A LIVING LEGACY OF SHANE MACGOWAN: HERO, SYMBOL AND MAN part 2
“HEARING THE POGUES for the first time was like an epiphany,” declares John McLaughlin whose background as a songwriter for Westlife and one-time manager of Bay City Rollers doesn’t obscure his roots in the punk scene of Glasgow. “I loved that Shane was the most unaffected and causally cool anti-hero ever!”
As Victoria Mary Clarke explained in part one of this story yesterday, Shane MacGowan “wasn’t bothered about what anyone else would think” of most things, but he did care about his fellow musicians and their thoughts and their approaches to song. Especially his songs. So the many choices made on Shane MacGowan: 20th Century Paddy, would have entertained, amused, maybe befuddled, but definitely provoked a response from him.
But what do some of the musicians on the album – those not called Bruce Springsteen or Tom Waits, Kate Moss or Bono, or for that matter, Glen Hansard or Jessie Buckley, Garron Noone and Damien Dempsey, Johnny Deep and Imelda May – think of the man and how did they come to perform the songs we now have to revel in MacGowan’s music?
Liam O Maonlai of Hothouse Flowers has known Shane and Victoria for decades and lives around the corner from them. He was one of the fulcrums of the tribute performances at the funeral in 2023 and has been playing MacGowan songs with another Irish artist and album contributor, Camille O’Sullian, since the funeral. As he knows better than most then, that service and now this album is anything but mournful, instead it was and is joyful and sad and celebratory.
“Shane represented a time for me,” O Maonlai says. “I grew up, I was coming of age, in the late ‘70s when punk rock was creating a wave in my country and across the pond in England and Scotland and Wales and further afield. Each territory had its own emphasis and its own energy and its own characters …[we were] kids who were looking at the world we were inheriting being told to be afraid, being told to obey, being told to conform, being told to buy, being told to learn, being told to memorise, being told to hate, being told to believe, being told so many things. There were so many contradictions and this anger in the form of music catalysed us just for identity’s sake: something to be as a teenager.
“Shane came out of that time, and he was a little bit older than me and he had a band and he was living that life, which was a crazy enough life but he believed in it as an artistic lifestyle. His lifestyle brought him to conversations and to visions and opinions and brought him to places that people identified with. A lot of the punk artists were Irish of origin but living in England so the experience for many of those people and families were of not feeling like they belonged anywhere. That they were born on the streets of London or Manchester or Leeds [meant] they were Irish in England and English in Ireland when they went home in the summers. That added a certain energy that you had to prove yourself, I suppose, and there was nothing better than creating music.
“I know that Shane looked to home, looked to Tipperary and the pastoral beauty of home, of ancestry. He looked to those places for his songs, then have them carried on the energy of punk rock and the energy of the music of the ‘50s and ‘60s that the Dubliners, particularly, had created, in folk … was equally important a reaction to fascism, a reaction to authoritarianism. So he spoke to the soul really and his way was a very, very natural and unapologetic evolution, and he wore his influences on his sleeve and people related to it.
“In the ‘80s a lot of Irish had to leave and go to London and go to other countries, and I’d meet people who lived in London at that time and the Pogues just meant so much. They made champions of these people who were otherwise looked upon as the opposite.”
It’s worth noting this five minute, 400-word answer came without pause or stumbling even. Which might be a warning before a second question! But when asked how he came to perform The Broad Majestic Shannon it is not all poetry. For a start, his first call, Summer In Siam, had already been taken by Tom Waits.
“But having said that, even the title has just got this bravado but it’s not bravado; it’s got this pride but it’s not pride, it’s nature,” O Maonlai says. “The river, like rivers all over the world, the water – everything natural – is under attack. The River Liffey, it used to stink, our main river in Dublin, it used to stink. Most of the big rivers in most of our big cities in Ireland and in England, everywhere, used to stink, but people know instinctively that a river should be clean because a river is a habitat, and you get these movements of people who are willing to take their kids on a Sunday and just go down and make sure the river is clean – clean it up and pick up whatever might be there.
“As I speak it’s an opportunity to say that that’s one good reason to sing about a river, to sing in praise of a river.”
For Lisa Moorish, an English singer/songwriter and social activist, “Shane's legacy is about being absolutely and totally unapologetic. Creatively, politically, in all ways”.
“He was never seduced by fame and fortune. His music said to me that traditional, middle of the road pop music I was being fed (some of it great) was not going to ignite my soul the way music should,” she writes. “I knew at a young age, that what Shane was doing was gently pushing his hand into your chest, and firmly plucking at your heart strings. Waking parts of you up, that lay dormant and untouched by revolutionary music and melody.”
As for her choice: “I wanted to do Rain Street, as it had a certain Blondie quality and style to it that I've always loved, and still love. And I knew it would work well with my voice because of that. It's such a corker of a song!”
You get something similar from Lyra, a relatively new artist whose debut album was released the year after MacGowan’s 2023 death but whose connection is as much about truth as poetry and Irishness, as might be told by her contribution, Streets Of Sorrow/Birmingham Six, that combines community and “having each other’s backs” with celebrating life.
“That sense of togetherness was something I really wanted people to feel, alongside the pain and injustice in the story. I wanted the arrangement to carry you through those emotions,” she says. For me, Shane’s legacy is about the power of telling a story and making people feel every word of it. There’s such honesty in his writing.
“He could find beauty in something heartbreaking, and he had a real gift for giving people a voice. He could make important messages heard through the beauty of his art, without losing any of the power of what he was saying. As an Irish artist, that’s something I really admire. He showed that you could stay completely true to where you came from and still connect with people all over the world. In my own music, I want people to feel something, and that’s what I take from him: having the courage to put real emotion into a song.”
When folk/rock singer and poet David Keenan was approached by Clarke “there was a lot of thought but there wasn’t any indecision. This is a hero of mine, you know, and whatever I can do to make it happen, I’ll make it happen.”
“This is a dream for any songwriter. I don’t know if our egos would get in the way for other people, but you just put down what you’re doing and sing on this record. It’s as simple as that,” he says. ““I reached out to Mick Cronin, who runs Transmission Studios. Shane spent a lot of time there, would have been great friends with Mick and Johnny Cronin, and I knew Shane’s energy was there. I thought let’s make a plan, let’s go and commune [he chuckles] with the spirit of Shane in some way in Drumlish.”
As for the song he chose, The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn, where he sees himself in the role of “an observer really, a witness”, he thought he needed a way to access to the song that would avoid merely copying the original, so wrote an Irish language introduction, “an invocation in Irish”, which helped him find a way of his own into the song. A song that in many ways had to be done by him.
“I suppose it was fate in a way because I was presented with maybe 10 or 11 songs but Cuchulainn is the figure in Irish mythology from where I’m from [in Dundalk near the border with Northern Ireland] and Cuchulainn’s stone is something I used to play around as a child,” Keenan says. “It’s like a standing stone in a field and it’s kind of disappeared into folklore and then mythology that this is the stone that he tied himself to, wounded, as he was fighting off armies. His enemies didn’t approach him until the bird landed on his shoulder and picked at him so they knew that he was dead.
“That stone was a stone we used to walk around at Easter, to open it up and close it. That’s how close mythology was to me, growing up.”
In the poem he has written as a preamble to the song, he says “On the third day I was spent, but suddenly I heard the music again and your voice saying ‘onwards, onwards, go on, go on’.”
“It was almost like me on a three-day bender being totally wiped out, being totally spent, and having this kind of scene in front of me of Cuchulainn and MacGowan saying get into it, get stuck in.”
Like Cuchulainn, MacGowan “has become a hero, in the tradition of Irish heroes and legends” and for Keenan that has roots for him that go back to his earliest memories and a resonance in the right now.
“It is like when you first hear She Loves You or Elvis: for my generation, when you’re conscious of Christmas in Ireland you know Fairytale Of New York. It stood out from the canon of Christmas songs, it stood out as some kind of treasure. It does the same thing to me today that he did then, when in a sea of homogenised shite, the poetry and the lyrics stand out. It always made me want to sit down with a pen and paper and write, and I just think it will do the same to a younger generation discovering it.”
Why does that matter?
“You need to be reminded all the time of actually what can be achieved with an imagination and a song. That’s why I think it’s treasure, that’s why I think it’s really important. It lit a torch in me and gave me permission to express my Irishness in self-imposed exile when I lived in the UK living hand-to-mouth. And even immigration at the minute, it’s very divisive and the Pogue’s music and MacGowan gave voice to that as well in Australia, America, everywhere. We need to be reminded of that now because there’s fucking xenophobia rife everywhere at the minute. Here’s somebody who took that story, that journey and mapped it out in amazing songs.
“And he lived it. Whether or not you agreed with him, the man was true to himself. That’s really powerful in an age of influencers and celebrity, somebody being themselves without any mask.”
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Shane MacGowan: Twentieth Century Paddy is out on November 13
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