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Shane MacGowan is only 42, but he shuffles like an old man. He's remote, a lost look on his face. But then, the former frontman for the legendary Irish hellraisers the Pogues once claimed he hadn't been sober since he was 14 years old. In 1990, his doctor allegedly gave him two years to live if he didn't knock off the sauce immediately. If he seems like he is, well, elsewhere, it comes as no surprise.
MacGowan, praised as a poetic genius as much as he's derided as a terminal drunk, is infamous for hating interviews, so it's with no little trepidation that I wander into his dressing room after his Wednesday gig at the Crystal Ballroom. I soon discover that though his body is far from the picture of health, MacGowan's mind is still alive and sharp.
In the long wait for the Popes to take the stage, the crowd at the Crystal sang his songs--"Streams of Whiskey," "Sally MacLennane"--just as boisterously as if he'd been singing with them. MacGowan most likely found this uncoordinated chorus appropriate for his booze-drenched lyrics, which he views as an outgrowth of his native land's muscular literary heritage. "The Irish tradition is an oral tradition; it's been passed down for thousands of years," MacGowan says. Even in early days, when Pogues gigs were typically raucous affairs with whistle player Spider Stacey bashing out the beat with his head on a beer tray, MacGowan's lyrics were artfully poetic.
MacGowan grew up on a small farm in the north of County Tipperary, Ireland, but when he was 8, his family moved to England. Like writers Samuel Beckett and James Joyce, who had to leave Ireland to write about it, MacGowan lives in a kind of artistic exile.
"I'm an immigrant," he says. "We all consider Ireland our home. I've spent a third of my life going 'round the world; the rest of it is more or less half and half in England and Ireland. I've really had it up to my neck with England. My family are back in Ireland. I always stay in the house I grew up in. It's the worst land in Ireland, very beautiful, but the soil is lye and rocky, all hills and valleys.
"My family are all very musical," he says of his influences. "I'm probably the least musical member of my family. Outside of that, there's other great Irish musicians like the Dubliners, the Clancys, the Fureys, Sean O'Riorda. Carolan was a harper who left a legacy of tunes, and O'Riorda revived them and arranged them for a ceilidh audience."
"Flatley," Tommy McAnimal, the Popes' banjo player, helpfully reminds MacGowan. The band, without Shane, recently played after a Riverdance performance in Bahrain.
"Oh, Michael Flatley was a huge influence on me," MacGowan says enthusiastically. "He made me puke, he made me puke so much that I lost weight. He influenced me--to go out and buy a gun, try and find him and kneecap him. I'd like to think that what we're doing will undo the damage that Flatley has done to the image of Irish music around the world."
MacGowan may have shattered his teeth, musically speaking, in the London punk scene of '77 with his band the Nipple Erectors, but he's not nostalgic. He's of the school that believes punk rock died with the Sex Pistols, and he hates the label.
"During the '70s, Irish music got hippified and intellectualized by various people," he says. "They started off with good intentions, but they softened it up, and a lot of purists got involved and they took it away from the people. And what the Pogues played was just Irish music the way it's played by bands in the country, by normal pub bands in Ireland. So we just took it back to the roots. The Dubliners had done it, but then it got softened. All the fusion stuff really fucked it up. It was nothing to do with punk. We didn't use any electric instruments. The lyrics certainly aren't punk-style lyrics, they weren't just 'Oi! Oi! fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.' If you mean punk in the sense that the Pistols took rock back to the roots, we did the same with Irish music. Then you've got a point, but it's wrong to say that we were an Irish punk group."
The set at the Crystal consisted largely of songs from the first several Pogues albums. Newer songs were scattered through the set here and there, but they paled in comparison to classics like "Body of an American" and "Sick Bed of Chuculainn."
"We play what I like playing, but that's generally what the people like as well," MacGowan says. "If a band isn't playing what they like and what the people like, then it's time they broke up. The band should be on the same wavelength as the audience."
That is to say: bollixed drunk.