Shane MacGowan
Having gained underground notoriety as leader of The Nipple Erectors and The Nips in the late 70s, Shane MacGowan appeared as leader of the seven-piece Pogue Mahone - Gaelic for "Kiss My Arse" - in 1984. He edited their name but never his attitude or songwriting.
"The Pogues were formed as a band that played a mixture of Irish music, country music, rock, punk - well, rock and punk are the same to me," he once told the New York Times. "The basis was traditional Irish music. We electrified it a bit and played in rock clubs..."
On The Pogues' debut album - Red Roses For Me (1984) you can hear Shane's songwriting take its first anarchic steps, inspired by both punk rock and his heroes, Irish traditionalists like The Clancy Brothers, Christy Moore and The Dubliners.
It was the next two albums - Rum, Sodomy And The Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988) - that saw Shane MacGowan become a songwriting hero in his own right. The former boasted The Sick Bed Of Cuchulainn, A Pair Of Brown Eyes and Sally MacLennane as it's most influential pieces of 'poguetry' and was described the The LA Times as "an unexpected pleasure".
A critical favourite to this day, in June 2005, Rum, Sodomy And The Lash was awarded the MOJO Honours List 2005 Classic Album Award. Its successor, If I Should Fall From Grace With God, featured Turkish Song Of The Damned, Birmingham Six and the classic Fairytale Of New York (featuring Kirsty MacColl), a Christmas number 2 in 1988 and recently voted the best Christmas song of all-time by VH-1.
By the time the next Pogues album was ready, Shane MacGowan had as much of as name for his outrageous lifestyle as for his genius songwriting. He appeared in the NME drunkenly jamming with Nick Cave and Mark E Smith, a trio the paper found "championed and castigated for their obsessiveness and extremism... dogged by reputations that precede them." Shane bowed out of The Pogues with some moving songs, most notably White City and Down All The Days from 1989's Peace And Love and Summer In Siam, the pivotal track from Hell's Ditch (1990).
Fired from his own band, critics were quick to cite the end of Shane MacGowan but he signed to ZTT in the early 90s and immediately began writing. The first fruit of his labours was The Church of the Holy Spook , a four-track EP that appeared in August 1994.
It paved the way for his debut solo album - The Snake - which was heralded by the NME as "Kick Asp Rock & Roll." Q magazine was equally impressed: "The Snake impresses with a fierce new intensity," wrote Jimmy Nicol, "songs like Aisling and the title track see MacGowan baring his soul in a powerfully direct manner."
All of this work was performed with a new band, The Popes, a floating line-up that also saw contributions from The Dubliners and Pogues Jem Finer and Spider Stacey. "The Popes are no mugs," wrote The Guardian on witnessing them live at Fleadh in 1994, "and without fiddles and accordions, they steam through a vigorous, punky, folkabilly set."
Shane reworked The Snake the next year, adding contributions from Sinéad O'Connor and Clannad's Maire Brennan. "Ethereal" (Rolling Stone), "woozy and romantic" (Newsday ) or "Spectorian balladry" (The Washington Post). However you looked at it, Shane's duet with Sinéad, Haunted, was a classic.
Shane's second album with The Popes, The Crock of Gold was released in October 1997. It featured the singles Rock 'n' Roll Paddy and Lonesome Highway which NME found "all the more moving for it's understated desperation, and Shane's genius for writing poetry on a beer mat with the froth from his bottle of stout. I believe Wordsworth used the same method."
In December 2001, a comprehensive 21-track compilation, The Rare 'Oul Stuff drew together highlights from Shane's post-Pogues era. "His talents are as profound as the demons that haunt him," wrote Rolling Stone at the time, "and the battle between them rages on..." Perhaps only a Pogue could put it better. "He'll probably outlive us all... just to annoy us!"
