| RETURN OF THE MAC RONAN McGREEVY Ri-Ra Magazine July 2004 Legendary folk / punk hero Shane MacGowan is back with his first release in years. RONAN McGREEVY talks to the man. Discerning listeners of the BBC Radio 4's Today programme will have choked on their soldiers and toast had they tuned in a couple of weeks ago. At 8.22pm, right after the slot usually reserved for Prime Ministers and peers of the realm, was that unmistakable bastardised accent and rattlesnake hiss of Snake MacGowan. Very few songwriters can command a prime slot on the time-honoured forum for the British and fewer still after seven years of silence, but Shane MacGowan is not like other songwriters. It is a measure of how people remain perennially fascinated with his genius that a programme like Today could last month devote so much time to his comeback single, The Road To Paradise. It has been too long for a man that many had presumed was dead or, at least the living dead. There is a glib assumption now that he is past the point of coherence, that his conversation ought to be like Samuel Johnson's famous comparison between a woman preaching and a dog walking on its hind legs. "It is not done well: but you are surprised to find it done at all." Yet, here he is in the Boogaloo Bar in Highgate, in great form expounding on music, history, football and literature, all punctuated by that crazy laugh of his. The Road To Paradise, his first original release since his 1997 album, The Crock Of Gold, is a double-A sided charity single to raise money for the Celtic hero Jimmy Johnstone Motor Neurone Disease Tribute Fund. The song insinuates itself into your brain and by second listen, you'll be singing along with the chorus. It's a melody you think you've heard a million times before, but you haven't – a hallmark of MacGowan's best songs. He wrote it in 10 minutes, but if songwriting comes that easy, why nothing for seven years? MacGowan's prodigious appetite for drink and drugs is his business, but his talent is all our business. Had he only written Fairy Tale Of New York it would have been enough, but he wrote at least a dozen more that will be playing until Armageddon, yet nothing of note for so long. "If you're asking me if I'm worried, well I'm not," he says of his long creative hiatus. "Five years (sic) is not a long time. That's the fuckin' music business for you. "I'm just glad I'm in the papers for having a single out and not because I'm going to be dead in six months or I'm having Damien Dempsey's love child or whatever." He's writing songs for a new album at the moment, but he's rather vague on a release date. "There's a new album on the way. I'm looking forward to it. The songs always come in bursts, in spurts. I don't write something for months and then it comes, wham!" He says he is off the smack though not the liquor. As he said recently: "The heroin messed me up. The drink doesn't. I don't want to give it up and I haven't got a problem with the drink. I like it." Only too well as his fans will testify. Admiration for his talent is only matched by frustration at his lack of application. The creative hiatus has been too long and many of them are disgruntled. More than 3,000 of them have signed a petition on his website at www.shanemacgowan.com asking him to sack his friend and manager Joey Cashman. "Is the petition still going?" he remarks. "I'm not a computer person. I suppose it gives them something to talk about on their website. I'm sure it has a lot of merit, but I'm not going to be told by anybody who I can and can't work with." One of the signatories of the petition is his father Maurice who, not for the first time, has pleaded with his son to change his lifestyle and to sack Cashman. "I think my father has my best interests at heart, but I think he is wrong in the sense that he is misguided," MacGowan says. "I don't expect blind loyalty from anyone. I'm 46. Once you get over 40, you realise that everybody is going to stab you in the back sooner or later. "My father would be one of the first people to say: 'Don't trust anybody, all people are bastards, I hate everybody irrespective of race, colour and creed'," and there comes that cackle again as if he doesn't mean a word of it, "but I wouldn't put it in those extreme terms either." Welcome back Shane. Let it not be so long again. |