Shane: I Wuz Robbed

SHANE MacGowan just finished up a successful coast-to-coast tour of the U.S., playing all three legs of the tri-city Fleadh, which for an erratic performer like him is no mean feat. He's been his usual cheery self these days, barring a pre-tour outburst in which he accused his former bandmates in The Pogues of ripping him off. When asked what in his career he would have done different, the 40-year-old MacGowan hissed, "business decisions."

MacGowan says he's been ripped off "by loads of different people. They've been living off my royalties for six years," MacGowan said of The Pogues. "I wrote most of the songs, apart from the traditional ones. And I wanted to do more traditional ones, and the songs they wrote weren't really up to scratch, d'ya know what I mean? Most of 'em - I mean, there were some classics, like 'Thousands are Sailing' [written by Philip Chevron but sung by Shane] -- but in the end we all hated each other. They all hated me."

It's hard to tell when MacGowan is joking, but even if he was being only half-facetious in saying the above it was still the most vitriol we've seen to date between the singer and his former band. For the most part MacGowan has always wished his bandmates well, even after they dumped him from the band during a tour in Japan in 1991, and even when they released two Pogues discs without him. Despite some occasional quality on the first disc (Waiting for Herb), those discs sounded as if they were done by the posthumous Pogues.

Maybe this is just MacGowan trying to set the record straight. Two years ago, this writer was contacted by the above-named Chevron because of a negative review of the last and most dismal Pogues disc, patronizingly titled Pogue Mahone. Chevron urged that MacGowan's profile outweighed his actual contribution to the band, which in Chevron's view was much more of a collective than a 'MacGowan and Friends' group.

Finally, MacGowan confirmed that fleecing him probably wouldn't be such a difficult thing to do, considering his lack of memory skills. Reacting to a comment by his friend Nick Cave, the Australian rocker, MacGowan admitted that many of his songs have been lost to scribbled-on cocktail napkins. Cave said that MacGowan had probably lost more great songs than many other musicians have recorded.