Obit by Brad Balfour
With the death of Shane McGowan, one of Ireland’s and rock & roll finest poets is gone. At 65, long in ill health due to substance abuse, he passed away on November 30th 2023. In many ways he exemplified the tragic life of the poet or rocker consumed with his passion to create and a passion to destroy himself.
The English-born Irish musician, best known as the co-founder, frontman, and chief songwriter of Celtic punk band the Pogues, has had an uneven career but nonetheless established him as one of the finest Irish rockers to emerge from the pub rock scene of the ‘70s. MacGowan’s songs were sourced from Irish history, Irish nationalism, the Irish diaspora, and London life.
Born to Irish parents, in Kent, England, MacGowan spent his early childhood in Tipperary, Ireland. He then moved to England with his family at age six and a half. Noted for his precocious interest in literature — by age 11, he was reading authors including Fyodor Dostoevsky and James Joyce. He won a scholarship to Westminster School, but was expelled for having drugs. He became active on the London punk scene, attended gigs, working in a Soho record shop, and writing a punk fanzine under the pseudonym Shane O’Hooligan. In 1977, he joined the punk band the Nipple Erectors. In 1982, he co-founded the Pogues, who fused punk influences with traditional Irish music; he featured as the principal songwriter and vocalist on the band’s first five studio albums, including Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and the critically acclaimed and commercially successful If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988).
Nonetheless, McGowan sustained himself long enough to write many beautiful songs, some of them classics such as “A Pair of Brown Eyes.” His Christmas duet, “Fairytale of New York” is now a perennial. He co-wrote the 1987 Christmas hit single which the Pogues recorded as a duet between MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl. Titled after a novel by J.P. Dunleavy, it’s voiced with touching language (though sometimes saucy) and a lyicial expression.
Thanks to his reckless lifestyle, MacGowan was expelled from the Pogues — the band he founded. Though he lived a troubled life, he forged a career that won praise and admiration by his peers such as Elvis Costello. He then lived and wrote in London throughout the ’90s, releasing two albums with his band, the Popes. Residing in the county of Tipperary, Ireland, he put together the occasional tour.
In Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, he tells of himself and a small, intimate cast of close friends and family members. The 2020 documentary was written and directed by Julien Temple and produced by Johnny Depp. Distributed by Magnolia Pictures, it had its world premiere at the 2020 San Sebastian International Film Festival.
Unfortunately, this lifestyle took its toll and he fell ill over his last few years. He was hospitalized in July and died last month. Following his death, Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, said: “Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them. 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.”