Source: Loaded
Date: October 1994
Author: Jon Wilde
Copyright: (c) Loaded, all rights reserved
MR. LIVERMAN
The film director Oliver Stone once remarked that every new
generation needs someone to go out on the edge for them. During the '60s
when rock'n'roll excess was properly born with the hippy counterculture,
rock stars could be found queuing up at the edge of the abyss, their senses
totalled by a drug intake that often verged on the heroic. Many of these
'60s hedonists (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin and Brian Jones among them) failed
to last the assault course. Others, like Eric Clapton, reformed and settled
down in country mansions, emerging once a year for cosy month-long residencies
at the Albert Hall.
By the early '70s, the counterculture had foundered but a whole new chapter
of rock'n'roll excess had opened up, best epitimized by Led Zeppelin who
set a seemingly unattainable standard of mindless depravity for the rock
bands that followed them, which included sex with sharks, chopping up hotel
rooms with samurai swords and the cultivation of whacking great drug habits.
"It's like a stag party that never ends," commented Jimmy Page
on the band's dissolute lifestyle. But, eventually, the stag party did wind
itself up. By the start of the '80s, Led Zep and many of their contemporaries
had given up the ghost and an era of drug fuelled decadence was at an end,
to be succeeded by a period of reform where charity events, raised awareness
and body consciousness became the new fashions. Rock and roll had finally
buried its coke spoon in the back garden and discovered its conscience.
As soon as the mass media tired of documenting the lives of former hell-raisers
who had discovered early morning jogging and wholewheat muesli, they began
their search for a new symbol of rock'n'roll excess and they found it in
the shape of Shane MacGowan and the Pogues.
Long before Keef and Hendrix discovered smack, William Blake had written
that: "The road to excess leads to the palace of wisdom - for we never
know what is enough until we know what is more than enough."MacGowan
might have been unaware of Blake's philosophy but he had been living it
out from an early age. At the age of 14, he had been expelled from public
school for possession of dope, acid and pills. At 18, he spent six months
in detox hospital recovering from a prolonged drink and drugs binge. Upon
leaving he discovered punk rock and won his 15 minutes of celebrity after
reputedly having his ear bitten off at a Sex Pistols gig. A further footnote
in the punk history books was secured when he formed his own band, The Nipple
Erectors, whose spunky 'Gabrielle' became something of a minor punk classic.
Then, in 1982, came Pogue Mahone (Gaelic for 'kiss my arse'), later
rechristened the Pogues after complaints about the name. The motley Anglo-Irish
crew quickly built up a loyal following with their ingenious heathen marriage
of punk rock and Irish folk. From the start, media attention focussed on
the group's weakness for the sauce. "We just became known as a bunch
of drunks," remembers MacGowan. "I could never understand how
the drinking got so much attention. All bands drink. All bands take drugs.
No one forms a band just to impress their mums. You don't expect people
in bands to drink skimmed milk and spend their weekends washing the car.
They spend their time and their money indulging in every self-destructive
activity that is denied them by a normal 9 to 5 job. So yeah, we were drinking,
we were speeding, we were stoned, and so were our audience. Big fucking
deal."
The Pogues made three bona fide classic albums (Red Roses For Me; Rum,
Sodomy, & The Lash; and If I Should Fall From Grace With God)
and a fourth, 1989's Peace and Love, that suggested an interesting
transition to more explorative musical territories. By this time, MacGowan
had been officially adopted as the leading fuck-up of his generation and
the tales of his excessive and erratic behaviour were legion. Coke, speed,
ecstasy, dope, acid, crack, uppers, downers and copious amounts of alcohol
we all considered essential fuel for his creativity. At one stage, he openly
admitted to taking 50 tabs of acid and drinking three bottles of whiskey
a day. By the end of 1989, it was clear that MacGowan was hovering perilously
close to the edge of self-destruction. It might be said that he was no longer
slumming: he was in the slums.
Unsurprisingly, MacGowan's extra-curricular habits began to take a toll
on his own creative faculties and, inevitably, his working relationship
with the rest of the band. The fifth Pogues album, Hell's Ditch,
was clearly a troubled affair, written and performed by a group that was
falling apart at the seams. With fears about MacGowan's deteriorating health
escalating daily, it was only a matter of time before something gave. The
Pogues finally parted company with MacGowan during a tour of Japan in September
1991. The group soldiered on without their vocalist and main songwriter
to widespread indifference. MacGowan simply retired to a health farm, gratefully
handing over the baton of animalistic excess to the Happy Mondays and Guns
N' Roses.
Three years on, MacGowan is back with a new band, the Popes, and an album's
worth of songs that, whilst falling short of a complete return to form,
suggest that his troubled muse has not completely deserted him - even if
that once enthralling voice now sounds cracked beyond repair. At 36, the
ravages of excess are scrawled all over his body; ghastly skin of greyish
tint; a set of teeth that might have been modeled after the skyline of Beirut;
a mind that veers between startling lucidity and stumbling incomprehensability.
"I'm not a healthy man," he says, with a marvellous sense
of understatement. "I've lived a totally irresponsable existence. I've
given no thought to what I've swallowed or poured down my throat or stuck
up my nose over the years. It was only when a doctor told me that I was
was like a cat rapidly running out of lives that I decided to calm down
- purely for the sake of staying alive. I've had to adjust to a slower pace
of life and that's made writing a lot more difficult. But I'm recovering.
My liver, my whole body, is starting to regenerate. I still like a drink
but I've learned there's no point in carrying on when I'm already drunk.
Drugs? Whether I'm still doing drugs is none of your business. Let's just
say that I've learned some lessons. You liver and learn. That's your headline."
The splenetic rage that gloriously illuminated those early Pogues albums
might have given way to a not untypical thirtysomething sense of self-reckoning,
but much anger remains in reserve for the manner in which he was adopted
as the ultimate totem of hedenistic excess in the '80s.
"The drink and the drugs," he says, "make for a neat little
rock'n'roll story. The media are always looking for someone to stick into
that particular box. That box was there all right and I might have slept
in it for a while but I managed to crawl out of the fucker. They thought
they had nailed it shut but they were wrong 'cus I'm still here and I'm
very much alive. I'm older now than most rock'n'roll casualties are when
they die. I'm a bit too old now to fit the bill. They'll have to find some
other cunt to jump through those hoops, and I'm sure they will.
"I'm no survivor. I hate all that survivor shit. I'm still living my
life on my own terms and I'm not the only one. Keith Richards learned his
lessons from all the black guys who had been ripped off by the slime of
the music business and went his own way. Iggy Pop was nearly fucked over
by the business but managed to pull himself out of it, having decided that
he didn't want to die in some shit stained toilet with a needle stuck in
his arm. I didn't have to go through the Pogues to decide that I didn't
want to die in the gutter. I made that decision when I was three years old.
"I've never bought into the idea that the show must go on, even if
you're dying. That's why I'm not touring the world with the Pogues anymore.
They'd have to be dragging me out of a wooden box and sticking an electric
current up my arse to get me to perform. I've always thought of that side
of the business was shit. It's a business that's full of horrible disgusting
people. A lot of it I could never accept. The rest of it, well, I don't
have any fucking choice. The day I can't accept it any longer, I'll grab
me a machine gun, go round the record companies and blow the fuckers to
bits. We'll grab us a couple of sawn-off shotguns. You do the record companies
and I'll sort out scummy newpapers. Going out in a blaze of fucking glory.
How about it?"
This rather inviting suggestion is punctuated with a prolonged burst of
that now-famous laugh: a fairly faltless impression of cold sick being sucked
down a clogged drain. Despite appearances to the contrary, the 1994 version
of Shane MacGowan is content with his lot as he has been for close to 15
years.
"Yeah, I'm pretty happy," he says, absently stubbing a cigarette
out on a pair of already filthy baggy black trousers. "After all that
fucking misery in the last years of the Pogues, I'd forgotten what it was
like to be excited about having a record coming out. All this horrible frustration
that had built up inside - I've got it all out on the new album and the
live shows I've been doing. I'd forgotten it was possible to do that. I
remember watching Joy Division in 1979. It was fucking terrifying, y'know.
Like a horror film or something. You were scared to go for a piss in case
you missed something. He was clearly disturbed but he managed to exorcise
his demons onstage. That's what I've always done. Smashing a few things
up, the odd voodoo ritual... I've been singing with my trousers 'round my
bollocking andles and haven't noticed 'cus I've been so out of it. That'
sone thing I learned with the Pogues. About the only thing. When I went
into the Pogues, I reckoned I knew all ther was to learn. When I came out
of the Pogues I realized that I knew fuck all about anything. "
MacGowan may have learned to regualte his habits but you're unlikely to
find him ordering muesli by the crate-load or happily spending his mornings
happily jogging around Hyde Park with Eric Clapton and Sting. Devoted pursuers
of pleasure might adjust to living life in a slightly less frantic lane
but, like leopards, they can hardly be expected to change their spots over
night. After visitng Jom Morrison's vandalized grave, Guns N' Roses' Axl
Rose offered a new twist on on the famous William Blake dictum when he commented:
"The path of excess leads to a dirt plot in a foreign land that people
pour booze on and piss all over." For Guns N' Roses the stag party
continued nevertheless.
In the case of MacGowan, it remains a moot point whether he'll write
anything as bare-arsed inspirational as Dark
Streets of London', as downright beautiful as A
Pair of Brown Eyes', or as purely emotive of Fairytale
of New York' ever again. Morover, it's doubtful whether his ravaged
voice can ever scale the emotional heights once attained on the Pogues'
version of Ewan MacColl's 'Dirty
Old Town'.
For the former Shane O'Hooligan, the road to excess might now offer a rather
smoother course, byt he's not about to take a sudden detour to some picturesque
village where rock'n'roll survivors all sit around the church hall self-rightiously
lectuaring Q readers on the dangers of drink and drugs whilst gargling
expensive mineral water. MacGowan might have escaped from the tawdry wreckage
of his own life with some vestage of his awesome talent intact, but he won't
be staggering into the pulput to repent.
"If you're asking whether drink and drugs have worked for me,"
he concludes, "I've got to say they have. I'm one with William Blake
on this one. Drink and drugs and all that shit, it's a short cut to the
subconscious. Y'know, real wisdom has got fuck all to do with with your
three times table and the capital of Belgium and all that bollocks. When
you take a load of drugs, you get into a state of mind where you see reality
in a completely different light and that obviously helps when you're writing
songs or whatever.
"See, there's two kinds of creative artists. There's those who get
their highs and inspiration from their environment, from life itself if
you like. They don't feel the need for artificial stimulation. Then ther's
the other kind, like myself, who need drink and drugs to fuel what they
do. If you take enough drugs and blow those doors open, they'll remain open.
All those drugs I took, they blew my fucking mind wide open and it's stayed
open. That's why I can afford to pace myself these days. That's how it is,
y'know, and no cunt is going to tell me any different."
(Thanks to DzM for allowing me to use this)
This page is maintained by
Michael Madden,
Ingrid Knetsch ,
Juergen Schmitz.
