| Ireland: Interview: Through a glass darkly |
| The Sunday Times (subscription), UK 13 Dec 2003 By MICK HEANEY. |
| Against all the odds, Shane MacGowan is well. In fact, he says, he feels great. If one was so inclined, it would be easy to believe him as he conjures up seamy anecdotes in lucid, lurid detail, sipping from his pint glass of Bloody Mary and letting rip with his trademark cackle. But then, by his own admission, MacGowan is not a man easily given to expressing his emotions. It is only at the end, as he gets ready to make his goodbyes, that the cackle dissipates for a second. “There’s nothing wrong with being domesticated, you know”, he says, looking around the near empty hotel bar where we have spent the previous two hours. “It’s nice to be able to go back to someone, rather than spend all your time in places like here.” It is only the briefest flash of melancholia, but it is telling. The pub certainly remains his milieu, the ever-present backdrop to his classic songs with the Pogues and his public image as a barfly sage. But while he is gregarious in company, he clearly pines for the company of his former girlfriend, Victoria Clarke. “It was totally unexpected when she left,” he says. “But at least it forced me to clean up my act.” Perhaps it is the desire to win back Clarke, with whom he spent 15 years and who co-wrote his 2001 memoir A Drink with Shane MacGowan, that makes the Tipperary-born singer keen to project the impression that he is, if not quite reformed, then no longer living on borrowed time. He no longer thinks of himself as indestructible, he says. He has stopped the heroin use that was a key factor in the decline of his relationship with Clarke - MacGowan was famously reported to the Gardai for possession of the drug by Sinead O’Connor in 1999, something that still makes him bristle. It may be a strange thing to say about a man whose first act, after apologising for arriving two and a half hours late, is to order a beer and triple hot whiskey, but this evening at least, MacGowan seems as hale and hearty as he has been for years. “Everyone seems to think I have no brain cells left,” he says, a little defensively. Certainly he is far sharper and more coherent than during our last encounter six years ago when, if he wasn’t making trips to the bathroom, he was nodding off. But back then, at least, he had an album to promote. Since the release of The Crock of Gold in 1997 his career has been in limbo. Arguably the greatest Irish songwriter of the past 25 years, MacGowan has contented himself touring with his band, the Popes, singing a mixture of his own songs and rabble-rousing Irish standards. Again, at its heart again lies a painful subject. “I’m in no hurry to make an album,” he says. “I’ve been signed up a couple of times, but decided that I didn’t like the people and just spent the money. And I’ve had writer’s block for a while. A lot of disasters happened for everybody, culminating in me breaking up with Victoria. I had a very rough time, and I can’t write when I’m having a rough time. I have to get over it. I can only write all these whingey songs when I couldn’t give a f*** any more. “I don’t understand writer’s block, I don’t think anyone does. It just goes away in the end somehow. But I don’t particularly want to record an album of original songs at the moment. There’s a lot of old songs I’d like to record: I always tell people there aren’t any bad Irish songs. Well, there are, but forgetting the Wolfe Tones, there aren’t.” Fans of MacGowan’s scabrous, evocative songwriting may despair at this idea, but for the man himself it is a return to his roots. Long before he started writing punky rock’n’roll songs for his first group the Nips, MacGowan had absorbed myriad folk and rebel ballads as a child growing up around his uncles and aunts in rural Tipperary, while his parents worked in England. He was “raised a raving republican” by his family, while displaying his black sense of humour from an early age. “I used to make the other children cry,” he says. The turning point came when he moved over at seven years of age to be with his parents, first in Brighton and then London. There his obvious intelligence and alert imagination won him a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster school: but he was more drawn by other, less salubrious elements of English life. “I had a great time in Ireland and hated having to go to England,” he says. “But the older people who had been telling me the English were a barbaric, savage race hadn’t mentioned that there were undreamed of compensations. “In London, there was money and fun. And the women were shameless hussies to whom Irishmen appeared to be incredibly gentlemanly and romantic compared to your average English Romeo, whose idea of romance was: ‘You make me really randy, you dirty cow.’ ” It was this seedy underbelly of casual sex, heavy drinking, cheap drugs and misty-eyed emigrant patriotism that formed the inspiration for MacGowan’s best songs with the Pogues, the band he co-founded in the early 1980s. Mixing traditional Irish airs with a punky edge and offbeat pop sensibility, the band proved the perfect vehicle for MacGowan’s tales of the urban underclass, as he produced classic songs such as The Old Main Drag, A Pair of Brown Eyes and, above all, Fairytale of New York. But the band’s success took its toll. There was, of course, their suicidally hedonistic lifestyle: MacGowan claims they were so deranged by intoxication and boredom on the road that they once played Russian roulette. And there were difficulties within the group, with MacGowan’s increasing unreliability and unhappiness in the band eventually leading to his departure in 1991. “I have good memories and bad memories of the Pogues,” he says. “But mainly I have good memories: it takes a pretty perverse nature to make sure to remember all the bad things. The great thing about the Pogues, which I never thought was exploited properly musically, was that everybody sang, everybody wrote, everybody played. But that got twisted around by outside influences so that everybody was hanging everything on me and my songwriting.” MacGowan didn’t burn his bridges with his erstwhile companions. He is still on good terms with two former members, Spider Stacey and Terry Woods, and was even coaxed into a short reunion tour two years ago, which won unexpected critical praise. For the time being, though, he is happier with the Popes, with whom he plays in Dublin this week. For many, this is evidence of his creative decline. Not only can MacGowan’s performances be painfully erratic - last year in Dublin he vomited on the audience - but the band’s two albums have veered close to paddywhackery. MacGowan has no regrets about the album, save the fact that it was released on Trevor Horn’s ZTT label, with which he parted company acrimoniously. “There were very bad vibes around it,” he says. “And then loads of people died straight afterwards, like Dave Jordan, who was my co-producer and sound man, Charlie MacLennan, who was the road manager. So there was a lot of bitterness about it.” The remark about the death of his friends slips out almost casually, perhaps because there have been several deaths in MacGowan’s circle down the years, often related to drug and alcohol abuse. So it’s unsurprising that MacGowan has retreated from the urban frontline of his heavily intoxicated lifestyle in recent years. Clearly he still drinks: the anti-drink stance of Michael MacDowell, the justice minister, earns him the epithet of a “chump on a one-way ticket to Palookaville” from MacGowan. But while he still frequently lives up to the stereotyped caricature expected of him in public, he doesn’t see himself as a hellraiser, preferring to recharge, in his own particular fashion, at his home, a farm in Tipperary. “I’m not a hellraiser: I can do it, but it’s not pleasant. The farm is a haven. I don’t run it as a farm, so you can just wander around, chewing leaves, trying different mushrooms: it’s incredible the amount of things you can experience. And just necking a half bottle of whiskey in the open air in a farmyard is completely different experience to this kind of crap,” he says, motioning to the bar. Though he seems in better shape than in recent years, it’s all relative: for any other man in his mid-40s he would be in terrible condition. His lip quivers as he lapses into silence; his teeth are now decayed to black stumps. His imagination remains febrile and corruscatingly surreal: as he talks, he comes up with a bizarre idea for a song which sees Nietzsche visiting Ireland. One would like to think he will write it, that he will reclaim his status as Ireland’s foremost songwriter. But don’t hold your breath. MacGowan hasn’t left the bar yet. “There’s always challenges: every song you write has to be a song that you enjoy singing as much as one you’ve known all your life. I feel relieved that I’ve done that with some of my songs, but if I never write another one again, I don’t really mind. “Never having had a plan, I’ve never been disappointed. I’ve been lucky I suppose. It’s the basic principle of Buddhism and Taoism, or of just having a happy life: never be pessimistic, never be optimistic and then you can never be disappointed. You can have a plan like going up to get some drinks, but that’s as far as it goes.” |