After winning a scholarship to the prestigious Westminster School in London,MacGowan struggled to fit in and was expelled two years later for drug use,and started hanging out in London bars with other musicians.
At 17 his alcohol and drug use helped trigger a mental breakdown and he was kept in a psychiatric hospital for six months.
After recovering he embraced the eruption of punk in London in the late 1970s and early ’80s.
Following a fad for fusions of traditional music from around the world,MacGowan started screaming Irish ballads over distorted guitars,setting up a band called Pogue Mahone – Gaelic for “kiss my arse”.
Immense talents
The band,which later shortened its name to the Pogues,released their debut album in 1984,catching the attention of the British music press with its irreverent lyrics about drinking and fighting with penniless Irish immigrants on the streets of London.
But it was the songA Pair of Brown Eyes on their 1985 follow-up album – the Elvis Costello-producedRum Sodomy&the Lash – that demonstrated MacGowan’s immense talents as a songwriter,a song that paved the way for later classics such asA Rainy Night in Soho andSummer in Siam.
The Clash’s Joe Strummer,who later played with the Pogues and briefly replaced MacGowan as lead singer,described MacGowan at the time as a visionary,a poet and “one of the finest writers of the century”.
The height of the Pogues’ success came in 1987 withFairytale of New York,which MacGowan sang in a duet with Kirsty MacColl to create an instant Christmas classic,despite radio-unfriendly lyrics in which the estranged couple exchange insults.
After a series of hallucinogenic benders,including one night in New Zealand when he stripped naked and painted himself blue,the Pogues fired MacGowan during a 1991 tour of Japan.
Following a decade with a new band,the Popes,MacGowan and the Pogues reunited and toured regularly until 2014.
In 2018 singers Bono,Nick Cave and Sinead O’Connor,Sex Pistols bassist Glen Matlock and actor Johnny Depp joined MacGowan on stage in the refined surroundings of Dublin’s National Concert Hall for a show to celebrate his 60th birthday.
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Irish President Michael D. Higgins bowed his head in admiration of the wheelchair-bound MacGowan as he presented him with the venue’s lifetime achievement award.
“I regard Shane as easily the best lyric writer of our generation,” Cave,also a close friend of MacGowan’s,toldThe Guardian shortly after the concert. “He has a very natural,unadorned,crystalline way with language. There is a compassion in his words that is always tender,often brutal,and completely his own.”
Reuters
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