The Measure

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

I could have been someone

Shane MacGowan

It may be that this blog is drawing to a close, though I've thought that a few times before. Since the last post, it's been a few months, I've had a few ideas, but just not been bothered to take the time to inadequately express something small. So, maybe this is something of a last hurrah. Probably not, but maybe.

I am drawn back to write about Shane MacGowan, inevitably. I've written a few times about Shane MacGowan before, particularly in December 2020. This will expand on some of those thoughts and will become self-indulgent. There's been a huge outpouring of warmth at his death, as you'd have expected. He meant a lot to many people. He meant a lot to me.

I knew a little about the Pogues in the 80s. I think they were well-liked by one or more of my siblings, or my cousins. Then MacGowan became a figure of some dark tabloid fascination in the 90s, without my really diving deep into his music. I liked That Woman's Got Me Drinking by The Popes and paid some attention to Haunted, his duet with Sinead O'Connor. Of course, there was always Fairytale of New York, I perhaps knew one or two others, not much else. He was in the gossip pages of the NME fairly often, for good or bad.

In around 2000, I started to investigate the Pogues further, and was bowled over in particular by Rainy Night in Soho. I also became fascinated by Haunted (originally a Pogues song, then rerecorded in the 90s). I think it is one of the most personally significant songs I've ever listened to, in fact. It is the most blatant example of the juxtaposition of the conventionally (if you can ever describe Sinead O'Connor as conventional) beautiful with the apparently ugly, for the purpose of creating a greater beauty. It really defines that idea. It told me a lot, in a very clear way, about what music I loved and why I loved it. 

It just seems to be something in music some of us love, and some of us don't. Some fly from the first sign of ugliness, some have no choice but to embrace it, I listened to it over and over again, waiting to be thrilled by the moment when Shane bursts in ..."you got a way of walking..." Both of them are utterly angelic, in their different ways, on that song.

And over the last 20-odd years, I've listened to the Pogues more and more - to songs which seem to me to be obvious classics - like Springsteen, or Dylan. Sally McLennane, Sick Bed of Cuchulainn, Streams of Whiskey, Body of an American, If I Should Fall from Grace With God, Fiesta, A Pair of Brown Eyes, Summer in Siam, The Old Main Drag, London Girl etc. I'd sing gleefully, raucously along to them when I was working down in the shed and had lost any sense of inhibition, during lockdown. I can sing them well, actually.

I was too young to properly experience the Pogues in their prime (oddly, the only time I saw Shane in the flesh was when he strolled out to do Dirty Old Town with Babyshambles, of all people, at Benicassim in 2006). How thrilling and life-enhancing they must have been for the London Irish and for everyone they struck a chord with. Especially as it was the 80s, and so much or rock music was so clueless and misguided in the 80s. To be one of the very few bands, like the Replacements on the other side of the Atlantic, that figured it out and set the template for the decade to come - how to take the best from punk and also from their own traditional forms, to make something fierce and beautiful and timeless. The Pogues are a paragon. I love the fact that they were the biggest influence on the Walkmen. You wouldn't think to hear it. But it's true, pure rock'n'roll. 

Like Dylan's, the songs sound like redrawings of fundamentals, they borrow from what already exists, yet still manufacture something unique, something which seems obvious yet no one had ever thought of before.

And then there's MacGowan the man. A man not separate from his music. A music not separate from its man. 

I suppose my interest was piqued by his incongruities and the superficial similarities of our biography. The name. The ears. The ... departure from conventional beauty norms. The London public schoolboy. Loving The Jam. The Irishness, of course, the London Irishness. 

But I'm not like Shane McGowan. I'm not brilliant or wild. The two famous people who I've identified with most strongly, actually the only two I've felt I'm made of the same fundamental stuff as, are Shane McGowan and Wayne Rooney. But they're both brilliant and wild.

When Wayne Rooney emerged, I wished he'd been 8 years older than me, rather than vice versa, as I'd have known how to play football as well as I could if I'd had his example, his physical template, to follow. I'd have played like him (obviously much worse, but like him ...)

But I'd never really have wanted to be like Shane MacGowan, I suppose. The forces against living like that were too strong, too formative.

Alcoholic is one word. Addict is another. People like to use those words these days, to denote the illness, the tragedy. To visualise a different, better person not trapped in the cycle of abuse. Still, there is a place for a word like "drinker". A more dignifying, romantic, word. There remains a place for that.

Some people are drinkers. Maybe there was some point in time when that wasn't what they were, but that time is too far gone to be relevant. Shane MacGowan, a drinker, made it 65. My father, Paddy McGaughey, a drinker, made it to 70. Decent efforts under the circumstances, in both cases.

I thought about MacGowan a fair bit in my dad's final years. I certainly, cliche though it is, thought about him as the protagonist in Fairytale from New York. I was having a drink with him on Christmas Eve 2009 and I think we were both thinking "won't see another one".

I drank with him a lot between 1996 and 2010 because that was the thing to do, and I got to understand him (and, by extension, people like him) pretty well. It was always cordial, but not always smooth.

Was he like Shane MacGowan? In some ways, perhaps. MacGowan was clearly brilliant as a boy from the Irish countryside who won writing competitions and won a scholarship to a leading English public school. I suspect he had sucked up most of the lore and literature that fed into his greatest songs while he was still in his teens. Perhaps his brilliance was not entirely gone too soon, who knows, but certainly he was unproductive, compared to his promise, after the age of 30. 

My father was also, by accounts including his own (!), brilliant as a child and a young man from the rural edge of an Irish city who took himself to England at 18. Those meetings in Paddington pubs we shared in my early adulthood featured plenty of regrets and disappointments (on both sides) but also plenty of signs that what gifts had once been abundant was still there, just in a reduced form.

It is, needless to say, complex. I never wished or considered that my father would stop drinking, nor that he would seek to extend his life beyond the natural course such a lifestyle took him. It was a luxury I had to think that way, I suppose. I was a peripheral, pretty undamaged part of what wreckage there was. I could afford to respect his attempts to hold on to dignity, to not seek pity, to, really and truly, enjoy the drink and the barstool and the chat, to be true to himself, and accept the consequences.

Sometimes. Sometimes it was irritating. On my own behalf, "irritating" on my mother's behalf and his later partner/carer's, on my older siblings' behalf, on anyone's behalf who was was caught in the crossfire. Irritating to assume the role of confidante and forgiver. I remember sitting in the McDonald's at Marble Arch in 1996 (so probably one of the first adult-to-adult drinks we'd had), thoroughly vexed and saddened. I can't remember exactly what it was. Just disappointment mainly. I got over that moment. I never really felt that bad about the whole business again. I always protected myself and was my mother's son, above all.

In the end, all the mayhem and pain gets mostly forgotten, even forgiven. MacGowan's bandmates, who had to kick him out of their magnificent band, love and honour him. The church was packed for my father's funeral and the revelling went into the night. It sticks in the craw of some, I suppose. They say, don't romanticize the disease, the ruin.

But these are great songs and these are drinking songs, nearly every one. Funny, ruinous, pathetic, beautiful. There is no separation.

If I was to choose 12 Shane MacGowan/Pogues songs for each day of Christmas, I'd go with with ...

A Rainy Night in Soho (a perfect song, a song that should be Number 1 for 20 weeks)

Sally MacLennane

Summer in Siam

Haunted (with Sinead O'Connor)

The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn

Turkish Song of the Damned

The Body of an American

Pair of Brown Eyes

The Broad Majestic Shannon

Streams of Whiskey

Fairytale of New York

The Parting Glass

But really, almost all the early Pogues songs are good to great. There was something bulletproof about that sound, that voice and that pen for a few years

Farewell Shane MacGowan, you figurehead (hero is definitely the wrong word) for us somewhat Irish people, us London people, us people who love rock'n'roll and history, who love lines that scan like magic and make you laugh, us unconventional-looking men, us unconventional singers, us fans of The Jam and of Murder Ballads, us McGs, for people who drink and people who know people who drink and still see the beauty in it. Maybe it could have been different. Maybe better. Maybe not.