A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan

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Suite Sudarmoricaine", " Tri Martolod", "The Foggy Dew" ( Foggy Dew) (with Alan Stivell, Again, 1993) Shane was heavily involved in the London punk scene in the 70s and was friends with The Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and others in the scene. His first band, The Nipple Erectors, was a punk band but never got off the ground. It was after the broke up that he formed the Pogues and decided the style would combine his 2 loves Irish music and punk. Shane loved Ireland from a young age where he would spend lots of time with his mothers family on a farm near Nenagh in County Tipperary.

Writing the biography of the man best known for marrying traditional Irish music with British punk — a sound once described by concertina player Noel Hill of the band Planxty as a “terrible abortion” of Irish music — was never going to be easy. To further complicate the matter, Shane MacGowan’s hatred of interviews is almost as notorious as his long and sophisticated affair with drugs and alcohol. Such is punk. Born on Christmas Day 1957 in Kent, MacGowan is best known as the unruly elf who duets so bleakly on Fairytale of New York. He is now, reluctantly, a seasonal fixture, like Mariah Carey in her “sexy Santa” suit. But he is also recognised as a great songwriter, as well as the creator of powerful cover versions of traditional Irish ballads. With the Pogues he made five influential albums, that, with his drunken rabble-rousing, established him as a music industry legend. “I am not a mythical creature though,” he says. “I am very much a human being. I am a primate. I am an animal and an animal has a soul. I believe that we all have one big soul. Everybody on this planet.” I enjoyed this telling of MacGowan's life; it is well written and easy to consume. It is clear that Balls has set out to provide a "warts and all" narrative and there is plenty of material here, that's for sure. I do think that it must be a particular challenge to write a bio of a subject still alive since it necessitates spending time getting material not only from those that know him, but also from the horses mouth so to speak. What often happened is that the author and the subject become friends and therefore I wonder if objectivity suffers. We are told, time and again, how shy Shane is and what a overall "good guy" he is whilst at the same time, being informed about his claims to violence, temper and general proclivity for being obnoxious. Now, it is not up to me to judge any one's lifestyle and I have absolutely no problem with hedonism, in fact I often wish I had lived a life more along those lines. However, it does seem to have been so central to his life that the negatives, although mentioned frequently, seem a little understated to me, at least until the final chapter. Janet Street-Porter. "Editor-At-Large: Tasteless, rude, brilliant (not you, Shane)". The Independent. Archived from the original on 18 March 2017 . Retrieved 4 April 2004. WATCH: Shane MacGowan's car crash duet with Pretenders star Chrissie Hynde". Extra.ie. 14 June 2019. Archived from the original on 4 December 2019 . Retrieved 10 May 2020.Irish Post, 2020 https://www.irishpost.com/news/the-pogues-controversially-branded-english-rather-than-irish-on-wikipedia-189680 I was always into drawing and painting, and I used to do all sorts of things,” he says, “hurlers, IRA men, teenage punks hanging around in cafes, you name it…when I was about 11 or 12 I got heavily into studying history of art and looking at old paintings and modern paintings, I knew a lot about art. It’s one of the only O Levels I got, was in art. Cooper, Leonie (24 December 2015). " "I Don't Like Christmas, It's Gross": An Interview With Shane MacGowan". Vice Magazine. Archived from the original on 10 December 2016 . Retrieved 24 December 2015. A deep dive into the legacy of an Irish icon. Richard Balls serves up the most thorough account of the man — and myth — to date.' Rolling Stone

But if you’re gonna stand there drunk and big up Donald Trump after four years, and put it on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, then you’ve descended to a level of self-loathing. At the same time you just can’t get enough of the public staring at you.” MacGowan has suffered physically from years of binge drinking. He often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland. [36] MacGowan began drinking at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep, and his father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. [37]Definitive portrait of the former Pogue. Intimate, cooperative... the book's strength is that he lets MacGowan speak, and speak on, perfectly capturing the lyrical, romantic rhythms beneath the rasped whisper.' Mojo Book of the Month, 4*

Johnny Depp, who collects MacGowan’s art, writes in a foreword for The Eternal Buzz…: “It’s rare for a creative genius like Shane to have one avenue of output. Such an incendiary talent is likely to have a multitude of facilities whereby his talent might infiltrate the atmosphere and change the climate as we know it. Soon, the Pogues — at that time called Pogue Mahone (the Anglicized version of the Irish phrase for “kiss my arse”) — started gigging regularly around London. Ball describes in detail how they took the scene by storm with a novel mix of tradition and ferocious energy that was unlike anything else going on at the time, anywhere. As the band’s popularity grew, some began to question the authenticity of their Irishness, but “Pogue Mahone didn’t set out to be part of any scene,” Balls writes. “Beyond Dexys [Midnight Runners], no one else was playing Irish music and the patent on hot-wiring traditional songs with punk’s raw power rested firmly with Shane.” Petridis, Alexis (28 November 2013). "The Pogues: 30 Years – review". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 12 June 2018 . Retrieved 10 June 2018. When hearing that this book was to be published my first thought was, is this really the first? I’d read A Drink With Shane MacGowan by the man himself and his then long term partner, Victoria, when it came out in 2001, a great book, which is Shane telling his story, but this is genuinely the first official time the tale has been told in print.Johnny Depp writes in his foreword: “It’s rare for a creative genius like Shane to have one avenue of output. Such an incendiary talent is likely to have a multitude of facilities whereby his talent might infiltrate the atmosphere and change the climate as we know it. And so, revealed here, is Shane’s propensity for the wild, for the absurd, for the political, for the beautiful, all funnelled and threaded through the needle of his pen. MacGowan has used a wheelchair following a fall as he was leaving a Dublin studio in the summer of 2015, which fractured his pelvis. [24] He said in an interview with Vice later that year, "It was a fall and I fell the wrong way. I broke my pelvis, which is the worst thing you can do. I'm lame in one leg, I can't walk around the room without a crutch. I am getting better, but it's taking a very long time. It's the longest I've ever taken to recover from an injury. And I've had a lot of injuries." [33] As of December 2020 [update], he continues to use a wheelchair. [34] Costello would go on to produce the band’s sophomore album Rum, Sodomy, & the Lash, and the Pogues started headlining their own tours. Frank Murray, who had managed the storied Irish band Thin Lizzy, became the Pogues manager and a “battle of wills commenced” between him and MacGowan that would not subside until Shane’s departure. MacGowan’s writing was getting better and becoming more multi-dimensional, evident on songs like “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” which was heavily steeped in allusions to traditional Irish music. As this engrossing book details, Shane was a fairly broken man by this stage. He’d wanted to quit the band for some time, but as he didn't like confrontation or responsibility, he couldn’t do it himself. He needed someone to do it for him, he didn’t enjoy the fame and the gruelling touring schedule had nearly killed him. His legendary consumption of drink and drugs was out of control. This book is the story of one of Ireland’s most favourite sons, from his early days in England to the husk of a man he has now become. Disalvo, Tom (6 December 2022). "Shane MacGowan of The Pogues admitted to hospital". NME . Retrieved 12 December 2022.