Rest in piss

Shane MacGowan's time for sayonara

About the passing of the Pogues’ Shane MacGowan this week, Tabatha Southey wrote: “Gone far too soon, yet far later than could have been expected.” That about sums it up.

It’s a miracle he made it to 65. Shane MacGowan’s ninth life was done. One of them, according to urban legend, once found him getting up and walking away after flying 30 feet in the air after being hit by a car while crossing the street in a typically drunken stupor.

This week MacGowan died peacefully at home, of an encephalitis infection, after being discharged from hospital.

The more I think about Shane MacGowan, the angrier I get. The angrier at him I get. And I’m angry at his fans. Of which I have been one for almost 40 years.

The Pogues were one of the most important musical acts of my youth. They opened many musical doors for me. Political ones, too. I picked up specific instruments in part because of them. I learned their songs. I bonded with new friends over their music. I saw them four times in four years. They were always amazing live — MacGowan, not so much.

I’ve never seen this concert film — it’s shockingly good, with solid sound, sharp editing, a guest spot from Kirsty McColl, some Specials, and a lot of interstitial Joe Strummer getting very specific about what he loves about this band, and who he loves in this band (spoiler: all of them):

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The first Pogues song I ever heard was “The Old Main Drag,” late at night on CBC’s Night Lines. The droning accordion leapt out of the speakers. The voice was horrifying yet intriguing, the downtrodden narrator pitiful, and I’d certainly never heard a couplet about being “spat on and shat on and raped and abused.” It was unforgettable.

I didn’t have a concept of Celtic music: I was 14 and lived in Scarborough. The instrumentation was not only exotic, but raw and novel in the middle of the synth-driven ’80s. It helped implant the concept that, sometimes, the most rebellious thing you can do is look back to tradition. Especially tradition untied to notions of “good old days.”

Yet the Pogues were hardly traditional: they played with a spirit and a swing and a whole lotta spit, in ways that rock’n’roll kids of the punk generation might — but with serious chops for a band that often seemed like it might fall apart.

They bent their Celtic influences into cinematic big band music (“Metropolis,” “Gridlock”), into calypso (“Blue Heaven”), into a “Turkish Song of the Damned,” into gonzo mariachi (“Fiesta”) and garage rock (“Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah”). They probably would’ve tried a house music track if they held it together another couple of years. They were true to themselves while embracing the wealth of the musical world around them.

Is that an Irish thing? (Not that the Pogues were Irish; half of them were of Irish parentage, but they were a London band through and through.) Sinead O’Connor was also quick to embrace current trends in alternative music and early hip-hop while easily sitting in with the Chieftains or cutting an album of show tunes. Don’t try and tell Irish people what to do or how to sound.

Speaking of Irish things: the Pogues were also the first band I heard sing about colonialism, to sing songs of resistance outside the context of American civil rights. I didn’t know who Oliver Cromwell or the Birmingham Six were. I didn’t fully grasp the depth of anti-Irish racism in Britain, which to this day strikes me as the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous racisms. And yet it’s deadly serious.

I’d never heard the plight of refugees captured so beautifully in song as I did on “Thousands are Sailing” (which is a song by guitarist Phil Chevron, not MacGowan). The only reason crusty Christmas classic “Fairytale of New York” works at all, lyrically, is that the two characters are down-and-out immigrants whose love falls prey to pointlessly blind optimism just because they’re on Broadway, in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty, in a town where both bums and cop choirs sing traditional Irish songs of melancholy that connect them to their homeland.

Maybe all the Pogues’ drinking songs aren’t so out of place in the context of intergenerational trauma.

Not that many people stopped between pints to think about much of that. The Pogues were a drinking band, one that in my culturally mixed neighbourhood particularly appealed to Irish- and British-Canadians. Other white kids, too. Nobody of any skin tone gave a shit about Canadian culture, if there was one. The newer immigrants celebrated their own. The Pogues were, if nothing else, celebrating extremely white culture tied to an ancestral homeland, in ways that —no doubt to the band’s chagrin — also attracted the White Pride crowd, a.k.a Nazis.

There were definitely Nazis around Scarborough in the ’80s and ’90s, often masquerading as alternative skinheads. Canada loves to pretend that we don’t have this problem, but we did, we do, and we always have. (It’s also a day-one historical punk rock problem.) And those were the kind of white Pogues fans who liked to sing, while on what we now call treaty land, an Irish anti-colonial lyric like:

“This land was always ours
It was the proud land of our fathers
It belongs to us and them
Not to any of the others”

Being a Pogues fan made me think a lot about identity politics, about how or why even a majority population can claim to be threatened, or why a historically abused minority could become blind to the travails of other historically abused minorities. (That last one’s on my mind quite a bit lately.)

Again: none of this came from the band itself, whose lyrics display empathy with any downtrodden people, and whose music I’d like to believe is easily understood and embraced by anyone. MacGowan also penned this killer anti-fascist couplet, so those Nazi punks can fuck off:

“Frank Ryan bought you whiskey in a brothel in Madrid
And you decked some fucking blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids”

Where am I going with this? I’m just saying that being in a Pogues audience with a bunch of drunk people in the ’80s felt like a consciously white environment in ways that other shows did not — and that felt odd to this Scarborough white boy.

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“Bury me at sea / Where no murdered ghost can haunt me”

Because we live in a culture where the singer is the band, Shane MacGowan and the Pogues are synonymous. Most people who loved the Pogues loved Shane MacGowan. Part of me did too, because obviously he wrote most — but not all — of the band’s best songs.

But he did his best to fuck up this thing —this thing that I, his band, and many others cherished and loved. And so many of his fans cheered on the desecration.

When his friend Sinead O’Connor died earlier this year, of an assumed — but not confirmed — suicide, there was plenty of hand-wringing from fans upset about her ever-fragile mental health, and how the media ridiculed her for years. “What could we all have done?” they cried. “If only she got the help she needed!” they bemoaned. “The music industry is a horrible beast!” they lamented.

It sure is, and I will never underplay the misogyny that affected Sinead — but did you see what they/we did to Shane, which is almost as bad as what he did to himself?

Shane and Sinead on an Irish talk show in 1995

Sinead O’Connor had plenty of problems, which she was very candid about. To the best of my/our knowledge, substance abuse was not one of them. Shane MacGowan most definitely did have a substance abuse problem — it couldn’t be more obvious. And his fans cheered him on. It’s what they loved about him.

O’Connor, however, did not love that about him: she called the police on him in 1999 when she was worried he was going to OD on heroin. He later credited her with giving him the wakeup call to kick it. But he kept drinking.

(Amanda Hess has an excellent piece in the New York Times on Sinead and Shane’s friendship.)

The fact that he was so drunk — on stage, in public, almost always — was part of “the appeal.” People applauded the drunken clown. It wasn’t a character: it was, like Paul Westerberg and Amy Winehouse and others, very real. Real enough that MacGowan’s own band eventually fired him in a Japanese hotel room in 1991, after a repeated history of not showing up to gigs.

Apparently he asked his bandmates, “What took you so long?”

Look, I like a good drinking song as much as anyone (who drinks). MacGowan wrote plenty of them — but he also wrote a lot of songs about other things, both dark and beautiful, which is what made him great. But right from the Pogues’ first album, there were pretty big red flags: songs about downing 15 pints and fantasizing about “Streams of Whiskey.” That seems… a lot.

Exaggeration? Sure. But I certainly knew people who took those songs literally, or at least aspirationally. People who think this tragic picture is funny:

Pogues shows were, in my memory, damp affairs: beer sprayed everywhere, in every direction. I’ve spent most of my adult life having people complain to me about behaviour of Tragically Hip fans — Jesus Christ, did you ever go to a Pogues show?

I’m not going to psychoanalyze Shane MacGowan — among other reasons, I don’t actually know that much about him, despite watching documentaries and reading the excellent, highly recommended memoir by accordionist Fearnley. (“A stable perception was never reachable,” he writes, “as to whether Shane was a genius or a fucking idiot.”)

Surely you have to be in a lot of psychological pain to pump so much shit into your body decade after decade, to the point where it quite obviously is affecting your performance, your appearance, and probably a lot more.

Audiences didn’t see pain: they saw self-abuse as some kind of countercultural rebellious act. It’s so punk! (That’s a whole other essay.)

They cheered on the excess, perhaps aspiring to it, or happy to live vicariously, laughing and applauding while a talented songwriter openly pissed away his talent. I don’t think MacGowan wrote another great song after the Pogues fired him. Sadly, his story isn’t unique: we could talk about dozens of other examples.

I get it: Being drunk when you’re young can be funny. You think you’re invincible, and maybe you are, for a bit. But that joke wears real thin, real fast — like by 25. 30, tops. 40, oof, watch out. 50, oh, dear god, stay clear. 60 — you’re still here?

This makes me sound like a pious, judgmental jackass, sure. Maybe I am. (Probably.) But before your sixth decade, do you want to be led out on stage in a wheelchair, pint of beer still in your hand, to embarrass yourself? Check this, likely the saddest performance I’ve ever seen, four years ago with Chrissie Hynde, opening for Fleetwood Mac in Dublin. MacGowan is not yet 60 in this clip. Hynde is six years older than him. It’s neither cute nor funny.

Maybe I should thank Shane MacGowan for teaching me this lesson, and teaching it to me early.

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“Can’t make it on my own / I’ve built my dreams around you”

Part of my conflicted feelings today are because I loved the Pogues, as a band: every individual in that band brought so much to the table. They were a supergroup to me. I can point out parts each of them play in certain songs that still thrill me. And I’m still finding more.

Shane was the singer. No one eulogizing him this week will talk about his vocals, with good reason. The best thing you could say about his singing was that it sounded… real.

There were other songwriters in the band: “Thousands are Sailing,” “Lorelei,” “Young Ned of the Hill” are three of their best songs — in fact, MacGowan is the weakest link on 1989’s Peace and Love album, where all but two of his songs (“Down All the Days,” “London, You’re a Lady”) are filler and retreads. That year he was much better on a non-album single that was so stupid it was brilliant:

MacGowan returned to form on 1990’s underrated Hell’s Ditch, produced by Joe Strummer, but by that point he was such a fuck-up on stage — when he even made it to the stage — that after the band fired him they went on the road with Strummer at the mic. That was a necessary and ballsy move by the band. It also marked the end.

The Pogues, sans MacGowan and sadly sans Strummer, put out two more albums in the ’90s. One of them, Waiting for Herb, spawned a top 20 UK single (only their second), “Tuesday Morning.” Oddly enough, it’s also the only song that Spider Stacy — the tin whistle player who would also assume lead vocals whenever MacGowan wandered away from the mic, which was often — ever wrote while in the Pogues. It’s a pleasant trifle.

Yet the full album found the other songwriters struggling; I had high hopes, but they were dashed by mediocre material. Maybe they were emotionally drained after all the MacGowan drama. The crisp but limp production by Torontonian Michael Brook didn’t help; most of the songs badly needed some bite.

The final record, Pogue Mahone, where only Jem Finer contributed original songs, was a pale imitation of what had once been one of the greatest bands in the world. Finer too soon left, and the band finally folded.

MacGowan put together a band cheekily called the Popes, hoping that the fairest of fairweather fans might be confused. Their 1994 debut album, The Snake, wasn’t terrible. They were basically a rock band with a banjo in it.

The Popes’ live show, though, was absolutely terrible, or at least the show I saw at Toronto’s RPM club in 1995: MacGowan could barely stand up, never mind sing, and the set list consisted almost entirely of Pogues songs being played by dudes who were most definitely not the Pogues. He also covered, uh, “Hippy Hippy Shake.” It was ham-fisted at best.

Another album followed in 1997. MacGowan was heavily into heroin around this time — that’s pretty audible. Then the Popes too thankfully packed it in.

To get an idea of just how bad MacGowan sounded in the ’90s, here he is butchering one of his best songs with none other than Sinead O’Connor, where they’re both haunted by the ghost of the fact that he could do a lot better than this. I don’t dare post the duet he did with Clannad’s Moya Brennan, which is even worse. This video is just as terrible as the rendition, which even O’Connor can’t save — and why is he standing in ankle-deep water?!):

I mean, it’s really no small wonder he never got in front of a studio microphone again.

There were many Pogues reunion gigs and short tours after 2001, all of which included MacGowan. Guitarist/songwriter Phillip Chevron died of cancer in 2013; the Pogues played what would be their final show a year later.

They never came to Canada during that time. I’m not sure I’d go see them if they had. If someone other than MacGowan was at the mic? Then I absolutely would. The Pogues are the one band in the world I would be super excited to see play live without their lead singer. And I did.

Joe Strummer had filled in for Philip Chevron on one ’80s tour of North America, and fronted the band in 1991, shortly after producing Hell’s Ditch and after they sacked MacGowan. The Toronto stop on that tour, held on the CNE grounds in a circus tent belonging to a troupe called Archaos, was absolutely thrilling. I didn’t miss MacGowan at all. (The Dream Warriors showed up on stage that night, too — that was odd.)

I like to imagine a future where Strummer continued with the Pogues. He died in 2002. I didn’t realize until this week that a London show from that 1991 tour was released in 2014. It sounds amazing. This was not a band that was ready to pack it in.

The ghosts are rattling at the door

A man is dead, this is an obit, and I’m prattling on as a disappointed fan who feels he’s owed something. But I’m not. A lot of great bands, a lot of great songwriters, only have 10 solid-gold years in them anyway — and the brighter they burn, the more likely they’re not knocking it out of the park after a decade.

If MacGowan had quietly retired in 1991 and lived off the royalties to “Fairytale of New York” for the rest of his life, who am I to judge? He assembled one of my favourite bands of all time and wrote many of their best songs. For that I’m thankful and grateful.

And because I feel terrible about posting that Chrissie Hynde clip earlier, I’ll close on a slightly better note.

It’s 2008, and he’s on Irish television with Sarah Shannon’s band and Joyce Redmond playing the part of Kirsty McColl, on a song that you will be hearing yet again this Christmas, a countercultural song from 1988 that has somehow been sanitized in the public imagination to be suitable for holiday shopping. He’s singing it a year after the BBC started bleeping out the word “faggot” in the lyric which incensed some fans. But MacGowan was actually fine with it, understood the modern controversy, took time to explain narrative songwriting, and told everyone to chill out and do what they like with it. Bleep it or don’t, he’s fine either way.

I love this song, but I kind of never need to hear it again in my life. Every December when it comes on I’m reminded that Kirsty McColl was killed in a Christmas Day accident. And this December I’ll remember that Shane MacGowan “won’t see another one.”

Happy Christmas your arse / I pray God it’s our last. This year, it is.

So let’s watch the man smile and waltz with a lovely lady in an Irish pub. He does not have a drink in his hand in this clip.

I have a feeling, however, that MacGowan would prefer this tribute:

“Good night and God bless, now fuck off to bed.” — Shane MacGowan, “Sit Down by the Fire”

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Because MacGowan was a romantic but not maudlin, I’ll share my favourite morbid meme from this week’s news: