Richard Hogan: Shane MacGowan was more than a hellraiser - were we complicit in his tragic loss?

Richard Hogan. Photograph Moya Nolan

The smoke swirling up like some sort of funnelling gyre from the ashtray. A half-drunk bottle of wine. The first sounds of that piano riff. 

Enter Shane MacGowan, dragged into a police station by a fresh-faced Matt Dillion and that massive hat wobbling around on his unsteady head. 

And then his voice, like it had been warmed and cooled in the staves of a whiskey barrel for centuries. ‘It was Christmas Eve babe, in the drunk tank’. 

The dark oneiric vision from MacGowan’s mind of a couple in conflict, lost in a strange city, comes into view. Magic. Few people have said as much and touched so many with so few lines. 

Bob Dylan, the master of creating such complicated story and imagery in song, could only dream of capturing Christmas like MacGowan and The Pogues. 

While mere mortals were toiling away trying to rhyme ‘tinsel’, ‘chestnuts’ and ‘merry little Christmas’, a young Irish/English punk was busy weaving words like ‘faggot’ ‘arse’ and ‘slut’ into his particular brand of festive cheer. 

Something that has perplexed radio stations for decades and become a perennial debate on censorship since 1987. Classic MacGowan.

It’s wrapped in mystique and complexity. It’s ironic to think, that one of the most played Christmas songs in history was, as the author explained through his snarling hiss, ‘fuck you’ to Christmas. 

It is the antidote, the shot in the vein to the cloyingly sweet and maudlin sentimentality that drenches most songs this time of year. It is the anti-Christmas song, a cracked bell of broken dreams and unreached potential. 

Any attempt to cover the song is always met with derision and laughter. And rightly so. You can’t reproduce perfection. You certainly can’t censor a song that means so much to everyone. Even in this age of brute censoriousness. 

There is a timelessness to it. One of those few songs that feels like it was always with us, waiting for that right person to emerge from the wet landscape and hammer into life.

Shane MacGowan represented the Irish diaspora like no one else. The romanticism he held in his heart for Ireland, poignantly captured in melody and words. His lyrics and attitude had a direct portal to my teenage, recalcitrant heart. 

He was a punk with the sensitivity of John Keats. A unique, mercurial talent. The out pouring of grief and sympathy over the last two weeks illuminates just how much we all thought of him, and how deeply we held him in our collective hearts. Like Sinead, we wanted to protect him. 

There was a vulnerability and innocence to him, that we all saw and felt needed safeguarding. Whenever he was interviewed, I held my breath. Hoping he wouldn’t be ridiculed or condescended by the interviewer he was faced with. 

There seemed to be an incongruence, between the incoherent rambling he presented in interviews and the penetratingly pure songs he brought to life. 

Of course, it added to the mystery. But I can’t help think about the man who struggled with alcohol, the talent that was cut short because of addiction, the songs that will never be written. The life that he fought to have, and body couldn’t sustain. 

I often questioned was there a shy, sensitive soul that needed alcohol to mute those sensitivities. That seemed to me to be the gigantic elephant in the room over the last few weeks. 

It was lost in the celebrity, whose who attending the funeral. I know my own experience of growing up with a father who struggled with alcohol is influencing my perspective on his death. 

But in all the tributes that were offered over the weeks, in particular Johnny Depp regaling crowds with his wild antics with his pal, I wondered how much of Shane got caught living the romantic idea of the drunk Irish poet. 

How much of his image was cast onto him by others? We all get given labels and roles, we play out in life. Some less obvious, but Shane was quickly labelled as a raucous, hellraising frontman. Beyond social mores and accepted norms, a glass of alcohol always by his side. 

And while maybe that was some of the truth, but he was a real person who dreamed, and by all accounts was a generous, caring and loving spirit. But he was caught out on the razor's edge on limbs that ran wild, while we all observed from the comfort of our quiet lives. 

I can’t help but feel his tragic loss to alcohol. Were we all somehow complicit in it? Did he feel the pressure to be something we all expected him to be? 

The answer to that, might be an uncomfortable truth. ‘One summer evening drunk to hell/I stood there nearly lifeless’. Art echoing life. 

Few poems or songs touch me like the lyrics of that song, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’. The beauty, pureness and simplicity. The rawness of his voice, the sincerity of the words get you in the rag and bone shop of the heart. 

We have lost one of our greats and it is tragic. I almost feel like I’m betraying him by writing it, but there is nothing romantic about alcohol addiction. 

It devastates all in its orbit, and leaves the addict isolated and alone. Shane died at 65, about 20 years early, in my opinion. We will rarely see his talent again. 

‘And a rovin', a rovin', a rovin', I’ll go’.