The Pogues founder Shane MacGowan dies

The founder and vocalist of the punk band The Pogues, the famous Irish musician Shane MacGowan, has died at the age of 65.

In recent days, music lovers have been actively sharing footage on social networks in which there was a man in a hospital bed who vaguely resembled ex-leader of The Pogues Shane MacGowan. It’s unlikely that anyone believed that this man would soon recover. It was more logical to be surprised that he survived until 2023.

If you saw Julian Temple’s documentary “One More Time with Shane MacGowan,” which was shown in Russia in 2021, you will remember that even then the hero looked little like a person with more or less a real chance of returning to a normal life. And what is considered normal? Especially in the case of a guy who crossed British punk and Irish folk.

McGowan brought the power of Irish folk music to rock, drawing on literature, mythology and the Bible.

“Everything that could be done in the standard rock format was done, and usually quite poorly,” McGowan told NME in 1983.

In Temple’s film, McGowan remains largely silent, both in scenes with the film’s producer Johnny Depp and during meetings with other characters: his wife Victoria, former radical nationalist Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, biographer Anne Scanlon and the leader of the band Primal. Scream Bobby Gillespie.

Shane Magcowan is a man who once entered show business to offer the public an alternative to the star system.

He drank his first glass of whiskey when he was five years old, smoked his first cigarette at six, after his family moved to London, he immediately began selling drugs at school and soon ended up in a mental hospital. The son of an Irish singer and an Irish writer formed The Pogues in 1982. However, he hated the very word “rock band”. And when, after three albums by The Pogues with their unique mix of punk and folk, real world fame came to them, the group found itself on the verge of self-destruction. Like many at a similar point in their history, The Pogues were unable to jump off the assembly line, which was 363 concerts a year, and at some point they simply did not understand what it was all for – they simply moved by inertia.

The band eventually split up, but Shane MacGowan continued to record until the 2010s.

He was taken to his last concerts in a wheelchair.

The scenes, directed by Julian Temple, mostly capture the frightened and detached look of a man who can barely hold his head up, his rare remarks and his laugh, similar to the hiss of a snake.

In fact, Shane MacGowan is the Irish man; it is not for nothing that people whose names have become synonymous with the “successful Irishman” – Bono from U2 and Sinead O’Connor – worshiped him. The best moments of McGowan’s biopic come when he discusses the history of his homeland, from the Easter Rising of 1916 and the British War of 1919 to the declaration of independence in 1949 and the terrorist attacks carried out by the Irish Republican Army in London in the 1980s.

Ireland is a country whose currency has become alcohol, literature and music. A country whose citizens in the 17th century were sold into slavery cheaper than black Africans. A country where two thirds of its natives live abroad. Living in the British capital, McGowan was a true patriot of his homeland to the core. He believed that he had the right to judge whether the Irishman William Butler Yeats was real, he considered himself a continuator of the literary tradition of James Joyce, and he criticized the punk activist Bob Geldof for what he was worth.

In 2010, The Pogues played their first concert in Moscow. From the first minutes of their presence on stage, it became clear that the main character and icon of world punk alcoholism, Shane MacGowan, still had the same warm relationship with alcohol in which the formation of the group found him in 1982.

Swinging his microphone, he eventually knocked over a drinks table set up right next to his work station on the proscenium. The Pogues were a band where the worse things got, the better. During one of the breaks between songs, The Pogues guitarist Phil Chevron said: “We often get asked what Shane does when he leaves the stage backstage during a concert. Right now, for example, he, as any self-respecting Irishman should, is discussing Deep Purple with the Russian president.” I wonder how often Dmitry Medvedev recalls this conversation?

Shane McGowan died in the early hours of November 30th. In December 2022, he was hospitalized with a diagnosis of viral encephalitis and spent several months of 2023 in intensive care.

“Shane will always be the light I hold before me, the measure of my dreams and the love of my life,” McGowan’s widow, Victoria Maria Clark, wrote in her obituary. I am incredibly happy that I met him, loved him and was so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him.”

Igor Gavrilov