowan and his songs, I felt as though my soul were being cut to ribbons by some godlike swordsman, whirling and dancing and slashing and cackling his way through me. This was an artist who could reach down into a gutter and somehow pull up a diamond, and each new jewel seemed more brilliant than the last.

And my god how he drank! And smoked! And smoked and drank! The wild tales were legendary, the DVD interviews and biographies were inspiring, the lyrics inciting me to virtually double my expected alcohol intake over the next 20 years. This was a man who understood a certain truth, which is that for some of us there is a level of inebriation within which we see reality as it is, in all its joyful, creative, Dionysian glory, and not as our dull, lifeless sobriety ordinarily presents it to us. This was no mere mortal man, really, this was a kind of Greek God, whose shambling, ugly, slurred persona masked his ability to take that dark, mysterious reality and turn it into incandescent music.

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But, you know, it wasn’t all good.

Unlike some of my other buddies in the folk-punk world, Dave from the Peelers, Finny from The Mahones, etc, I never got to meet Shane. By the time I had a band that was good enough to open for the Pogues he was mostly done singing and playing. I tossed the first amateurish, shambolic CD from my celtic-punk band on stage at Brixton Academy in Manchester in 2001, and James Fearnley (Pogues accordion) picked it up and pocketed it. In retrospect, I wouldn’t blame him for pissing on it or using it as a coaster or ashtray. That was a horrendous thing to toss at that band. To this day I feel deeply ashamed about this. I shouldn’t, but I do.

Life at the time was…. interesting. I was brutally hung over twice a week and I subscribed to a magazine called Modern Drunkard. Poor Amanda was starting to complain because I’d end up stumbling into her place at 4 am and barfing on the floor. I couldn’t know it, but I was stuck in a deeply unhealthy place, artistically, physically and spiritually. But if I ever felt conflicted about things, I could just return to Shane Macgowan and listen to him sing:

When the world is too dark
And I need a light inside of me
I’ll walk into a bar
And drink fifteen pints of beer.

The next album my band put out was reviewed in the local paper: this is just an attempt at a Pogues album, but it’s not nearly as good as the Pogues, so why make it? The reviewer was right. Amanda would ask me why I was pretending to be Irish, why I didn’t just accept that I was Canadian. Instead of listening, I lashed out and accused her of failing to understand me. Oh, she understood me just fine.

It’s the Paradox of the Hero: what makes someone a hero is that they did something amazing and original. But this means that you can’t copy the hero by copying the hero, because as soon as you get stuck in imitation you are no longer imitating. You lack originality, they did not. You either waste away in that paradox, trying to live someone else’s life, or you go your own way. As Freud and Jung might say, I eventually found my own way by killing my father: by taking on new influences, rejecting old ones, by getting more creative… by starting the Dreadnoughts. You gotta kill your dad, man. Just like Shane did.

I suppose, in an ideal world, I would have liked to have met a sober, reflective MacGowan and talk to him about all of this. But in recent years, I have really wondered if that conversation would even be possible.

Look: he died today at 65, eight years below the life expectancy of the average Irish male. That is not good. He died too young with loving family and friends wishing he could keep going. That is not good. People online are jokingly saying: “I’m shocked he made it to 65!” What a horrible, wretched thing to say about a damaged human being. He left dozens of diamonds lying in that gutter, where they will forever stay. And those jokers are of course right, because none of this was an accident: the man absolutely annihilated his body and brain with some unknown combination of drugs and booze sometime in the late 80s. This is well recorded in many Pogues memoirs and it is the primary reason for his being fired in 1991. Unlike, say, Tom Waits, who carried on giving the world beautiful music for decades because he made sure not to take the persona too seriously, MacGowan went all in, and he paid dearly for it.

And if it were just him who were paying for it, that would be one thing. But I know prominent musicians in the folk and punk world whose bodies and lives went down the drain, many leaving this world too soon, and where a huge part of that story was their obsession with Shane or with heroes like Shane.

“It’s better to burn out than to fade away.” No. No, it fucking isn’t, especially not if you plan on having people around who love you. Not if there are more diamonds to dredge up.

May the wind that blows from haunted graves
Never bring you misery
May the angels bright watch you tonight
And keep you while you sleep

To be clear: I am not criticizing Shane the person or his decisions, I am talking about those of us who took him as a role model. The “drunk Pogues” thing was partly a myth brought on by a basically racist stereotype about musicians who play Irish music. The media and music promoters fed it as much as he did.

But I mean: read the autobiography. Listen to the interviews. MacGowan was free to do as he pleased, but it is also correct to say that he was selling a lifestyle. And for almost everyone that lifestyle is a brief boatload of fun followed by a decades-long fucking nightmare. And we, in the Dreadnoughts, eagerly lapped up that mythology, gleefully overconsuming and writing our own songs about it, encouraging masses of people to go way over the line. I’ve been feeling guilty about this for a little while and the guilt isn’t going away. MacGowan’s early death is putting it strongly into focus. Booze is great. “Fifteen pints of beer”? Yeah. Not great.

And so for the last 15 years I have felt very strongly that I did not really want to meet him anymore. Especially because when I saw videos of him talking, where the damage he’d done to himself was so painfully obvious, I realized that in many ways the person I wanted to talk to wasn’t there… or at least, unavailable.

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Enough. I know that I’m saying all of this because deep down I’m still angry and processing the news. I’m angry that he’s gone, I’m angry that the world seems to contain fewer and fewer poet-troubadours like him, I’m angry that it all had to be this way, because Shane entered adulthood a troubled and deeply damaged soul. I’m still recovering from that ugly cry because saying goodbye to Shane is really just saying goodbye to a part of myself.

But! I recently volunteered to play accordion for the NYC-based tribute band Dark Streets. After a long break I think I’d like to really re-engage with the Pogues music and with MacGowan’s unrivaled genius. Turns out I’m playing with them this weekend. I’ve been going over those brilliant old songs recently and feeling that sense of joy and possibility flowing through me again. Like all good heroes—and indeed like any Ancient God worth their salt—MacGowan has left us with a deep and profound lesson about life. Our task is to interpret that lesson and pass it to our children.

And so today, watching my son dance around to the Pogues, I understood that he, too, would one day have one of those mysterious life-changing clicks—maybe staring into a stranger’s eyes, maybe standing over a landscape, maybe reading a book, maybe witnessing some kind of art for the first time—where his life would never again be the same. What a gift it is to be able to provide that moment for someone. Thanks, Shane, for providing it for me.

Fare thee well, gone away:
there’s nothing left to say.