SLIPPERS AND SONGS AND SHANE MACGOWAN LIVING ON part 1
HOW DO WE BEST MOURN the dead? By remembering. How do we best remember? By repeating and sharing what we knew of them, encouraging others to join in with their own takes, and along the way allowing more to discover what had been there waiting for them to know.
When Shane MacGowan died almost three years ago, a very public mourning and celebration happened in Dublin, in Ireland on both sides of the border, in the UK and America and Australia and plenty of places where the singer and songwriter had never even been. This wasn’t just another death of a musician whose least significant but nonetheless vital achievement was having outlived the predictions of those who had only seen a long love/hate affair with alcohol and drugs in a life led furiously if not always wisely. Here had passed a writer whose songs broadened the idea of the Irish diaspora to include the emotionally displaced and romantic everywhere.
As an old friend and colleague, Liam O Maonlai described him: “There’s a type of artist who goes down to Hades, down to the dark, or what we call the dark, and shines light on it. Or finds light down there and says ‘look, there’s light down there’. It’s the lost, it’s the drunk tank, it’s the marginal people you step over on the street, but when you actually stop you might find yourself being actually taken on an almost shamanic journey of stories. And Shane discovered that and therefore gives identity to those people and those characters who might otherwise be looked upon as lost.”
MacGowan’s casket was taken through the streets of his adopted and spiritual home in a horse-drawn carriage, his passing was then marked at a church in County Tipperary inside which gathered the great and the good and the maybe-not-so-good, from the president of Ireland to former members of the IRA, from musicians such as Nick Cave and Glen Hansard to actors like Aidan Gillen and Johnny Depp. And inside that church some of the songs he wrote, for The Pogues and for himself, were performed by many of the musicians in attendance, broadcast internationally.
That was probably never going to be enough though, as his widow, the journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, well knew. Which may explain why now we are to receive a vast collection of his songs performed by the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits, Oscar winner Jessie Buckley and Lisa O’Neill, who was on tour in Australia with The Pogues earlier this year, Scottish bands such as Jesus And Mary Chain and Primal Scream, Irish artists like U2 and Camille O’Sullivan, and folk, rock, pop and traditional musicians from all over the world.
It’s almost as if Clarke, who was the project’s executive producer, was offering everyone one more chance to mourn and remember and celebrate the man, beginning with his fellow musicians.
“I kinda saw it as them helping me, rather than me helping them,” she says today. “They’re all contributing something of their own essence really, their own energy, their own time, but also their own perspective, their own being. So it’s like they’re taking Shane’s work and bringing themselves to it and making something new, a totally new entity.
“And maybe more people will listen to these versions and decide to do their own versions based on [that]. It’s like growing different branches, isn’t it?”
The music stays alive but then is refreshed, reborn?
“It’s circulating, it’s not staying stagnant. It’s moving and growing and evolving.”
This project was not something that had come up with MacGowan before his death, but the genesis may well have been a celebration during his lifetime that had a similar spiral from intimate to major event to almost historic.
“We did a concert for his birthday, when he turned 60, which he really enjoyed, and that was quite a surprise because it wasn’t meant to be so big. It started out as let’s do a bit of a concert, let’s see who’s around, but then when we realised who was around – like Bono and Johnny Depp and Nick Cave – it kinda turned into something much bigger,” Clarke recalls. “And even Sinead O’Connor. We didn’t expect Sinead O’Connor to be able to come but she came and she absolutely killed it. So it turned into something much bigger and more beautiful than we could have imagined.
“The same thing happened with this album. It started out as just an idea after his funeral. I thought that music [at the ceremony] was so good and people did such beautiful versions that I thought, wow, we have to capture this. We can’t let this disappear.”
Many, if not most of the artists involved were friends of Clarke and MacGowan: some going back decades, such as Cave and Springsteen; some, like Liam O Maonlai of Hothouse Flowers, also are literally neighbours. Some though were sought out as inheritors of the ideas not just the music.
“[Springsteen] came around to visit Shane before he died and they had a really lovely afternoon together. He gave me his number and said call him any time, come visit him if we’re in America,” explains Clarke. “He phoned me when Shane died, so it wasn’t really difficult to just say hey we’re doing this and he said yes, absolutely I want to be in it.”
And Springsteen did, offering an explanation: "Shane was all naked bottomless humanity. Threatening to force us to ask ourselves if we were living deeply, authentically. He was raw, hilarious, no apologies and profound. His soul was filled with the transgressive and ecstatic properties of the saints.”
Once started, this thing snowballed as Clarke put to use her contact book (and that of close friend Hansard, whose own life was curtailed in a road accident in July) or fielded calls from volunteers. Indeed right up to a supposedly hard deadline recently people were offering themselves.
“What was interesting is the bigger names, like Bruce and U2, were so easy: they were like ‘yes!’. Glen Hansard just said yes straight away, Camille said yes straight away, and Johnny Depp had already done it. He had gone ahead and recorded it. And then some of the smaller names maybe we had to accommodate them a bit, or negotiate a bit,” says Clarke. “We looked for younger people, we looked for people representing the next generation so we got people like Amble and Madra Salach, and Kingfishr and The High Kings, Murder Capital – they were great, they were really good fun as well. And then the Japanese band Pinch Of Snuff opens it up to a Japanese audience, which I think is wonderful.”
Were the songs allocated or bid for? Did people fight over songs?
“There was very little fighting,” she says, chuckling. “There was a tiny bit of fighting, but not very much. For example, Pair Of Brown Eyes, was a very popular choice: a couple of people fighting over that one [won by Primal Scream]. But pretty much the rest of them self-allocated. Bruce took Rainy Night [In Soho] because it was the most obvious perfect choice for him. And it is something that Shane had written with Frank Sinatra in mind, so I guess he wanted a big American crooner to do it and we’ve got the most American crooner on the market right now with Bruce.”
Helped by a vast catalogue and serendipity, the album, Shane MacGowan: 20th Century Paddy, coalesced eerily organically.
“For Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah I just said to Bono, I think this song is perfect for you and he thought about it and said yes, this song is perfect for us. A lot of the time it worked really well like that,” Clarke says. “[Comedian and singer] Garron Noone chose White City because that’s the song he liked the best and actually that’s the song that Shane always said he liked the best. I think with Bob Geldof [who would end up doing St John Of Gods] he didn’t like the song I originally sent him so he chose his own, but then that’s Bob Geldof. What do you expect?”
The weight of the loss has been surprisingly lighter for the process of putting together this album, as complicated a puzzle as it has been for Clarke, who married MacGowan in 2018 after an “engagement” of 11 years.
“It feels like there is a kind of invisible force at work which is partly Shane, but probably partly something else, and that this was meant to happen. It’s got this energy behind it and when I tune into it it feels good, it feels uplifting. So it feels like the thing I’m meant to do.”
The portents have been good too if you’re that way inclined. And MacGowan, who greets me from her living room where behind her I can see a religious iconography familiar to any Catholic of a certain age who would have gazed on most of those at their grandmother’s house throughout childhood, clearly is.
“Shane’s really not just encouraging it but working a little bit of magic behind the scenes, pulling strings,” she laughs. “Putting his own energy into it. I don’t think I could have done it on my own, I think it needed some background help.”
Would he have liked this? Would he have been a bit uncomfortable with the singular spotlight on his “genius”? Or would have gone “yeah!”?
“He would have gone ‘yeah!’. He would have enjoyed it,” Clarke says. “If they were doing it when he was alive he would have actively participated in choosing the people and listening to their tracks and deciding if he liked them or not. He was a person who really appreciated attention and approval. He didn’t need it, and he didn’t look for it, but he definitely appreciated it. So when they did that birthday concert he actually cried on stage when the [Irish] president gave him the award because he was really very moved. He definitely responded to love in a huge way.”
This may surprise those who assumed a certain irascibility in the man, but they have all been (partly at least) wrong.
“He didn’t have much tolerance or patience with people he found annoying but that didn’t mean he didn’t like the attention, because he did. He was one of the only people I’ve ever met who was fully comfortable being famous. He was entirely comfortable,” Clarke says with affection. “I think he was born famous because his first picture was on his birthday, Christmas Day, and it was in the newspapers because he was the Christmas baby. So he got completely comfortable with fame and never really thought about it.
“He didn’t think ‘I’m going out today, should I take my slippers off and put on shoes?’. No, could he give a fuck? On our wedding day he wore slippers! So he wasn’t bothered about what anyone else would think. But he did appreciate people saying ‘oh wow, you’re a genius, let’s get you the best seat, let’s get you upgraded’.”
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A Living Legacy Of Shane MacGowan: Hero, Symbol And Man: tomorrow, in part two of this story, we hear from musicians inspired by Shane MacGowan about why he mattered and how they ended up on Shane MacGowan: 20th Century Paddy, revelling in “this feeling of celebrating life, celebrating each other, having each other’s backs and coming together as a community”.
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Shane MacGowan: Twentieth Century Paddy is out on November 13
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