Sinead O’Connor – Blood and Porridge

April 23, 2025April 23, 2025

Happy belated birthday, Patrick

© Pan Macmillan

A month ago, I planned to post something on this blog in honour of the great Irish writer Patrick McCabe, who celebrated his 70^th birthday on March 27th. Somehow, though, I forgot all about it and the Happy-Birthday-Patrick post didn’t appear. I must have been distracted by something else near the end of March – probably the latest atrocity or lunacy perpetrated by Donald Trump’s administration in the USA. I can’t remember what. The atrocities and lunacies have come thick and fast since the Orange Jobby’s inauguration as the 47^th American president and it’s impossible to keep track of them.

Anyway, here’s that post now. Be warned that it contains many spoilers for McCabe’s books.

Patrick McCabe hails from the town of Clones (pronounced ‘klo-nis’, not as in the 2002 Star Wars movie Attack of the Clones) in County Monaghan, just over the border from Northern Ireland. Clones is famous as the birthplace of boxer Barry McGuigan, known during his pugilistic career as ‘the Clones Cyclone’, though I suspect McCabe was more intrigued by the exploits of another famous, or infamous, native of the town, Alexander Pearce, the convict, serial escapee and alleged cannibal who was hung in Van Diemen’s Land (now Tasmania) in 1824.

Clones and the surrounding countryside are obviously influential on McCabe’s writing and that explains some of the affinity I feel for it – Clones is only a 35-minute drive from Enniskillen in County Fermanagh, where I was born and went to school. Though Clones is in the Irish Republic and Enniskillen is in Northern Ireland, part of the United Kingdom, and as a result the political and cultural vibes aren’t quite the same, there’s nonetheless much in his books I can relate to: how his characters think, behave and speak and how they deal with, or fail to deal with, the frustrations and absurdities that their environment assails them with.

Also, McCabe’s books can be very funny and very dark, frequently at the same time. If there’s anything I find irresistible, it’s the combination of humour and darkness, done well.

The most famous of McCabe’s books is 1992’s The Butcher Boy, which won the Irish Times’ Irish Literature Prize and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Like Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) and Irvine Welsh’s Trainspotting (1993), it made such a splash that it both overshadowed his other works and became the measuring stick against which they were all compared. However, while Lanark and Trainspotting were Gray and Welsh’s first published books, The Butcher Boy was McCabe’s fourth. It followed the children’s book The Adventures of Shay Mouse (1985) and the novels Music on Clinton Street (1987) and Carn (1989). That last book is set in a small Irish town, the Carn of the title, that’s clearly a fictional stand-in for Clones and it’s the only one of his early works that I’ve read.

© Picador Books

Actually, I read Carn after I’d read The Butcher Boy, and for a long time I thought it was published after The Butcher Boy too. Maybe Carn feels like a subsequent book because The Butcher Boy is set in the early 1960s, while Carn’s plot spans the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Amusingly, late on, McCabe describes how the townsfolk of Carn have become addicted to the brash American TV soap opera Dallas (1978-91) and are talking about J.R. Ewing and co. as if they’re real people.

Carn tells the tale both of two women, Sadie and Josie, who are trapped in the town in different ways – one drudges in the local meat-packing factory, the other is an outcast who returns after a long exile – and of the town itself, experiencing economic growth in the 1960s, witnessing nearby Northern Ireland going insane in the 1970s, and suffering economic decline in the 1980s. At one point, Josie reflects on the changes, on how “a huddled clump of windswept grey buildings split in two by a muddied main street, had somehow been spirited away and supplanted by a thriving, bustling place which bore no resemblance whatever to it.” Carn isn’t McCabe’s best work, but its blend of sadness, tenderness, bleakness and humour makes it an interesting blueprint for what was to follow.

The Butcher Boy is a more claustrophobic read than Carn because we’re stuck inside the head of its main character, psychotic youngster Francie Brady. Told by Francie in the first person, we quickly realise he’s an unreliable narrator. Indeed, the opening line spells it out: “When I was a young lad twenty or thirty or forty years ago I lived in a small town where they were all after me on account of what I done on Mrs Nugent.” This isn’t unreliable narration in the style of Kazuo Ishiguro where it gradually dawns on you that the reality isn’t quite as it’s being presented. It’s unreliable narration where you know fine well the vile and cruel things that are really going on, despite Francie’s deluded blathering, and you read on with (metaphorically) your fingers over your eyes, waiting for the excruciating moment when the penny finally drops.

This happens several times. Francie’s friendship with a comparatively normal lad called Joe Purcell clearly frays much more quickly than Francie thinks it does. Francie clings to the belief they’re best buddies even when it’s obvious Joe is repelled by the sight of him. Also, after the deaths of his parents, Francie becomes obsessed with a story he’d heard from his father, Benny, about their honeymoon in the seaside town of Bundoran. As Benny told it, he and Francie’s mother were young, beautiful and blissfully in love. We just know from what we’ve seen of Benny, a drunken brute of a man, that the reality was horribly different. Francie, though, believes in the ideal until he finally goes asking questions at the Bundoran boarding house his parents stayed in. Only then does he realise the hideous truth.

© Picador Books

Worst of all is an earlier episode where Francie calms down for a while, works in the local abattoir and lives at home with Benny, who’s – supposedly – still alive at the time. But Benny is oddly subdued and it’s evident to the reader that he’s died of alcoholism and is slowly decomposing into the sofa. Francie, in his madness, doesn’t twig on until several months later when the police come calling.

Incidentally… No disrespect to Patrick McCabe, but I have a wee quibble about the book’s continuity. Francie mentions watching that hoary old American sci-fi TV series Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, which was produced by Irwin Allen and ran from 1964 to 1968. But the book’s later action takes place against the potentially-apocalyptic background of the Cuban Missile Crisis, which occurred in 1962, two years before Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea debuted on television. Maybe McCabe was thinking of the movie that inspired the TV show, released in 1961?

In 1997, The Butcher Boy was filmed by Neil Jordan, a writer-director who with movies like Angel (1982), Mona Lisa (1986) and The Crying Game (1992) has a knack similar to McCabe’s for taking the dreary and mundane and creating something out-of-the-ordinary with it. Though with Jordan, what’s created is closer to magical realism. With McCabe, it’s gothic. The film follows the book fairly faithfully, with a few small embellishments – I liked Sinead O’Connor cameoing as the Virgin Mary. However, just by being a film, it’s a less suffocating experience, as we’re seeing events as bystanders, not inside from the cockpit of Francie’s head. Incidentally, McCabe appears among the cast playing the town drunk, Jimmy the Skite.

© Picador Books

I’ve read claims that Francie’s mental unravelling is meant to symbolise Ireland’s fragile and precarious sense of identity, moving from colonial status to independence and having to navigate such momentous events as the permissive swinging 1960s and the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But to me McCabe’s next book, The Dead School (1995), is more obviously about that. It pits Old Ireland – represented by Raphael Bell, the pious, patriotic and upstanding master of a boys’ boarding school – against Young Ireland – represented by Malachy Dudgeon, a product of a dysfunctional family and a member of a younger, less conservative and more fun-loving generation than Raphael’s. Malachy becomes a teacher and ends up working at Raphael’s school, with disastrous consequences for both of them. Later, when their paths cross again, things are even worse – one is mad, the other an alcoholic. The Dead School describes a collision of two different eras, and two antagonistic Irish mindsets, and the result is as unpretty as The Butcher Boy.

After the darkness of those two books, I was ready for Breakfast on Pluto (1998), which also made it onto the Booker Prize shortlist. This recounts the early-1970s adventures of Patrick ‘Pussy’ Brady, described in contemporary reviews as a ‘gay transvestite’ though now I suppose she’d be called a transwoman. Pussy leaves her Irish hometown and heads to London in search of her biological mother, who’d abandoned her when she was a baby. Overshadowing everything are the Troubles that have recently bloodily erupted in Northern Ireland and are making their presence felt in London too, thanks to bombing campaigns by the IRA. With Irish terrorist violence on the menu, Breakfast on Pluto may not sound a barrel of laughs, but I found it hilarious thanks to Pussy’s droll way of describing things. I also found it curiously uplifting. Despite having many indignities inflicted upon her, Pussy is a trooper who keeps on going.

Breakfast on Pluto was filmed in 2005, again courtesy of Neil Jordan. The movie version is a bit too long and episodic, but it’s mightily enjoyable and has a lighter, breezier feel than the book. Cillian ‘Oppenheimer’ Murphy plays the main character, whose name is changed from ‘Pussy’ to the less provocative ‘Kitten’. This is one of several alterations Jordan makes. Kitten’s first lover – whom McCabe depicted as a crooked Irish politician in the mould of Charles Haughey – becomes a singer in a rock band, played by Gavin Friday, real-life singer of the Virgin Prunes. And generally, Jordan glams things up with some pleasantly nostalgic references to early-1970s popular culture. For instance, the film features both Wombles and Daleks, which I don’t recall being in the original. McCabe has a cameo in this too, playing a schoolteacher who freaks out when the young Kitten asks him for advice on how to have a sex change. Sadly, though, Breakfast on Pluto is one of Jordan’s more underrated and neglected films.

© Picador Books

A year after Breakfast on Pluto, McCabe published a short-story collection, Mondo Desperado. The stories’ titles, like My Friend Bruce Lee, I Ordained the Devil and The Boils of Thomas Gully, tell you what to expect – more of that inimitable McCabe cocktail of the humdrum, absurd, grotesque, macabre and howlingly funny. Deserving special mention is the opening story, Hot Nights at the Go-Go Lounge, which memorably begins: “It’s hard to figure out how in a small town like this a mature woman of twenty-eight years could get herself mixed up with a bunch of deadbeat swingers, but that is exactly what happened to Cora Bunyan and I should know because she was my wife.”

After that, I lost track of McCabe’s books for a while. To date, there’s been seven more I haven’t read: Emerald Gems of Ireland (2001), Call Me the Breeze (2003), Winterwood (2006) – which Irvine Welsh reviewed admiringly in the Guardian – The Holy City (2009), Hello and Goodbye (2013), The Big Yaroo (2019) and Poguemahone (2022). A few years back, however, I did read his 2010 novel The Stray Sod Country, which I thought was wonderful. It features another of McCabe’s exquisitely-drawn Irish small towns. This time, the action takes place mostly in the late 1950s, around the time of the launch of Sputnik 2 in 1957 and the Munich air disaster in 1958 – though there are jumps forward in time to add perspective to the 1950s-set plot.

The Stray Sod Country has an omniscient and sinister narrator. This, we learn, is a malevolent supernatural being called a fetch, which has a dismaying fondness for entering the minds of humans, corrupting them and encouraging them to do harm to others. Sneakily, the fetch foments and escalates feuds between the townspeople. Thus, for example, a rivalry, then hatred, develops between Golly Murray, wife of the town’s barber, and Blossom Foster, wife of its bank manager. Meanwhile, in a fit of priestly jealousy worthy of Father Ted (1995-98), local cleric Father Hand fulminates against his old rival Father Peyton, ‘the infuriatingly smug Mayo toady’, now a ‘celebrity priest of Hollywood, America’ who associates with Frank Sinatra. But he’d be better advised to worry about a disgraced schoolteacher called James A. Reilly. Father Hand had him run out of town for kissing a male pupil. Reilly is living as a vagrant in the nearby bog, nursing his wrath whilst in possession of an Enfield rifle from the Irish Civil War, and he’s fertile ground for the fetch.

I felt McCabe portrayed the cast of small-town eccentrics populating The Stray Sod Country with more affection than usual. And he seemed to have a genuine love for the time and place depicted. Perhaps the great man was mellowing with age?

So, I wish Patrick McCabe all the best as he enters his eighth decade. Barry McGuigan may be the Clones Cyclone, but in literary terms McCabe is the Clones Hurricane – a hurricane of the homespun, the hideous and the hilarious.

© Bloomsbury Publishing

December 5, 2023December 9, 2023

I’m sad to say, he must be on his way

From wikipedia.org / © Masao Yakagami

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!”

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.