Shane MacGowan and the Popes – Blood and Porridge

December 5, 2023December 9, 2023

I’m sad to say, he must be on his way

It was not a great surprise that on November 30^th Shane MacGowan, singer, songwriter, musician, raconteur and front-man of much-loved Anglo-Irish folk-punk band the Pogues, breathed his last. The highs of his musical and song-writing creativity had always been offset by the lows of his industrial-strength alcohol and drug consumption, and that consumption had famously taken a toll on his health. Plus, he’d been wheelchair-bound since 2015, when an accident outside a Dublin recording studio resulted in him breaking his pelvis, and he’d spent much of the past year in hospital suffering from viral encephalitis. The writing had been on the wall for poor old Shane for a long time.

Then again, it was absolutely miraculous how long that writing had remained on the wall before the cantankerous old bugger took any notice of it and died. Indeed, back in the 1990s, the prospect of him making it to even the age of 40 had looked doubtful. This was when his drunkenness, drug-taking and general unreliability led to him being ejected from the Pogues. Also, late in the decade, he’d developed a heroin habit so severe that his pal Sinead O’Connor felt compelled to report him to the police before he killed himself with an overdose.

Yet in 2017, he celebrated his 60^th birthday. I remember thinking at the time, Wow, six words I never expected to hear together in a sentence: ‘Shane MacGowan’ and ‘celebrated his 60^th birthday’. As a 60^thbirthday-bash, MacGowan was honoured with a do at Dublin’s National Concert Hall, where some of his most famous compositions were played and sung by a series of notable musical icons and talents like O’Connor, Carl Barat, Nick Cave, Bobby Gillespie, Glen Hansard, Cerys Matthews, Glen Matlock and Imelda May. (Bono was at it too.) There can’t have been a single dry eye or lump-free throat in the building when, near the end, the birthday boy himself was wheeled onstage to sing Summer in Siam, from the 1990 Pogues album Hell’s Ditch, with his old mate Cave. He then brought the event to a close with a solo rendition of the venerable Scottish folk song Wild Mountain Thyme.

McGowan was not at the top of his game for terribly long. He appeared on the first five Pogues albums from 1984 to 1990 and on two albums by Shane MacGowan and the Popes in 1994 and 1997, and that was really it. But during that period his songwriting skills were extraordinary. On one level, his lyrics were shot through with a grim, unflinching realism, documenting the miseries that his characters, invariably Irish ones, had to endure: poverty, violence, oppression, imprisonment, addiction, homelessness and heartbreak. Tempering these were mentions of the things that offered their existences some fleeting rays of sunshine: their faith, music and song, enjoying a flutter on the dogs and horses, good company and good booze-ups.

Thus, 1987’s Fairy Tale of New York manages in its four minutes to encompass dying old men, drunk tanks, icy winter winds, broken dreams, violent domestic rows, being bedridden on a drip, winning on a horse that ‘came in eighteen to one’, the songs The Rare Old Mountain Dew and Galway Bay, ringing church bells, the New York Police Department choir, Frank Sinatra, singing drunkards… That’s a lot more ground than your average Christmas song covers.

© Stiff Records

At the same time, and despite his popular public image of slurring befuddlement, MacGowan was a fiercely intelligent type who littered his songs with references to Irish history, literature, religion and myth. For instance, The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn, from 1985’s Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, alludes to the hero of the ‘Ulster’ cycle of Irish mythology in its title and name-checks the following in its lyrics: famed Irish tenor John McCormack, famed Austrian tenor Richard Tauber, IRA man Frank Ryan who led a contingent of Irish soldiers to fight the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, legendary and (literally) legless Dublin beggar and robber Billy in the Bowl, and County Tipperary parish Cloughprior, which is noted for its 15^th-century church and cemetery.

Meanwhile, Streams of Whiskey from 1984’s Red Roses for Me is about a dream where MacGowan meets the late Irish writer and hellraiser Brendan Behan, who once described himself as ‘a drinker with writing problems’. Its chorus could be MacGowan’s manifesto: “I am going, I am going, where streams of whiskey are flowing.”

I loved the Pogues and enjoyed much of MacGowan’s later music with the Popes, even though I knew that, being a Protestant from a Unionist community in Northern Ireland, he probably wouldn’t have liked me very much. Mind you, I’m sure there were some staunch members of my family who reciprocated the feeling, viewing him as an unseemly Irish-Republican rabble-rouser. He once told an interviewer: “I felt ashamed that I didn’t have the guts to join the IRA, so the Pogues was my way of overcoming that guilt.” Later in life, while an invalid in Dublin, he sometimes had former Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams drop by to visit him – “He’s a very easy man to talk to,” was MacGowan’s comment. Then again, he’d been known to wear a Union Jack-patterned coat and, if you’re to believe his widow, the journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, he watched The Crown (2016-23) avidly and shed tears at the deaths of Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip and Princess Diana. A Northern Irish Proddy I might be, but those are things I wouldn’t countenance doing.

In the summer of 1995 I was in New York when I learned that Shane MacGowan and the Popes were performing at a local venue. So I bought a ticket. The gig saw a mightily-inebriated MacGowan manage to sing all of two songs. He spent another fifteen minutes sitting at the edge of the stage clutching his head while the Popes played a couple of instrumentals. Then he disappeared. The band did a few more instrumentals, then followed their leader’s example and exited too. The crowd rioted. McGowan did not look like a man who had much of a professional future ahead of him. Or indeed, much of a future.

Yet he was in better form three years later when I saw him, with the Popes again, at the Fleadh outdoor music festival at London’s Finsbury Park. At least, he remained standing and remained singing for the entire set, even if he did have the dazed air of a man who’d just been returned to earth after being abducted and probed by aliens. And it was touching how, when the performance was done, the crowd kept chanting, “Shane-o! Shane-o! Shane-o!” until, finally, a big, appreciative grin spread across his bleary features.

And he was better still the next time I saw him, in the early noughties. He and the rest of the Pogues’ classic line-up – James Fearnley, Jem Finer, Cait O’Riordan, Andrew Ranken, Spider Stacy, Terry Woods, the late Philip Chevron and the late Darryl Hunt – had got together for a Christmas tour and they made an appearance at the Metro Radio Arena in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where I was living at the time. Admittedly, MacGowan’s voice was weaker than it’d been during the glory days of Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, but he seemed to raise his game whenever Cait O’Riordan sang onstage with him. And their rendition of Fairy Tale of New York, with O’Riordan taking the place of Kirsty McColl, who’d died four years earlier, was rather wonderful.

The whole event, shameless, nostalgic cash-in though it was, was rather wonderful in fact. Well, with a combination of the Pogues, Christmas and a few thousand boozed-up Geordies, how could it not be wonderful?

© Pan Books

In the meantime, in 2001, MacGowan and his missus Victoria Mary Clarke had published a book called A Drink with Shane MacGowan. A rambling mixture of memoirs, anecdotes, opinions and philosophy related by the great man and recorded and edited by Clarke, A Drink… is very entertaining, fascinating in parts and knowingly hilarious in others. I particularly liked the bit in it where MacGowan theorises why Irish playwright Samuel Beckett was such an existentialist misery-guts – it was because he was the only man in the whole of Ireland who liked cricket. Mind you, I suspect there’s some artistic license in MacGowan’s claims that he was drinking, smoking and betting on the horses when he was five years old.

Here’s a list of my ten favourite Shane MacGowan songs – ones he wrote and / or ones he sang.

The Sick Bed of Cúchulainn (from the 1985 Pogues album Rum, Sodomy and the Lash). Glasses of punch, whiskey, ghosts, banshees, angels, the devil, midnight mass, rattling death-trains, pissing yourself, getting syphilis, kicking in the windows of Euston taverns and decking “some f**king blackshirt who was cursing all the Yids…” Yes, this is the song that truly sets out the Pogues’ stall.

Sally MacLennane (from Rum, Sodomy and the Lash). Equally rousing and elegiac, this is the perfect song for bidding adieu to an old friend: “I’m sad to say, I must be on my way, so buy me beer and whiskey cos I’m going far away… FAR AWAY!”

© Pogue Mahone / Warner Music Group

If I Should Fall from Grace with God (from the 1988 Pogues album of the same name). And this is the perfect go-wild-on-the-dance-floor song for Pogues fans.

Thousands are Sailing (from If I Should Fall from Grace with God). Written by Philip Chevron, this paean to the millions of Irish people who migrated to North America in the 19^th and 20^th centuries receives much of its power from MacGowan’s vocals, simultaneously wistful and exultant. It just didn’t sound the same when, minus MacGowan, the Pogues performed it in the 1990s. Those who dismiss the band as propagandists for Ireland and all things Irish should note the disdain for the mother-country expressed in the lyrics: “Where e’er we go, we celebrate the land that makes us refugees, from fear of priests with empty plates, from guilt and weeping effigies.”

Down All the Days (from the 1989 Pogues album Peace and Love). A tribute to the severely-palsied Irish writer Christy Brown, who had to “Type with me toes, drink stout through me nose, and where it’s going to end, God only knows,” this also contains the memorable lines, “I’ve often had to depend upon the kindness of strangers, but I’ve never been asked and never replied if I supported Glasgow Rangers.”

What a Wonderful World (a 1992 duet with Nick Cave, available on the 2005 Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds album B-Sides and Rarities). MacGowan and Cave’s amusing, but still tender and respectful, version of the Louis Armstrong classic is the song I want played at my funeral.

God Help Me (from the 1994 Jesus and Mary Chain album Stoned and Dethroned). Considering what MacGowan was going through at the time, this melancholic, low-key collaboration with the usually abrasive, feedback-drenched Scottish alternative-rock band the Jesus and Mary Chain is probably aptly titled.

That Woman’s got me Drinking (from the 1994 Shane MacGowan and the Popes album The Snake). This features one of the best choruses ever: “That woman’s got me drinking, look at the state I’m in, give me one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten bottles of gin!”

Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway (from The Snake). Gerry Rafferty’s rumination on a relationship that’s gone wrong is reworked by MacGowan and the Popes in their own inimitable manner. I wonder what Rafferty thought about the subtle change made to the lyrics at the very end of his song. The Rafferty version simply concludes, “Her father didn’t like me anyway.” The MacGowan one concludes, “Her father was a right c*nt anyway.”

Fix It (from the 2010 Alabama 3 album Revolver Soul). You hardly hear MacGowan on this effort from celebrated London blues-country-electronica-trip-hop-acid-house outfit the Albama 3. Here and there he spectrally moans one simple, plaintive line. But his spirit infuses the song, making it rueful yet ultimately soaring.

And no, I haven’t put Fairy Tale of New York on this list – because I’ve heard it so many times I’m now a bit sick of it. After the sad news of November 30^th, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s this year’s Christmas number one.

© Elektra / Wea

June 6, 2023June 22, 2023

Live bands behaving badly

© Warner Bros.

I see the rock band Royal Blood have landed themselves in hot water. They took to the stage at Radio 1’s Big Weekend event in Dundee on May 28^th and reacted to what they felt was the crowd’s lack of energy and enthusiasm by impersonating Victor Meldrew in the TV sitcom One Foot in the Grave (1990-2000). They behaved like curmudgeonly old farts. Vocalist and bassist Mike Kerr berated the audience, who mainly consisted of folk come to see the also-on-the-bill popstars Niall Horan and Lewis Capaldi, with such cantankerous remarks as: “Well, I guess I should introduce ourselves seeing as no one actually knows who we are. We’re called Royal Blood and this is rock music. Who likes rock music? Nine people, brilliant…” And: “We’re having to clap ourselves because that was so pathetic…” Plus, he flipped the crowd off while leaving the stage.

Small wonder that the band has been roasted on social media since then. Particularly brutal was a Twitter posting likening them to the long-running British TV glove puppets Sooty and Sweep.

Now I quite like Royal Blood’s music and I have a copy of their eponymous 2014 debut album somewhere in my record collection. Also, not being a pop fan, I would probably find a concert featuring Niall Horan (who was once in One Direction) and Lewis Capaldi (who I admit does have an awesome second cousin once removed) about as pleasurable as poking a sharp stick into my ear and twisting it. But if you’re in a rock band and find yourself lined up to play at an event that’s obviously going to be thronged with pop fans, you should know what to expect, leave your prejudices offstage, get on with the show and make the best of it… Or just cancel your appearance.

Come to think of it, I did once attend Radio 1’s One Big Sunday event in Ipswich in the summer of 2002, while I was working in the area. That was because I wanted to see two bands on the bill, Edinburgh rockers Idlewild and Bristol electronica outfit Kosheen. I didn’t let the fact that the bill also contained Liberty X, Ms Dynamite and Natalie Imbruglia, whom I had zero interest in, interfere with my enjoyment. As I said, at an eclectic do like this, you make the best of things.

Anyway, the recent stushie involving Royal Blood has made me look back over my gig-going career and wonder… What instances of bad behaviour by live bands have I witnessed in my time?

The most memorable onstage meltdowns came while I was living in the city of Sapporo, in Hokkaido, northern Japan, during the 1990s. Visiting Western performers frequently got annoyed at what they saw as the passivity of Japanese audiences, forgetting that there were obvious cultural reasons why a Japanese crowd might seem less extrovert and exuberant than a Western one.

The number-one musical misery-guts during my Japanese years was Ian Brown, frontman of the Stone Roses, who performed at the Sapporo Factory venue in 1995 to promote their recently-released album Second Coming. Brown soon got riled by what he perceived as the audience’s inactivity. “Sapporo,” he snarled, “wake up!” At this point, some New Zealand guys whom I knew yelled from the back of the hall, “Oh, you’ve remembered which city you’re in! Well done!” Brown then commented sourly about “those people at the back with faces like well-skelped arses.” I was standing a few yards from the front of the stage and couldn’t help shouting back at him, “That’s rich coming from you!” My comeback seemed to rattle Brown and I saw him both gesturing towards the side of the stage and pointing furiously down at me. “Oh shit,” I thought, “he’s trying to get the venue’s security staff onto me!” I decided I should make myself less conspicuous. This was difficult because I was rather taller than the average Japanese person and my head and shoulders stuck up prominently above the crowd. I spent the rest of the gig with legs awkwardly bent at the knees, trying to reduce my height, so that Brown and his security goons wouldn’t notice me.

To be fair, Brown had recently been beaten up in a club in Tokyo, supposedly by a trio of Australian bodybuilders, which’d no doubt left him in a foul mood for the rest of his band’s Japanese tour. Still, he behaved like a dickwad that evening and put me off the Stone Roses for a long while afterwards.

Also losing it with their northern Japanese audience were the punk band Fluffy, who in 1996 supported the Sex Pistols (in the middle of their Filthy Lucre reunion tour) at the Hokkaido Koseinenkin Hall. Singer Amanda Rootes sneered at the end, “Thank you, Sapporo, for your boring hospitality!” But it was hardly the crowd’s fault. The Hall seemed designed to strangle any atmosphere at birth – as far as I remember, it was an all-seater venue, which limited one’s ability to get up and bop and jump around to the music, and it was brightly lit. Also, the tickets had said nothing about a support band and people were still filing in to take their seats while Fluffy performed onstage. The band continued to fume about the experience later. A mate of mine who worked in a pub in Susukino, Sapporo’s nightlife district, reported that the band came into his establishment for a drink after the gig and had a moan about how horrible the city was.

On the other hand, I’ve seen a Japanese audience – well, a Japanese audience sprinkled with a number of foreigners – have a go at a band for not being lively themselves. In the mid-1990s the American outfit Sugar played at Penny Lane, Sapporo’s best small venue. Their singer, guitarist and leader Bob Mould was so intense, wrapped-up-in-himself and non-communicative between songs that, eventually, someone with a North American accent roared at him, “Why don’t you speak to us!” I should say that years later I saw Mould again, performing solo at the Oran Mor arts / entertainment centre in Glasgow, and he seemed way more chilled and looked like he was enjoying himself much more.

Penny Lane was also where I witnessed a meltdown by Richey Edwards, the iconic but doomed guitarist – two years later, he’d disappear, never to be seen again – with the Welsh rock band the Manic Street Preachers. This was in 1993 and the Manics were promoting their new album Gold Against the Soul. The gig was excellent, but Edwards was clearly on edge. At one point he raged against an illuminated fire-exit sign at the auditorium’s far end that he claimed was distracting him. In a typical face-saving Japanese compromise, the venue manager didn’t turn the sign off. He just tied a big strip of cardboard over it so that nobody, including Richey, could see it, but it stayed switched on in accordance with fire regulations.

Away from Japan, I’ve observed some unprofessional behaviour onstage that was the result of physical or emotional dysfunction within the band. In 1995, in New York, I went to a gig by Shane MacGowan and the Popes. The famously raddled MacGowan – who’d already parted company with his earlier and more famous band the Pogues because of his ongoing state of dissolution – lasted all of two songs before sinking onto his haunches, clutching his head between his hands, and then slinking offstage. The rest of the band, the Popes, gamely played a few instrumental tunes for another 25 or 30 minutes. Then they buggered off too. And then there was a riot. Happily, when I saw MacGowan on two later occasions – with the Popes at the 1998 Fleadh Festival in London’s Finsbury Park and together again with the Pogues in Newcastle-upon-Tyne in 2004 – he was in better physical shape. Well, a bit better.

Meanwhile, by the time I saw the Jesus and Mary Chain in Edinburgh in 1998, the relationship between the band’s founding members, brothers Jim and William Reid, had become toxic. It showed onstage. (Jim Reid once said of the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain experience: “It’s like being locked in a cupboard with somebody for 15 years. If it wasn’t your brother, you could kick him out.”) At one point, in front of the audience, Jim roared, “William, just shut up!” when his sibling started singing a song intro off-key. It was no surprise when, the following year, the news came through that the band had split up.

I’ve also seen folk, full of boisterous, joking bonhomie, fail to read the room and say something they regretted. Most notably, I remember Primal Scream playing on the bill at a one-day event on Glasgow Green in 2000. While they were limbering up to play the song Sick City from their new album XTRMNTR, bass-player Gary ‘Mani’ Mountfield cheerfully barked into the microphone, “This is dedicated to Glasgow because it really is… a sick city!” That went down like a cup of – appropriately enough – cold sick among the multitude of Glaswegians assembled before them. So pissed off were they that, later, Mani felt obliged to announce that he was only jesting and, really, “Glasgow isn’t a sick city at all!” Incidentally, this was in the days before ‘sick’ acquired its modern, slang meaning of ‘amazingly good or impressive’. (I should add that I think Mani, most famous for playing in the Stone Roses alongside Ian Brown, is a decent bloke. His surname even inspired the pseudonym Jim Mountfield, which I use when I write horror stories. That day, he just let his mouth run a little bit ahead of his brain.)

Elsewhere, I recall seeing the Subways in Norwich in 2008. Singer Billy Lunn didn’t endear himself to me or the rest of the audience when, sporting a cheesy grin, he raised a hand and exclaimed at us, “Aha!” in the manner of Alan Partridge – Steve Coogan’s gormless, idiotic TV-presenter character who, of course, is supposed to hail from Norwich. “What a knobhead,” I thought.

Finally, I can think of a few examples of the opposite happening – when the audience behaved badly and the people onstage managed the situation with admirable skill. Back in 1984, I saw the late, legendary Mark E. Smith’s band the Fall at Aberdeen Ritzy, with support provided by abrasive post-punk / noise-rock band the Membranes. The audience was populated with serious Fall fans desperate for the support act to exit the stage as quickly as possible so that their hero Smith could come on. Accordingly, they kept yelling “F*ck off!” at the Membranes between songs. Bassist / vocalist John Robb took it in his stride and started doing funny impersonations of the abusers. “F*****ck off!” he drooled into his microphone.

And in 1997 in Melbourne, I was at a gig by the Henry Rollins Band when a woman at the edge of the stage got a little too vociferous in telling the band which songs she wanted them to perform. The fearsomely muscled Rollins declared, loudly, patiently, contemptuously: “Lady, we decide what songs we play, when we play them, how we play them. Sometimes you get what you want in life. Sometimes you don’t.”

It’s been a long time since I saw a live band behaving badly. This is probably because I spent most of the 2010s living in Sri Lanka, where the only option for seeing live rock music (away from the country’s holiday resorts, where hotel bands played cover versions of the Eagles and Bryan Adams to audiences of sweaty middle-aged Western tourists and local would-be hipsters) was to indulge in the thriving Sri Lankan heavy metal scene. And many of those heavy metal bands had an amusing habit of showing boundless Sri Lankan politeness and gratitude to the audience for turning up to see them. In between songs, they kept saying, “Thank you, thank you very much, thank you for coming, thank you so very much…” Then, a half-minute later, they were emitting blood-curdling, throaty black / death metal gurgles and screaming “F*CK! F*CK! F*CK!”

The pandemic obviously ended my gig-going for a few years. Now that I’ve relocated to Singapore, I’ve been able to see a couple of Western bands again and they’ve been impeccably well-behaved. Even Guns N’ Roses, who had a reputation for being dicks and subjecting audiences to some notoriously poor concerts over the years, were perfect gentlemen when I saw them at Singapore’s National Stadium last year. They even treated the crowd to a three-hour set. Maybe they were simply happy, post-Covid-19, to be on the road again. Actually, considering how expensive concert-tickets are here, the last thing I’d want would be to find myself in a pricy gig with the performers being arseholes onstage.

Mind you, if one of those Korean pop bands like BTS or Blackpink, massively popular in Singapore and elsewhere in East Asia, were to play here and sign up Royal Blood as the support act… I might pay money to see that.