A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan

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Shane MacGowan". IMDb.com. Archived from the original on 27 November 2013 . Retrieved 16 December 2012. Dwyer, Michael (2 August 1987). "Mac the Mouth". The Sunday Tribune. Archived from the original on 8 June 2009. But if you’re gonna stand there drunk and big up Donald Trump after four years, and put it on YouTube or Facebook or whatever, then you’ve descended to a level of self-loathing. At the same time you just can’t get enough of the public staring at you.” Petridis, Alexis (28 November 2013). "The Pogues: 30 Years – review". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 12 June 2018 . Retrieved 10 June 2018. Before joining the Pogues in the mid-1980s, MacGowan had been a fixture on London’s punk scene; he could be seen pogoing in the front row at endless gigs and going by the alias Shane O’Hooligan. Balls recounts how the young MacGowan, after his release from a psychiatric ward around the age of 19, found his calling living and breathing punk during the Sex Pistols’ ascent. He put out a fanzine and was frequently interviewed by the establishment press, achieving national notoriety after his ear was bitten off at a Clash gig, an incident that was written up in NME. Soon, he formed his first band, the Nipple Erectors (or Nips), with girlfriend Shanne Bradley.

A short spell at London’s hallowed Westminster school, where Clarke says he was bullied, was followed by a period of confinement for mental health problems. Both periods, Clarke believes, left their scars. More recently, MacGowan fell into what she describes as a depressive “tailspin” after a fall that has immobilised him. It was shortly followed by the sudden death of his mother: “He’d thought he’d go on for ever taking risks and nothing would get him. He didn’t want to talk or see people and it lasted years.”She described herself as “a bit of a hoarder” who collected bits of paper for years “not knowing if they had any value”. MacGowan made a return to stage on 13 June 2019 at the RDS Arena in Dublin as a guest for Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders. [22]

Peter Walker (20 December 2015). " 'Everest of dentistry': Shane MacGowan gets new teeth in TV special". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 20 December 2015 . Retrieved 20 December 2015.Adams applauded Clarke – “the ginger lady” – for curating more than 3,000 sketches, scribblings and “any number of graphic, phallic and provocative drawings and paintings by Shane which she salvaged, which she saved and which is now presenting to the world”. Disalvo, Tom (6 December 2022). "Shane MacGowan of The Pogues admitted to hospital". NME . Retrieved 12 December 2022. In 2001, MacGowan coauthored the autobiographical book A Drink with Shane MacGowan with Victoria Mary Clarke. Myth of Returned. Roseberry Crest, 2007 pg. 16. 2007. ISBN 978-0-9555048-0-8. Archived from the original on 8 December 2012 . Retrieved 16 December 2012. After If I Should Fall From Grace With God, MacGowan would stay with the Pogues for two more albums, but he had wanted out after that tour ended. He was not in his right mind, gobbling insane amounts of LSD and having conversations with a dead Jimi Hendrix, among other pastimes. When the Pogues were invited to open six shows for Bob Dylan in 1989, MacGowan failed to show because he was holed up in a friend’s apartment in London, strung out like a kite. The band played the shows without him, though it’s not clear if Dylan even noticed.

Shane was heavily involved in the London punk scene in the 70s and was friends with The Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and others in the scene. His first band, The Nipple Erectors, was a punk band but never got off the ground. It was after the broke up that he formed the Pogues and decided the style would combine his 2 loves Irish music and punk. Shane loved Ireland from a young age where he would spend lots of time with his mothers family on a farm near Nenagh in County Tipperary.Chef Richard Corrigan, who hosted the launch in his new restaurant, The Park Café, in Ballsbridge, said MacGowan was “the London Irish we always wanted”. A fascinating portrait of ex-Pogue and folk-punk pioneer Shane MacGowan', Great books for Christmas selection, Choice Magazine

He may have drawn compulsively once but it is music that hounds him now, with tunes forming constantly in his head: “I am always writing songs. It is far more effort to draw. I am in the later stages now of recording the album with a new band and we have amazing chemistry.” He would draw anywhere then,” says Clarke. “On a restaurant menu, a hotel room-service card, or my receipts and bank statements. Even the walls, but not once on a canvas.” Like most good movies from my youth, this is definitely a tale of two halves. The first half tells the story of Shanes life up until he wrote Fairy Tale of New York. Growing up around London with Irish parents during the height of the troubles Shane was an outsider from the very beginning, espeically at the private Westminster School, which he attended due to his precocity with English literature. He was reading the likes of James Joyce by the time he was 10, encouraged by his Dad. Whilst encouraging him to read his Dad is accussed of lax parenting that landed Shane in rehab as a teenager after he had been expelled from school. MacGowan has suffered physically from years of binge drinking. He 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. [36] MacGowan began drinking at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep, and his father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. [37] Suite Sudarmoricaine", " Tri Martolod", "The Foggy Dew" ( Foggy Dew) (with Alan Stivell, Again, 1993)MacGowan was hospitalised for an infection on 6 December 2022. [39] [40] He was diagnosed with encephalitis. [41]