All played an instrument or sang, and if you were on the run, for Republican activities let’s say, they would

perennial, but that’s when Clarke announces she has to leave to pick up her vintage Mercedes, which broke down an hour previously.

For the first time there is real fear in MacGowan’s glassy, grey-blue eyes. “You’re not going to help me with this guy?” he asks, pleadingly. When she confirms that she will indeed leave to meet the man from the AA, he turns to me and asks, really quite gently: “Can you roll me a joint?”

After a while he opens up about how music and drink have shaped the course of his life. It started in childhood, when his extended family would sing Irish rebel songs during family holidays at the cottage in Nenagh.

“My aunts, uncles, grand aunts, grand uncles all played an instrument or sang, and if you were on the run, for Republican activities let’s say, they would hide you. We would hide you.” He lets out his famous death rattle of a laugh, which brings to mind an old radiator being bled of trapped air. “We did a lot of drinking, singing and card playing with those IRA guys. I remember a guy called Paddy. He got really pissed one night and then he said he was off to do a bombing or a shooting or whatever. Everyone went, ‘Ah, don’t listen to him, he’s making it up.’ He was killed a few weeks later.”

MacGowan says he discovered drinking at age 4. By 8 he was conducting conversations with the farmyard animals after getting hold of a bottle of whisky. “I couldn’t wait to grow up. I went to the pub when I was a kid. My uncle, who looked after the farm, would bring me bottles of Guinness from the boozer. I would drink them very slowly as the night went on and feel better and better.”

MacGowan is really a London Irishman and the Pogues are a band born of the London Irish experience. His parents moved to Kent before he was born and he even had a spell at the establishment hotbed Westminster School, although he got chucked out in his second year after being caught with cannabis. In London he

The cover of the Pogues album If I Should Fall from Grace with God, which featured Fairytale of New York. A Ralph Steadman animation of a dream Shane MacGowan had in a Wellington hotel. discovered punk, and the Pogues got together in 1982.

The early days of the Pogues were fantastic, he says. Each day brought something they had never done before. “Everything was exciting. The first time we stayed in a hotel and discovered room service – that was exciting… But going around America got to be a real drag.”

What was the worst of it? “Running out of booze and drugs.” The bleeding radiator laugh sounds as if it is spitting water everywhere. “Once Fairytale got big it was really boring and you get real sick of it. You’re walking out on stage and they’re applauding like mad before you’ve done anything, yeah? It gets frightening. We did loads of bad gigs, most of them in the States.”

Things took a turn for the worse in 1985 when Cait O’Riordan, the Pogues’ original bassist, got romantically involved with Elvis Costello. “It was quite repulsive, actually. Elvis Costello was screwing her on a rickety sofa in the recording studio and he was really fat, so it was horrible. She had to leave the group to marry Elvis, which really pissed me off. I liked his very early stuff, but by then he was putting out shit.”

I suggest to MacGowan that things tend to get boring around the time people lose their inspiration.

“Lots of people just run out of time. Their number is up. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the list is endless. A lot of rock stars become assholes, but the most amazing one I ever met was Lou Reed. He was really smart.” He was also the most unpleasant person I have ever interviewed. “Yeah, but I’m not a reporter so he was a real gent to me. I have that tendency with reporters too, but if it gets your name and photograph in the papers then there’s no such thing as bad press.”

That’s when I realise that, for all his chaos and truculence, MacGowan is a classic diva. He loves attention, good or bad. Clarke returns and with her by his side he’s sufficiently relaxed to tell some hilariously indiscreet stories, such as the time they rented Bono’s house on the Dublin coast, right next to a railway line.

“Bono put in a glass roof and wall,” MacGowan says. “I used to wave my willy at the train as it passed and hope that they thought it was Bono’s.”

“Bono was very patient,” Clarke says. “We had the police round all the time because Shane kept setting off the alarm. Eventually he asked us to move out.”

An hour or so later we head out to a restaurant in a nearby hotel with MacGowan’s nurse who is working hard to get him to do the physiotherapy that could get him walking again. That’s where, after battling to make an extremely stoic Ukrainian waitress understand that he wants an entire bottle of rosé and not just a glass, he takes his napkin, folds it carefully into a square, and puts it underneath his plate. Clarke asks him why he did it.

“Because he did it,” he says, pointing at me, although I didn’t. “He seems like a polite person who knows what to do about table manners.”

“You got him stoned,” the nurse says to me. “He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

The bleeding radiator laugh explodes all over the restaurant.

“My aunts, uncles, grand aunts, grand uncles