In October 1984, the Pogues released their raucous debut album, Red Roses for Me. MacGowan might have been going to punk gigs, but he was listening to The Dubliners and The Clancy Brothers at home. Shane and The Pogues fused the filth and fury of punk with the poetic sensibilities of Irish traditional and folk music. Later on, he really surprised a lot of people with the sheer quality of his songwriting, me included.” “I always saw him around because he’s quite a distinctive figure, let’s put it that way. “I remember Shane pogoing right in front of me in the Notre Dame Hall in London,” Matlock says. Sex Pistols bassist and vocalist Glen Matlock first encountered Shane in those heady days. MacGowan’s inimitable visage first made the papers under an NME headline: “Cannibalism at Clash Gig!” After seeing The Sex Pistols in 1976, he devoted his life to music, first with the Nipple Erectors (or the Nips) and The Millwall Chainsaws, and later with The Pogues and The Popes.Īt a Clash gig, a girl reportedly bit a piece of his ear off, although it is said he was really struck by a bottle. In the late 1970s, MacGowan cut a dash on London’s nascent punk scene. It was the most mental introduction I’ve ever had to anybody.” His Mum usually sang it, but she couldn’t that night. “The first time I met Shane was singing with him onstage. “I got someone to print out the lyrics and I cycled down to Dame Street trying to read it on the way. “I know the song like everybody else, but I realised I didn’t know it well enough,” she remembers. O’Sullivan agreed to the 11th-hour request. “The only problem was they wanted me onstage in an hour.” “I was in a friend’s house in Harold’s Cross eating a Christmas pie when I got a phone call from Shane’s girlfriend Victoria, asking if I’d like to sing Fairytale of New York with The Pogues in the Olympia,” she recalls. Nick Cave’s recollection of where and when he met MacGowan might be hazy, but for Camille O’Sullivan, it was an encounter she’ll never forget. It was terrifying.” Photograph: Cyril Byrne Not easily forgotten.”Ĭamille O’Sullivan: “The first time I met Shane was singing with him onstage. Shane staring into your eyes and singing you a song was quite something, you know. I always loved his stories that would run on into the night and how the evenings would invariably end with Shane singing songs. “Almost in spite of our fractious demeanours we had romantic natures,” Cave says. While Cave and MacGowan were natural-born hellraisers back in their day, Cave thinks their friendship is grounded in something much deeper. I think we were the only two people that could put up with each other.” “God knows when I exactly first met Shane,” Nick Cave tells The Irish Times. They recorded and released a splendid cover version together of Louis Armstrong’s What a Wonderful World in 1992, but they knew each for years beforehand, memorably participating in an end-of-year NME summit together with Mark E Smith of The Fall. MacGowan and Nick Cave go back a long way. At 35, the Pogues fired him, as the band who made him famous could no longer tolerate any more of his wayward and debauched behaviour.Ī quarter of a century later, and MacGowan has a gala star-studded concert in his honour at the National Concert Hall this Monday, featuring a host of friends and collaborators, including Nick Cave, Johnny Depp (who appeared in the video for his 1994 single That Woman’s Got Me Drinking), Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, Glen Hansard (who performed A Rainy Night in Soho at former Pogues manager Frank Murray’s funeral last January), Camille O’Sullivan, Cerys Matthews, Clem Burke of Blondie, Glen Matlock of the Sex Pistols and former bandmates Cáit O’Riordain, Terry Woods, Spider Stacy and Jem Finer. Few thought Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan would live until 40, let alone celebrate his 60th birthday.
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