It is June and the Pogues and I are all travelling along in a big green tour bus to another gig. All, that is, except for Shane McGowan, who is teleporting somewhere off the milky seas of Venus as I attempt to interview him in the rear of the tour coach where he sits, alone in all his ruin, not so much removed from the rest of the band as utterly dislocated from the straight world in general. His eyes are mad, conspiratorial beacons and his thoughts are cluttered and half-digested.
‘Are you wired for sound?’ he keeps asking me, until it isn’t even remotely amusing anymore and yet he’s still ogling me with that totally meaningful look acid heads give you when they’re saying something totally meaningless. ‘No, Shane, but you’re wired for life!’ a roadie indulgently ripostes.
It is an appropriate rejoinder just as the condition it indicates is not altogether unexpected. But it’s frustating and a little disheartening to witness because, in between those moments when his brain isn’t being swamped out by some oppressive agent of stupefaction, it’s clear Shane McGowan has something he wants to tell me. So why do you think you have to torment yourself with all this drinking and drugging you do, I ask him.
He once more laughs his trademark ‘Kssshh’ laugh, the sound of a portable toilet flushing itself. ‘I don’t take drugs to torment myself- ksshh-h-h. I’ve already got life to do that for me!’
But how do you feel when everybody sits you down and lectures you about being too out of it?
‘I try my best to hold my temper, that’s what I do. S’none of their fuckin’ business what I fuckin’ do to myself, right?’
Yes, but good God, man, youVe got, whether you think this way or not, youVe got a God-given talent that, the way you carry on, you’re suffocating as much as you’re expressing. Don’t you think you owe that talent the option of something approaching sobriety if only in order to allow yourself to grasp the nettle of its full potential, so to speak.
‘I’ve been straight,’ he retorts a touch petulantly, ‘well, not like recently, kssshhh! But I’ve done all that.’
And it didn’t work?
‘Nah, it worked perfectly. ’Cos it proved to me once and for all that I never wanted to be that way ever again. If I could help it . . . I don’t believe in the fuckin’ work ethic. This “work is what life’s all about” shit is just a bunch of bollocks, it’s just a fuckin’ English bourgeois guilt trip invented by the fuckin’ English bourgeoisie to keep people in line, y’know, like a bunch of happy fuckin’ slaves. Bourgeois guilt means fuckin’ nothin’ to me.
‘Now, Catholic guilt, I can, like, relate to that. When I was a kid, I was very religiously minded. I’d be down at the confessional talking to God with my rosary . . . [Ardently] I was a good Catholic boy. I believed. This is all like before I was put in this fuckin’ mental hospital in Dublin. That taught me a thing or two, right? They put me in to try and get me off these Valium this fuckin’ doctor had put me on when I was sixteen. The bastard put me on eighty fuckin’ milligram a day, right, and after a year they reckoned you have fits if you just stop, which I quickly found out is true. So they put me in there, right, and I’m next door to some poor junkie bastard who’s detoxing and screamin’ for his fix, right, while on the other side there’s some old man who’s screaming all night every night ’cos he keeps reliving his mother dying, which happened, like, thirty years before all this. And I didn’t know what the fuck was going on or why I was in there, right? I was really, really terrified. Seeing and hearing all that fuckin’ horror and misery changed a lot of things for me, right. Taught me a lot. Like the word “mad”! That word doesn’t have any fuckin’ meaning for me. In this life, some people are just less mad than others. That’s all.’
Many people still call Shane McGowan another beautiful loser, but he’s never been a beauty and neither, all desperate appearances to the contrary, is he a loser. Rather, he’s a loser who chose to lose and came up winning more than he ever dared dream. The severity of that contradiction haunts him, but then McGowan’s whole life is shot through with raging contradictions. He is extremely shy yet makes his living standing stupified and being stared at by thousands at a time. He is extremely bright and perceptive but seems to do everything in his power to bury these characteristics behind as much grimy sensory deprivation as he can muster. Stupefaction seems his only defence and intoxication his muse, yet his best songs betray a depth, a longing and a clarity that mock those tawdry implications.
He is obviously ensnared in the grand romance of his Celtic heritage, but his manner and bearings are all those of the London wide-boy punk. Certainly, as traditions go, he has a rare talent for mixing the Byronic with the moronic.
Still he’s always been true to his vision. His notoriety as one of 1977’s seminal punk faces is all a matter of public record now. The first time I saw him that year he looked like he’d already been a member of the ‘count me out’ generation probably from since before he could count. A few months later I remember we had a barney that stopped just short of blows; this was just after my immortal spat with Sid Vicious, mind, and I was fair prey to every ‘aspiring young psychopath’ in club-land who wanted a quick mention in the weekly music comics. He wasn’t physically threatening (nor was he – or is he – genuinely psychopathic, certain appearances to the contrary), but he was on so much speed he was shaking and his eyes had an unnervingly demented quality to them. At that moment I needed him berating me like I needed cancer. We enjoyed a very singular relationship after that. For what must have been eight years I’d see him once a month in some crowded sweaty room, always half-cut (but then so was I usually) and we’d just scowl at each other wordlessly from our different foetid corners. As the years elapsed his appearance grew increasingly bedraggled and his mouth lost most of its teeth, but his compulsive appetites seemed only to harden – as apparently did his constitution, to that of a horse. It was obvious too that the persona he adopted took a lot of its cues from his hero Robert De Niro’s great lost boys, characters like Johnny Boy and the patron saint of the whole seventies psycho-chic experience, Travis Bickle. A friend who provided sanctuary for Shane after he’d been run over by a taxi cab in Westbourne Grove told me that he used to recite De Niro’s dialogue from Once Upon a Time in America every night in his sleep. From the first days of the Pogues’ formation, six years ago, people have been giving him no more than six months to live, just as his consistently besotted condition on and off stage blinkered many to view the group as nothing more than one long mangled advertisement for alcoholic oblivion. On a bad night they had a point, but on a good night, when everything connected, stupefaction would be alchemized into blinding fury and the Pogues would rage with riveting abandon, irrepressible and justifiably unstoppable.
‘It’s all in the bollocks where Irish music and rock music meet each other. The centre of gravity – the bollocks. Rage, anger, desire and all that shit.’ That’s how he summed up the Pogues’ mangled essence only last year. He’d used much the same analogy when I first interviewed him in 1986. I still remember two things about that evening. Firstly how, once he’d rid himself of his initial doubts, he spontaneously transformed his whole stance from the habitual dull-eyed, slack-jawed Shane McGowan stupor into a state of dauntingly focused and learned articulacy. The second image was quite different, however more appropriately ‘hellish’. At four in the morning we’d trooped out to King’s Cross, where McGowan, dressed only in a T-shirt, jeans and ragged bedroom slippers (and this was mid-January, mark you, brutally cold), purchased a bun wedged only with grease and copious onion rings then handed out the rest of his wealth in bank notes and loose silver to three beleaguered-looking tramps clumped haphazardly around the makeshift hut that sold refreshments and cigarettes to the area’s destitutes and insomniacs. As he was dispensing his booty, a solitary one pence coin dropped from his pocket and rolled into the gutter. Instantaneously he followed its descent, throwing himself down on to the cold, dank concrete sewer and crawling on all fours, his eyes stricken with the mad wallowing frenzy of those whose lives are one long exercise in seeing just how far and how low they can keep going.
Now take a picture of this. Shane McGowan has a vision he wants to share with me. ‘Young white psychopaths, young black psychopaths, young Paki psychopaths, young gay psychopaths – all fuckin’ races and creeds together on Ecstasy right, dancin’ in a line like the fuckin’ conga really connectin’ . . . This great fuckin’ swamp of humanity . . . Kssshhh!’
Twelve years after McGowan’s summer of punk he was back in a ‘rest home’ again, though some refer to it as a health farm, summoned there at either the group or his family’s instigation (or both), only to resurface in London in time to hurl himself headlong and screaming into the sensory wilderness of acid house. It was fuckin’ great, acid house. Well, the music’s bollocks in a way – but no, some of it’s good. No, really! You got to be on Ecstasy or acid to listen to it, of course, ksshhh! But that’s no fuckin’ different from punk and all the speed you had to take to listen to that, right.’
It was to prove a nightmare bender for everyone else, however. ‘Shane is extremely shy and self-conscious, extremely bright, extremely intense and obsessive,’ an acquaintance once remarked. ‘The ugly things about life that everyone else hold at arm’s length he kind of feels he has to madly embrace. As a result his defences are much lower than other people’s and it’s always made his whole personality a little bit fractured. And acid has only probably helped magnify those fractures.’
The Pogues would go further than that. ‘Yer man McGowan on acid . . . eight or nine tabs at a time, every day . . . One big fockin’ nightmare,’ remarked manager Frank Murray. ‘It was terrible him out his head on acid in the studio. He was bein’ impossible, gettin’ into a couple of big bust-ups with Steve [Lillywhite]. Tryin’ to get him to finish the fockin’ lyrics to a new song, y’know, was bad enough. Then he couldn’t sing properly some days.’ As a result sessions overran by an extra month (at a thousand pounds a day) in order that McGowan’s vocals be ‘suitably’ recorded. And he lobbied in vain to get the Pogues to record a twenty-minute acid house track he’d written entitled ‘You’ve Got to Connect Yourself’.
‘We had to tell him right there,’ claims Murray, ‘Shane, man, keep that fockin’ acid house for yer solo album.’
Murray, certain idle gossips have indicated, has perhaps done McGowan’s compulsive nature no favours by committing him and the rest of the Pogues to such an arduous work regime these past few years. These criticisms, however, simply don’t take the facts into account, as McGowan’s self-destructive tendencies only magnify when he has no regimented workload to half-way stabilize him. Trying to manage such a wayward individual, though particularly over the last year, has often brought Murray close to the end of his tether. And right now no one in the organization seems quite to be able to gauge what’s really going on in the back of Shane McGowan’s mind, whether his bent for stubborn petulance and general ‘out-there’-ness is an indication of some frivolous ‘altered state’ or the more deep-seated manifestation of a craving to hasten his own imminent retirement from the front line of Pogue-dom.
For their part, other members make no bones about publicly expressing their discontent over McGowan’s condition. ‘Enough people have tried to get through to him,’ bassist Darryl Hunt told me. ‘Nick Cave tried recently, he was being gentle about it but the message was clear. And Ali Campbell just last week on the coach’ – the Pogues have been supporting UB40 at various European stadium gigs – ‘really lit into him. “You’re pathetic, you know that! Why are you always such a miserable cunt? You never talk to anyone! You never fuckin’ socialize. You just sit in the back of the bus quietly fuckin’ yourself up!” Sometimes it registers and sometimes it doesn’t.’
Six weeks before had been a red-letter day for the Pogues, a day when the world’s most ostensibly dissolute band had to read the riot act to one of their own. McGowan, tripped on an alarmingly pronounced dosage of acid, had been impossible to communicate with, from the sound check, which he’d performed with his coat over his head, to the gig itself, where in front of ten thousand he’d stumbled about, continually interrupting his vocal performances to relocate his portable off licence or converse with other galaxies.
‘Altered states . . . Yeah! Kssshh,’ he remarks, grinning manically, his mouth a veritable dental graveyard. ‘See, I’m a hedonist, right.’
This is scarcely a major revelation. I ask him if intoxication really is his only muse (‘I’ve got to be out of my head in order to write,’ he’d told a journalist only three months before) and he immediately rejects the word ‘muse’: ‘’Cos, like, it infers that the songs I write sort of come through me. And that’s bollocks, mostly. Songwriting’s a craft, that’s all. Like, a lot of people analyse my lyrics but they miss the fuckin’ point. I always knew my lyrics were better than anyone else’s anyway. I just edit more than other people, that’s my fuckin’ secret. Constant fuckin’ re-editing. Also I never sleep and that helps too. You’ve got more time that way, right.’
So are you really just another of those ‘life is shit and then you die’ type of guys?
‘Nah, I hate that. Life is great. This is a beautiful world, y’know. It’s all here. This is where you get to experience heaven and hell . . . Heaven? Heaven is Thailand, OK. Kssshhh . . . A blinding civilization full of strong, gentle, good-hearted people with suss, right. A noble race of people, an easy-going race of people a lot like the Irish before the fuckin’ British soldiers occupied their country. The fuckin’ Yanks never went near ’em, right. Thailand’s an undefeated country, right. And, like, everyone smokes opium, right, but it’s cool. It’s all part of the scheme of things.
‘Where do these drugs come from? From plants right, growing out of the fuckin’ ground. If God didn’t mean us to take drugs he wouldn’t have created them in the first place. I don’t go for all this bollocks about “sin”. Evil is torturin’ other people, not yourself, right. I believe in reincarnation. And the laws of kharma.
You do wrong and it comes back to haunt you in your next life. Then after youVe come back over and over again your spirit is finally put to rest and shunted out into the fuckin’ void. And that really is heaven.’
And where is hell?
‘Hell’, he shoots back, indicating his immediate surroundings, ‘is all this.’
Though he admits to being ‘very, very unhappy’ at the moment, press him on whether he really wants to retire from the Pogues or not and he seems uncertain, if not a little shame-faced. He talks about ‘commitments I can’t turn my back on. There are, like, fifteen blokes depending on me in this organization and whether I personally get on with most of them or not is like beside the point. We’re still comrades.’
‘So where’s Mr Magoo then?’ It is seven and the Pogues are in the lobby waiting for Shane to join them for the gig tonight.
‘He’s in his room rubbing wintergreen into his girlfriend,’ retorts James Fearnley.
‘He’s looking for his third eye,’ pipes in Jem Finer.
‘No, he’s polishing his third eye, looking for his fourth eye.’
You can’t blame them for their barbs too much because in 1989 the image of the Pogues as a bunch of drunken yahoos is, barring McGowan and his bosom buddy Spider Stacey (oddly subdued this day), really a thing of the past. Everyone’s past thirty now, some nearer forty, and consequently they’ve become more professional, less abuse-conscious, more into pacing themselves. What started out as just a good crack has developed into a lucrative vocation. They tour the world in comfort, play to appreciative often adoring masses and then have heroes like Lou Reed and Tom Waits wanting to come up and shake their hands after the show. Is it any wonder they find it so frustrating to work with a frontman who spends half his life in conditions that constantly threaten to jeopardize their very future?
Later, on the coach, Philip Chevron remarks that ‘being around one person who obviously overdoes it can make everyone else sort of question their own vices. . . Shane is obviously irreplaceable to the Pogues, but then so is everyone else in this band. I still believe that if anyone needs to take an extended break from the group we can accommodate that . . . People seem to think that if Shane wasn’t involved in the Pogues he’d be more stable or something. But that’s really a fantasy. He’s never lived a normal life and he probably never will. It’s too late for him to start now.’
The gig is neither splendid nor is it particularly disastrous, but that isn’t the point. The band is seethingly professional (no small thanks to their rhythm section) but the mythic ‘bollocks’ factor seems absent tonight. Shane for his part manages to hang in with the rest while seeming to be forever out of step, like a sleepwalker almost. He doesn’t seem quite connected and only comes alive when he purposefully falls on to the stage twice in the middle of dancing a mutated Irish gig. Without him there, though, the conclusion is obvious: the Pogues would still be hugely entertaining but they would also be quite ‘irrelevant’.
Whatever happens next is anyone’s guess. ‘There’s a limit to everything,’ he stated ominously last year before describing the Pogues experience as ‘educational . . . The education of a young suicide.’ Still, there’s another way of looking at this life, I suppose. For, like Frank Sinatra, Shane McGowan has done it his way and what he has already achieved is to provide an authentic and stirring body of work for all the poor outcasts too sensitive or maladjusted to compete with all the grasping bullshit of the eighties to harken to. Just for the bare facts of what he and his success represents in Great Britain he will probably be remembered as the very stuff of Margaret Thatcher’s worst nightmares.
But he is doomed. ‘I don’t see it as any fuckin’ tragedy, my life. Everyone thought I’d be a failure and a liability.’ And he can still be spotted on the same dark London streets at night dispensing great bundles of ‘dosh’ to the tramps and destitutes who litter his path. ‘It’s not, like, a ritual though,’ he reasons. ‘I do it so they’ll leave me alone . . . But also because I’m very, very aware, right, that there but for the grace of God go I. I’m just lucky. ’Cos I’m no different from them. I just get to behave like they do in front of 24,000 people, that’s all.’