You’re a bum/You’re a punk/You’re an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed/
You scumbag, you maggot/ You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas your arse/I pray God it’s our lastPogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’
A Drink with Shane MacGowan is not a look at traditional Irish music unless your idea of that genre stretches a lot farther than mine! Rather, this is noted hell-raiser Shane MacGowan, Pogues lead vocalist and a man who has known many a bar floor up close and personal. The long-awaited biography — or at least that’s what the publicist for the publishing company thinks. Me guess is that no one was all that eager for this sloppy, self-indulgent non-memoir.
Here’s a sample from it…
And I thought I’d never have another bottle of whiskey in my pocket. But that’s the way you think when you’re a kid. A bit like an animal. I hoarded it, but then one day I said, ‘What the fuck!’ I drank it in the middle of the day, and I went out in the farmyard, and the geese started talking to me. They were just talking gobbledygook, but I was thinking gobbledygook, know what I mean?! I was out of my fucking brains. I had one belt and I went, ‘God almighty!!!’ … I got a fantastic rush! And then I went, ‘Fucking hell!’ and had the rest of it. And got another fantastic rush! I think they all thought I’d gone a bit loopy, ‘cos however drunk I was, I couldn’t say that I’d just had some whiskey, and that I’d got it off Tom. I wasn’t that sort of kid. That’s why he bought it for me, he wouldn’t have bought it if he thought I’d split on him. But the farmyard animals were talking to me, and I was talking back to them. And my Uncle John actually showed some interest in something, for once. He was carting a bucket across the yard, and he sort of looked at me, and he said, ‘What the fuck!?!?’ I think he sussed it out actually, you know. Well, I was laughing my head off for hours. I remember that really vividly, the first time I got drunk on whiskey.
Shane drunk? Bleedin’ fuckin’ surprise! I went to see him four times before I actually saw him as he was too drunk, and most likely stoned out of his head, to actually perform the first three times. He was brilliant when I finally saw him.
What this book is is a series of rambling Joycean conversations (Ulysses without the intelligence) that Victoria Mary Clarke, apparent longtime girlfriend of MacGowan, has put in printed form without — as near as I can tell — any editing at all. Throw in photos — some of Shane, who’s not cute in any way ‘tall, and some of Victoria, who’s very cute — and you’ve got a book. Sure — like bleedin’ hell you do! There’s more to him than alcoholism & toothlessness, but you won’t get that here, as this book’s virtually unreadable. It might be amusing if I’d imbibed three pints of stout, but reasonably sober, it was boring as hell. Despair not — if you want to read ’bout Shane and the Pogues, go to American Book Exchange and get a copy of Ann Scanlon’s superbly written The Pogues: The Lost Decade.
As I said in me review of that book: “…read The Pogues: The Lost Decade if you’re a fan of the Pogues, but those who should really read it are those interested in how the never-ending folk process stays alive. For like it or not, the Pogues did a fuckin’ brilliant job of kicking folk in its ever so fat arse and making the lazy old sod get back on its feet! We should all down a pint or three of Guiness to the lads, for we all owe them for their addition to the Irish music genre.”
Get a copy of this book and find a copy of Poguetry — The Lyrics of Shane MacGowan. The two books will tell you far more ’bout the man and the band than this piece of shit will!
(Macmillian, 2001)
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