Shane MacGowan, Pogues Singer, Dies at 65

Gil Kaufman
·10 min read
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Shane MacGowan, the legendarily shambolic, magnetic frontman of Celtic rock band The Pogues, died on Thursday (Nov. 30) at age 65 following a recent hospitalization. The band confirmed the passing of their notoriously hard-living singer, whose yearning, howling vocals and gritty rose-from-concrete lyrics super-charged the Pogues’ meld of traditional Irish music and punk rock spirit on such beloved songs as “The Old Main Drag” and “A Pair of Brown Eyes.”

The group issued a statement in honor of their beloved bandmate on behalf of MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clark, sister Siobhan and father, Maurice. “It is with the deepest sorrow and heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of SHANE MACGOWAN. Shane died peacefully at 3am this morning (30 November, 2023) with his wife Victoria and family by his side. Prayers and the last rites were read which gave comfort to his family,” it read, alongside a picture of MacGowan in his prime, a cigarette and glass of wine in hand, flashing his signature infectious, crooked smile.

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In an Instagram post, Clark wrote, “I don’t know how to say this so I am just going to say it. Shane who will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love ❤️ of my life and the most beautiful soul and beautiful angel and the sun and the moon and the start and end of everything that I hold dear has gone to be with Jesus and Mary and his beautiful mother Therese.”

The singer, who the BBC reported had been unwell for quite a while, struggled openly for many years with drugs and drink and was booted from the band in 1991 after his alcohol abuse made him unreliable; he returned to the fold in 2001 for a final thirteen-year stint before the band split for good in 2014. MacGowan was hospitalized in Dec. 2022 with viral encephalitis and spent several months in intensive care earlier this year as a result.

MacGowan was as mythical a figure on the British music scene as the grizzled characters he inhabited in the Pogues’ songs, which were inspired by figures from literature, the Bible, mythology and the hard-scrabble lives of working class Irish immigrants. His vocals, filled with a mix of anger, pugnaciousness and sad-eyed, sneery resignation, could swing from a howl and a growl to grizzled tenderness in the span of a single track, or a single couplet. His onstage demeanor often mirrored the rough-hewn heroes of his songs: perpetually disheveled, his hair mussed under a porkpie hat, a smoke in his right and a drink never far away as he squeezed his eyes shut and gripped the microphone stand as if hanging on for dear life.

His death just weeks before Christmas added an extra layer of poignancy to the loss, as this is the season when the Pogues’ 1987 holiday standard, “Fairytale of New York,” is often in heavy rotation. The swaying, dirt-caked ballad featuring MacGowan — who was born on Christmas day — trading vocals with the late singer/songwriter Kirsty MacColl has been in the UK’s top 20 19 times since its release, perennially charting around Christmastime and peaking at No. 2 on the UK charts during the year of its release.

After an opening scene in which MacGowan’s character laments sleeping off a drinks binge in a New York drunk tank, the tune has the two trading salty insults as they lament dreams deferred by addiction, brought home by the crooned chorus, “The boys of the NYPD choir/ Still singing Galway Bay/ And the bells are ringing out/ For Christmas day.”

Born Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan on Dec. 25 1957, in Kent, England to Irish parents, MacGowan showed creative promise and a thirst for literature from a young age, devouring the works of Irish poet/author James Joyce, philosopher Jean Paul Sartre and D.H. Lawrence at a time when most children were still working their way through chapter books. His literary precociousness helped land him a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster school in London in 1971, but in a foreshadowing of the trouble to come, he was expelled in his second year for drug possession.

According to authorized biographer Richard Balls (A Furious Devotion, 2001), MacGowan’s early acquaintance with substances and song could be traced in part to summers spent at his family’s home in rustic County Tipperary in Ireland. It was there that friends and kin would gather on weekends for spirited, all-night, booze-soaked hootenannies where the singer said, “I would be put upon the table from the earliest days I can remember and told to sing what songs I knew.”

That was also, he said in his 2001 memoir, where he first began indulging in what became a lifetime of drinking, in part thanks to an uncle who would return from the pub each night with two bottles of Guinness for his nephew beginning when MacGowan was five-years-old. By 17, he was institutionalized for six months in the psychiatric unit at Bethlem Royal Hospital due to a diagnosis of acute anxiety.

After watching the Sex Pistols open up for future Clash singer Joe Strummer’s The 101’ers, MacGowan found his purpose, transforming himself into a dyed-hair, snarling character Shane O’Hooligan. His unofficial debut on the then-boiling English punk scene came via an incident that was fittingly chaotic and tinged with punk-fueled violence when he was photographed covered in blood while attending a 1976 gig by The Clash at which his ear was ripped open, spawning the NME headline “Cannibalism at Clash Gig.”

After briefly joining a punk band called The Nipple Erectors (aka “the Nips”), MacGowan formed The Pogues in London in 1982 with tin whistle player Peter “Spider” Stacy, banjo player Jem Finer and former Nips accordion player James Fearnley at a time when eyeliner and dance-y synthesizer New Romantic music was all the rage; they were originally known as “Pogue Mahone,” a winking twist on a Gaelic phrase that roughly translates to “kiss my arse.”

With the addition of bassist Cait O’Riordan and drummer Andrew Ranken the band began playing London pub gigs and signed to punk label Stiff Records, which released their 1984 debut, Red Roses For Me. The album set the table for the Pogues’ signature sound from the very first song, “Transmetropolitan,” a rousing pub rocker featuring MacGowan’s excitable vocals, which fronted a collection of originals mixed with a number of traditional Irish songs.

Quickly establishing a reputation for high-energy, chaotic live shows, the group’s profile was kicked up several notches when fellow Stiff Records act Elvis Costello signed on to produce their breakthrough 1985 album, Run Sodomy & the Lash, which featured such classics as the lament “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “Sally MacLennane” and the frenetic pirate tune “Billy’s Bones,” all written by MacGowan.

On songs such as the sentimental “Brown Eyes,” MacGowan emerged as a drunk tank street poet with a heart of gold rusted through by hard living, embodied by such visually rich lines as: “A hungry sound came across the breeze/ So I gave the walls a talkin’/ And I heard the sounds of long ago/ From the old canal/ And the birds were whistling in the trees/ Where the wind was gently laughing.”

His portrait of a young man drinking at a pub listening to an old veteran’s tale of war and love is at once heartbreaking and strangely soothing. “One summer evening drunk to hell/ I sat there nearly lifeless/ An old man in the corner sang/ ‘Where the Water Lilies Grow’,” he sang in the song whose chorus begged for the raising of a pint and an arm-in-arm sing-along for a brown-eyed love the narrator reveals he’s lost as well: “And a rovin’, a rovin’, a rovin’ I’ll go/ For a pair of brown eyes.”

Their next album, 1987’s If I Should Fall From Grace With God, (which featured “Fairytale”) was their best-seller and their most eclectic, swapping some of the traditional Irish sounds with more world music touches, including a epic take on the the Australian anti-war lament “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda.”

The marauding, skiffle-like title track was again packed with MacGowan’s poetic tales of misadventure, couched in a tale of purgatory and spiked with a soupçon of Irish nationalist sentiment and contempt for Protestant England (“This land was always ours/ Was the proud land of our fathers/ It belongs to us and them/ Not to any of the others”).

Like in many of his lyrics, MacGowan also meditated on death and the beyond with a haunted pirate’s view, singing, “Bury me at sea/ Where no murdered ghost can haunt me/ If I rock upon the waves/ No corpse shall lie upon me,” leading to the chorus, “Let me go, boys/ Let me go, boys/ Let me go down in the mud/ Where the rivers all run dry.”

The band followed up with the release of 1989’s Peace and Love and 1990’s Hell’s Ditch, whose U.S tour was scotched due to MacGowan’s unreliability, which led to his sacking in 1991. The singer quickly formed the solo band Shane MacGowan and the Popes, with whom he released two studio albums and a live album. In 2000, Sinead O’Connor reported MacGowan to the police for heroin possession, which angered the singer at first, though he later thanked her for helping him kick the drug; when O’Connor’s son Shane, 17, died in 2022, MacGowan paid tribute to the “Nothing Compares 2 U” singer, writing, “You have always tried to heal and help.”

After his firing, MacGowan returned to the Pogues in 2001 and the group toured for much of the next decade while stories of MacGowan’s life and times were chronicled in the autobiography A Drink With Shane MacGowan and the 2020 film Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan.

Hailed by late Clash singer Joe Strummer — who briefly joined the band in 1991 — as one of England’s greatest songwriters, MacGowan won the prestigious Ivor Novello songwriting award in 2018. His passing was honored by Irish president Michael Higgins, who said, “His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history … The genius of Shane’s contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams – of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from.”

Priscilla Kotey, SVP of Warner Music Ireland said in a statement, “Shane MacGowan was in a class by himself. His extraordinary gift for music, zest for living and rebellious nature cemented him as an icon in Ireland and all around the world. He will continue to influence artists everywhere. This Christmas season will feel much darker without his charismatic, illuminating presence. We have lost some true Irish legends this year, but we can feel proud their amazing artistry transcended our isle, and that their incredible music will live on forever.”

See the family’s statement and listen to some MacGowan’s most beloved songs below.

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