Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 1957 – 30 November 2023) was a British-born Irish singer-songwriter, musician and poet best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of Celtic punk band the Pogues. He also produced solo material and collaborated with artists including Joe Strummer, Nick Cave, Sinéad O'Connor, and Cruachan. Known for his exceptional songwriting ability and his heavy alcohol and drug use, MacGowan was described by The New York Times as "a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life".
Born in Kent, England, to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early childhood in Tipperary, Ireland. He moved back to England with his family at age six and a half. MacGowan was noted for his precocious interest in literature; by age 11, he was reading authors including Fyodor Dostoevsky and James Joyce, and at 13 he was among the winners of a literary contest sponsored by the Daily Mirror. He attended Holmewood House preparatory school and won a scholarship to Westminster School, but was expelled from the latter for drug offences. Between the ages 17 and 18, he spent six months in psychiatric care at Bethlem Royal Hospital in London due to his drug and alcohol abuse. He became active on the London punk scene under the alias Shane O'Hooligan, attending gigs, working in the Rocks Off record shop, and writing a punk fanzine. In 1977, with then-girlfriend Shanne Bradley, he formed the punk band the Nipple Erectors (subsequently called the Nips).
In 1982, MacGowan co-founded the Pogues—originally called Pogue Mahone, an anglicisation of the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning "kiss my arse"—who fused punk influences with traditional Irish music. He rose to international fame as the principal songwriter and vocalist on the band's first five studio albums, including Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and the critically acclaimed and commercially successful If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988). With bandmate Jem Finer, he co-wrote the Christmas hit single "Fairytale of New York" (1987), which the Pogues recorded as a duet between MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl; the song remains a perennial Christmas favourite in the UK and Ireland and was certified quintuple platinum in the UK in 2022. Other well-known songs written by MacGowan during his time with the Pogues include "A Pair of Brown Eyes", "Dark Streets of London", "Sally MacLennane", "A Rainy Night in Soho", "The Body of an American", "The Broad Majestic Shannon", "The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn", and "Summer in Siam".
During a 1991 tour of Japan, MacGowan was dismissed from the Pogues due to the impact of his drug and alcohol dependency on the band's live shows. He subsequently formed a new band, Shane MacGowan and The Popes, with which he recorded his last two studio albums, The Snake (1994) and The Crock of Gold (1997). In 2001, MacGowan rejoined the Pogues for reunion shows; he remained with the group until it dissolved in 2014. In January 2018, the National Concert Hall in Dublin held a gala concert to celebrate his 60th birthday and gave him a lifetime achievement award for outstanding contributions to Irish life, music and culture. In May of that year, he received an Ivor Novello Inspiration Award; in November, he married his long-term partner, journalist Victoria Mary Clarke. Following years of deteriorating health, MacGowan died of pneumonia at his Dublin home in November 2023, aged 65. The president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, paid tribute, calling him "one of music's greatest lyricists".
MacGowan was born on 25 December 1957 in Pembury, Kent,[2][3] the son of Irish parents who were visiting relatives in England at the time of his birth.[3] MacGowan spent his early childhood in Tipperary, Ireland.[4] His younger sister, Siobhan MacGowan, was born in 1963; she later became a journalist, writer, and songwriter. MacGowan and his family moved to England when he was aged six and a half. His father, Maurice, from a middle-class background in Dublin, worked in the offices of department store C&A; his mother Therese, from Tipperary, worked as a typist at a convent, having previously been a singer, traditional Irish dancer, and model.[5]
MacGowan lived in many parts of southeast England such as Brighton, London, and the home counties, and attended an English public school. His father encouraged his precocious interest in literature; by age 11, MacGowan was reading authors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Steinbeck, and James Joyce.[6] At 13, he was among the winners of a literary contest sponsored by the Daily Mirror. In 1971, he left Holmewood House preparatory school in Langton Green, Kent, with a literature scholarship for Westminster School. Found in possession of drugs, he was expelled in his second year. At age 17, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction; while there, he was also diagnosed with acute situational anxiety. Briefly enrolled at St Martin's School of Art, he worked at the Rocks Off record shop in central London, and started a punk fanzine under the pseudonym Shane O'Hooligan. He was first publicly noted in 1976 at a concert by London punk rock band The Clash, where his earlobe was damaged by future Mo-dettes bassist Jane Crockford. A photographer took a picture of him covered in blood, which was reported in the music paper NME with the headline "Cannibalism at Clash Gig". Shortly after this, he and bassist Shanne Bradley formed the punk band the Nipple Erectors (later known as 'The Nips').
MacGowan drew upon his Irish heritage when founding the Pogues and changed his early punk style for a more traditional sound with tutoring from his extended family. Many of his songs were influenced by Irish nationalism, Irish history, the experiences of the Irish diaspora (particularly in England and the United States), and London life in general.[18] These influences were documented in the biography Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context. He often cited the 19th-century Irish poet James Clarence Mangan and playwright Brendan Behan as influences.
The Pogues' most critically acclaimed album was If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988), which also marked the high point of the band's commercial success. Between 1985 and 1987, MacGowan co-wrote "Fairytale of New York", which he performed with Kirsty MacColl, and remains a perennial Christmas favourite. In 2004, 2005 and 2006, it was voted favourite Christmas song in a poll by music video channel VH1. Other notable songs he performed with The Pogues include "Dirty Old Town", "Sally MacLennane" and "The Irish Rover" (featuring the Dubliners). In the following years MacGowan and the Pogues released several albums. In 1988, he co-wrote "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six", a song by the Pogues which proved highly controversial due to its support of the Birmingham Six – six men wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, but still serving prison sentences for the bombings at the time – and was banned on British commercial TV and radio.
In Yokohama, Japan, during a 1991 tour, the Pogues dismissed MacGowan for unprofessional behaviour. The band's performances had been affected by MacGowan's drug and alcohol problems, and his bandmates parted ways with him following "a string of no-shows, including when The Pogues were opening for Dylan".
After MacGowan had been dismissed from the Pogues, he formed a new band, Shane MacGowan and The Popes. The new band recorded two studio albums, a live album, three tracks on the Popes Outlaw Heaven (2010) and a live DVD; the band also toured internationally. In 1997, MacGowan appeared on Lou Reed's "Perfect Day", covered by numerous artists in aid of Children in Need. It was the UK's number one single for three weeks, in two separate spells. Selling over a million copies, the record contributed £2,125,000 to the charity's highest fundraising total in six years. From December 2003 up to May 2005, Shane MacGowan and the Popes toured extensively in the UK, Ireland and Europe.
The Pogues and MacGowan reformed for a sell-out tour in 2001 and each year from 2004 to 2009 for further tours, including headline slots at Guilfest in England and the Azkena Rock Festival in the Basque Country. In May 2005, MacGowan rejoined the Pogues permanently. That same year, the Pogues re-released "Fairytale of New York" to raise funds for the Justice For Kirsty Campaign and Crisis at Christmas. The single was the best-selling Christmas-themed single of 2005, reaching number 3 in the UK Charts that year.
In 2006, he was seen many times with the Libertines and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty; on occasions MacGowan joined Babyshambles on stage. Other famous friends included Johnny Depp, who appeared in the video for "That Woman's Got Me Drinking", and Joe Strummer, who referred to MacGowan as "one of the best writers of the century" in an interview featured on the videogram release "Live at the Town and Country Club" from 1988. Strummer occasionally joined MacGowan and the Pogues on stage (and briefly replaced MacGowan as lead vocalist after his sacking from the band). He also worked with Nick Cave and joined him on stage.
About his future with the Pogues, in a 24 December 2015 interview with Vice magazine, when the interviewer asked whether the band were still active, MacGowan said: "We're not, no", saying that, since their 2001 reunion happened, "I went back with [the] Pogues and we grew to hate each other all over again", adding: "I don't hate the band at all – they're friends. I like them a lot. We were friends for years before we joined the band. We just got a bit sick of each other. We're friends as long as we don't tour together. I've done a hell of a lot of touring. I've had enough of it."
In 2010, MacGowan played impromptu shows in Dublin with a new five-piece backing band, the Shane Gang, including In Tua Nua rhythm section Paul Byrne (drums) and Jack Dublin (bass), with manager Joey Cashman on whistle. In November 2010, this line-up went to Lanzarote to record a new album. MacGowan and the Shane Gang performed at the Red Hand Rocks music festival in the Patrician Hall, Carrickmore County Tyrone in June 2011.
MacGowan made a return to the stage on 13 June 2019 at the RDS Arena in Dublin as a guest of Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders.
Following on from the success of Feis Liverpool 2018's finale, in which he was joined by artists such as Imelda May, Paddy Moloney, Albert Hammond Jr and many more, MacGowan was announced to appear on 7 July alongside a host of guests for the Feis Liverpool 2019's finale. The event was ultimately cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales and funding issues. Feis Liverpool is the UK's largest celebration of Irish music and culture.
In 2020, MacGowan reportedly returned to the studio to record several new songs with the Irish indie band Cronin.
MacGowan appeared in an episode of Fair City, shown on 28 December 2008. In 2009, he starred in the RTÉ reality show Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own, as he and his wife Victoria Mary Clarke endeavoured to grow their food in their own garden.
In 2010, MacGowan offered a piece of unusual art to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) to auction off to support their services to children: a drawing on a living room door. It earned €1,602 for the charity.
On 26 November 2018, after a decades-long relationship and subsequent 11-year engagement, MacGowan married Irish journalist Victoria Mary Clarke in Copenhagen. They lived in Dublin. MacGowan was a Roman Catholic, calling himself "a free-thinking religious fanatic" who also prayed to the Buddha. As an adolescent, he considered the priesthood.
In 2015, MacGowan stated that he had grown up in an Irish republican family and that he regretted not joining the IRA. In a filmed interview he said, "I was ashamed I didn't have the guts to join the IRA, and The Pogues was my way of overcoming that". The central figure in his 1997 song "Paddy Public Enemy No. 1" is based on ex-INLA leader Dominic McGlinchey. Asked his opinion of McGlinchey, MacGowan said "he was a great man". He also counted former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams as a friend, according to his most recent biography.
MacGowan "battled longstanding health issues, compounded by well-documented struggles with substance abuse". He was "a famously voracious consumer of drugs and prone to physical trauma".
MacGowan began drinking alcohol at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep. His father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. He suffered physically from years of binge drinking. MacGowan also used LSD, and he developed a heroin addiction during his tenure with the Pogues. In the 1980s, he "was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles". While in New Zealand during a 1988 Pogues tour, MacGowan "painted his hotel room, face and chest blue, apparently because 'the Maoris were talking to me'". Problems arising from his alcohol and drug abuse led to his firing from the Pogues in 1991, and he experienced stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis in the 1990s. MacGowan often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland.
In November 1999, MacGowan was arrested in London after Sinéad O'Connor found him passed out on his floor, and called emergency services. MacGowan was criminally charged with heroin possession in January 2000. When police formally cautioned MacGowan (a process that "requires the accused to admit their guilt"), MacGowan accepted the caution and the criminal case against him was terminated in March 2000. O'Connor said she took this action in an attempt to discourage him from using heroin. Although he was furious with O'Connor at first, MacGowan later expressed gratitude to her and said that the incident helped him kick his heroin habit.
MacGowan experienced years of ill health toward the end of his life. In the summer of 2015, as he was leaving a Dublin studio, he fell and fractured his pelvis. After that, he used a wheelchair. Later that year, MacGowan said: "It was a fall and I fell the wrong way. I broke my pelvis, which is the worst thing you can do. I'm lame in one leg, I can't walk around the room without a crutch. I am getting better, but it's taking a very long time. It's the longest I've ever taken to recover from an injury. And I've had a lot of injuries". He continued to use a wheelchair until his death in 2023.
In 2016, Clarke told the press that MacGowan was sober "for the first time in years". She indicated that MacGowan's drinking had "not just been a recreational activity", but that "his whole career has revolved around it and, indeed, been both enhanced and simultaneously inhibited by it". She said that his drinking problem was made much worse by the introduction of hard drugs such as heroin. Clarke added that a serious bout with pneumonia—compounded by his 2015 hip injury, which required a long hospital stay—was ultimately responsible for his sobriety. The hospital stay required a total detox, and MacGowan's sobriety continued after he returned home.
MacGowan was long known for having very bad teeth. He lost the last of his natural teeth sometime around 2008. In 2015, he had a new set of teeth—including one gold tooth—fitted in a nine-hour procedure. The new set of teeth was secured by eight titanium implants in his jaws. The procedure was the subject of the hour-long television programme Shane MacGowan: A Wreck Reborn.
In early February 2021, MacGowan broke his knee in a fall at his home and left him bed-ridden for a short time.
MacGowan was hospitalised for an infection on 6 December 2022. He was diagnosed with viral encephalitis. Days after MacGowan had entered hospital, Clarke told the Irish Independent that he "'seems perfectly normal now – he is pissed off because he can't have a drink in the hospital'". Clarke reportedly added that she had urged MacGowan to "ditch his hard-living lifestyle", but that her efforts had not met with success.
It was reported on 23 July 2023 that MacGowan was hospitalised in an intensive care unit. Following treatment for an infection, he was visited by many celebrities while in hospital. He was discharged from St. Vincent's University Hospital on 23 November 2023 after 4 months of treatment. On 30 November 2023, after receiving last rites, MacGowan died from pneumonia at his home in Dublin with his wife by his side; he was 65.
On 8 December, MacGowan's coffin was borne through the streets of Dublin on a horse-drawn carriage as fans lined the streets for his funeral procession. Later hundreds gathered inside and outside Saint Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, County Tipperary, including celebrities Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, BP Fallon, Bob Geldof, Aidan Gillen, President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins and former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. There was dancing inside the church as "Fairytale of New York" was performed by The Pogues with Glen Hansard, Lisa O'Neill and John Sheahan from the Dubliners.
"Fairytale of New York" went to No. 1 in Ireland on the weekend of MacGowan's funeral. On 13 December 2023, the Pogues reissued the song as a charity seven-inch single in tribute to MacGowan and to benefit the Dublin Simon Community, an anti-homelessness organisation that MacGowan had supported.
Following MacGowan's death, Michael D. Higgins, the President of Ireland, said: "Shane will be remembered as one of music's greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them. The genius of Shane's contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams—of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from."
The New York Times described MacGowan as "a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life".
Following MacGowan's death, Tom Waits wrote on X: "Shane MacGowan’s torrid and mighty voice is mud and roses punched out with swaggering stagger, ancient longing that is blasted all to hell. A Bard’s bard, may he cast his spell upon us all forevermore".
Nick Cave called MacGowan "the greatest songwriter of his generation, with the most terrifyingly beautiful of voices". Bruce Springsteen said the "passion and deep intensity of [MacGowan's] music and lyrics is unmatched by all but the very best in the rock and roll canon... I don’t know about the rest of us, but they’ll be singing Shane’s songs 100 years from now".
When Bob Dylan performed a concert in Dublin in 2022, he paid tribute to MacGowan while onstage, describing the former Pogues frontman as one of his "favourite artists".
Paul Simon said MacGowan was "that kind of artist that needed to burn very brightly and intensely. Some artists are like that. They produce work that we treasure but they pay for it with their health – their bodily health and their mental health. That was Shane".
In 2001, MacGowan coauthored the autobiographical book A Drink with Shane MacGowan with his future wife, Victoria Mary Clarke. The book was published by Pan Macmillan.
Aside from Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context, which covered a portion of his musical career, MacGowan was the subject of a 2015 biography, A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan, published by Omnibus Press. He was also the subject of several books and paintings. In 2000, Tim Bradford used the title Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? for a humorous book about Ireland and Irish culture. Shaman Shane: The Wounded Healer by Stephan Martin brands Shane as a latter-day London-Irish spirit-raiser and exorcist. This commentary is found in the book Myth of Return: The Paintings of Brian Whelan and Collected Commentaries. London Irish artist Brian Whelan has painted MacGowan (for example Boy from the County Hell); his works are featured on MacGowan's official website, and he is also the illustrator of The Popes' Outlaw Heaven cover.
In 2006, he was voted 50th in the NME Rock Heroes List. In January 2018, MacGowan was honoured with a concert gala to celebrate his 60th birthday at the National Concert Hall in Dublin, where Irish president Michael D. Higgins presented him with a lifetime achievement award for his outstanding contribution to Irish life, music and culture. He also won the 2018 Ivor Novello Inspiration Award.
Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Date: February 2024.
Photo Credits:
(1)-(9) Shane MacGowan /
The Pogues
(unknown/website).
