Raw talent and masterful songwriting

Shane MacGowan once observed that “it’s a miracle every morning when you wake up” – and he was not kidding. MacGowan’s dissolute and self- destructive lifestyle – he claimed that he had never been sober since he was 14 – led doctors and concerned friends alike to tell him that unless he gave up the drink and drugs, he would not live long enough to get his bus pass. He took no notice, and not only stubbornly defied medical science to see in his 60th birthday, but revelled in his notoriety and bragged of being an “alcoholic junkie republican”.

Sinead O’Connor was so distressed by his heroin addiction that she turned police informer and had him arrested “for his own good”. The bust helped to wean him off narcotics, but his appetite for binge drinking continued unabated.

As an unlikely rock’n’roll survivor, he rivalled Keith Richards and Ozzy Osbourne – but it came at a high cost.

Bruised and bloodied, he was confined to a wheelchair after a bad fall from which his broken body never healed. Having lost all of his teeth by 2015, a documentary, Shane MacGowan: A Wreck Reborn, followed one Irish dentist as she took on the monumental task of replacing 28 dentures, which she dubbed “the Everest of dentistry”.

His indestructible legacy, though, was the songs he wrote and recorded with his band the Pogues.

He scribbled his lyrics on scraps of paper littering the floor amid the empty bottles at his King’s Cross, London flat, but the street poetry of songs such as Fairytale of New York, A Rainy Night in Soho and A Pair of Brown Eyes are as vivid and memorable as almost anything in the modern pop canon.

He sang with a permanent slur – invariably drunk by the time he went on stage, he stumbled around while swigging from a bottle, and had a disconcerting tendency to vomit mid-song. Despite such antics, at a Dublin concert to celebrate his 60th birthday, Bono, Johnny Depp, Nick Cave and Irish President Michael D Higgins all joined him on stage.

It was perhaps ironic that Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan's birth certificate recorded that he was born in Royal Tunbridge Wells, that most genteel of English towns, on Christmas Day 1957, although in truth it was an accident.

His Irish parents, Maurice and Therese MacGowan, were visiting Maurice’s sister for Christmas when Therese went into labour. After a few weeks when he was “sleeping in a drawer” in his aunt’s house, the family returned to the village of Silvermines in Tipperary, a community so cut off that there was only one bus a week to the nearest market town.

His father was an accountant. His mother, who died in a road accident on New Year’s Day 2017, was a typist and a feistily talented amateur singer. At 73, she got on stage in front of a sold-out audience in Dublin’s biggest concert hall to duet with her son on Fairytale of New York, singing “You scumbag, you maggot/You cheap lousy faggot”, a part originally taken by Kirsty MacColl on the hit record.

MacGowan grew up steeped in the twin pillars of republicanism and Catholicism. The family home in Tipperary had been a safe house from the Black and Tans during the war for Irish independence, and an uncle had been the local IRA commandant.

He suggested that if he had not been a singer, he might have become a priest. “I was a religious maniac and a total hedonist at the same time,” he said.

However, according to his younger sister Siobhan, who still lives in Silvermines, the MacGowans imbued “a fierce sense of individuality” in their offspring, and taught them “to question and think for ourselves”.

He loved his early years in Ireland, surrounded by his mother’s extended family. “It was open house – people would come around at all hours, and there would be dancing and card-playing and boozing and singing,” he recalled. “It was like living in a pub. I was smoking and drinking and gambling before I could talk.”

By the mid-1960s, he was back in the more demure environs of Tunbridge Wells, where his father became a bookkeeper at the local C&A store.

At Holmewood House prep school, an elegant country pile in the rolling Kent countryside, he came under the influence of the headmaster Bob Bairamian, who taught him classics and encouraged his precocious essay writing, which won him a scholarship to Westminster School.

Bullied for his looks and Irish accent at Westminster, he squandered his academic promise and spent his time truanting, drawn by the peep shows and strip joints to wander alone in Soho. He lasted two years before he was expelled for drug possession.

His frustrated creativity and hedonistic tendencies found a natural outlet on the London rock scene, playing in the punk band the Nipple Erectors. His Irish heritage was also a key part of his makeup, and he began to fashion an innovative fusion of punk, Irish traditional songs and rebel yells, topped off with a reckless, alcohol-fuelled bonhomie.

He honed this style as a busker, scaring the life out of commuters at Finsbury Park train station, and formed Pogue Mahone (anglicised Gaelic for “kiss my arse”). The band's debut single, Dark Streets of London, was promptly banned by BBC radio when the meaning of the name became known.

As the group’s popularity grew, so did MacGowan’s notoriety as a hard drinker, although the story that when the group signed to Stiff Records in 1984, he asked to be paid with a crate of Guinness, was a piece of clever myth-making on the part of an inventive marketing department.

Against MacGowan’s wishes, they were persuaded to change their name to the Pogues.

Hit albums such as Rum, Sodomy & the Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God combined his original and evocative compositions – often about drunks and derelicts – with roaring, alcohol-drenched versions of traditional Irish songs in an endearingly ramshackle but dynamic style that made the group favourites at rock and folk festivals alike.

As guitarist Philip Chevron put it, they looked like “a bunch of tumbledown wrecks”. At a time when Madonna and Michael Jackson were ruling the pop roost, MacGowan’s dishevelled lack of pretension was a whiskey breath of boozy, devil-maycare fresh air.

Scrapes and incidents followed him wherever he went. To the gossip columns of a dirt-hungry media, his every ravaged excess was enthusiastically welcomed as X-rated copy, whether breaking an arm when he drunkenly fell into the path of a taxi after leaving a London restaurant, or

spitting on posters of Margaret Thatcher in the video for the Pogues’ hit A Pair of Brown Eyes.

Abrilliant collaboration with the Dubliners on The Irish Rover gave the Pogues a Top 10 single in 1987, but even better was that same year’s Fairytale of New York.

The song was the perfect encapsulation of MacGowan's writing strengths. Poignant and romantic yet brutally honest (“It was Christmas Eve, babe/In the drunk tank/ An old man said to me, ‘Won’t see another one’/And then he sang a song”), it was the festive song for those who cannot abide festive songs.

It should have been the Christmas No 1 but lost out to the Pet Shop Boys. No matter. Re-released annually, Fairytale of New York charts again every Christmas and has become Britain’s most-played Christmas song of the 21st century, ahead of songs by Slade and John Lennon.

Fairytale of New York was the high water mark of the Pogues’ commercial success - and thereafter, MacGowan’s drinking, once the source of the band’s roguish appeal, became a serious threat to its stability, as his performances vacillated wildly between the inspired and the incoherent.

In 1988, he collapsed at Heathrow Airport as the Pogues were flying to America for the biggest tour of their career, supporting Bob Dylan. They played on without him, and when he returned to the fray it was never the same again.

He was fired from the band in 1991, after his binge drinking on a tour of Japan rendered him incapable of taking the stage.

He re-emerged with a new group, the Popes, whose debut album featured Depp

on guitar. However, the band were grounded when MacGowan fell off a bar stool and broke his hip while shooting a beer commercial. He later reunited with the Pogues until “we got a bit sick of each other again”.

Those tasked with interviewing him deserved danger money.

When Lynn Barber profiled him for The Observer in 2001, he plied her with gin and tonics for six hours, then tried to talk her into being the getaway driver while he and a friend robbed a bank. She eventually made her way to her hotel room “completely blotto”. When she came down for breakfast the next morning, he was still sitting at the bar.

He met his long-term partner, Victoria Mary Clarke, in 1982, when she was 16. She wrote a biography of him – inevitably titled A Drink With Shane MacGowan – and made Sharon Osbourne, wife of Ozzy, her role model in attempting to keep her wayward partner out of trouble.

She did not always succeed, and on several occasions thought she had lost him for good.

On one occasion in New Orleans, he went drinking on Bourbon Street, and when he was not seen again for 48 hours, she reported him missing. The police were getting ready to check the dumpsters when he turned up in the lobby of the wrong hotel, asking for the key to his room.

After three decades together, they married in 2018 at a quiet ceremony in Copenhagen attended by Depp, who sang at their reception. “She's probably the only reason I’m alive,” MacGowan said.