MacGowan, MacGowan, MacGone.

Shane MacGowan was buried yesterday. They say he died last week but he really died a long time ago, like Elvis when he joined the army (or so said John Lennon), though I can’t imagine any army finding a use for poor Shane. And then he was buried. Fast, the Irish way. The Irish don’t like to hold on to their corpses. Perhaps they want them gone before someone finds out something they shouldn’t, or in case pretending to be dead is someone’s idea of a good craic gone rotten. Buried in Shane’s coffin, along with his frightfully withered and wasted body was a reputation so vast you could be forgiven for thinking he had been a demi-god. A genius. A colossus of modern music. He could, after all, count Johnny Depp as a fan and what more would you want than that? Watching the crowds gathering in Dublin to join the funeral procession, the Irish way, one got a distinct impression that this was a man who really did straddle the world, when in blunt fact all he ever seemed to do was straddle a great big hole in the ground; the hole he would eventually fill. Never has a man so doomed lived so long and to such misguided acclaim. Never has the walking dead done such a second-rate impression of still being alive.

Some artists are undervalued and some the opposite. I don’t wish to get into a fight with a single MacGowan fan but now he’s safely under the topsoil I’d like to suggest that he was at the least a little bit overrated and at the most massively so. And I know this is true because I know that for every someone who reads this and loves Shane MacGowan and his music, if not his habits, there will be rather substantial handful of someone else’s who couldn’t care less. To the vast majority of the world he only ever released one well known song – Fairytale Of New York – and that’s been played so often for one month of every year that, personally, I’m sick to back teeth of it and have been for more than a while. Maybe it was good one day, a long time ago, but now it feels like another blunted pebble on a very long and pebbly beach. The hip choice in a genre that has very little of hip to speak glowingly about. Nothing too special; the sort of song that people only like when they’re drunk. I’d actually rather listen to Shakin’ Stevens at Christmas. More or less.

Go on then. Name another Shane MacGowan song. Ok then, name another song by The Pogues. Didn’t think so. Because unless you love MacGowan or The Pogues you’ll have virtually no reason to listen to them, except for at Christmas. Instead, tragically, though not entirely so, most people watching the news last week will have just dredged their personal history to remember a man with apocalyptic teeth and rotting fingertips slurring his way through life and song in an ever-failing attempt to quench a thirst that could never be quenched in a mortal life. Here was a man that became famous more for being a very thirsty soul than he did for his gifts as a songwriter and, by apparent default as an Irishman, poet. Somewhere in tragedy, with the faint whiff of a memory of long since departed triumph – that’s the space where Shane MacGowan curled up. But in death the devil plays his tricks, and some are remembered for what they hadn’t been, not what they were. I hope that’s how it goes for me too, but I’m not Irish and I’m not too lucky either.

So we’ve lost Ireland’s great rogue poet. It’s the poet that he’ll be remembered for by the diehard fans. The fans who lined the streets of Dublin yesterday and the fans who leapt up amongst his family and, under the watchful eye of the deeply uncool Johnny Depp, danced at the end of his funeral service to, you guessed it, Fairytale Of New York. Thank goodness they played that one because at least everyone would have known nearly half the words. They sang Dirty Old Town outside too, and just to emphasise the point that Shane MacGowan had his hand (if not in lyric and tune) in as many as three memorable songs, they probably had a go at The Irish Rover as well. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against MacGowan or Irish music but when he died I could understand the outpouring of grief but less so the admiration. It’s probably the usual: it’s just my ignorance, but I do often find it hard to appreciate the poetry of a man when he’s permanently half-cut and I can’t understand a word he’s saying. It’s very likely an Irish thing, and they do say we all have a bit of Irish in us, but I didn’t realise quite how many sycophants that extended to. He’ll be glad to be done at the bar, old Shane. It was time for a break. It had been for a break for a long time. Maybe it was never anything more than a break to start with. Rarely has such a big reputation been built on such slender foundations. That’s his luck, I imagine. The luck of the Irish.

G B Burton. 09.12.2023