TO THE CASUAL OBSERVER, Shane MacGowan seems to have had a particularly rough old time of it these last few years. Not all of it was self-inflicted. In April he was beaten up in the toilets of a Belgravia pub. His (male) assailant would later claim that MacGowan had offered him money for sex, and so he'd duly pommelled the singer in the face with a scaffolding buckle, fracturing his cheekbone and knocking out two of his few remaining teeth. "He could easily have killed me," said MacGowan. 'He didn't because I've got the luck of the devil, even though I'm a God-fearing man, sheeeksle-shekselk..." Here he emitted the infamous MacGowan laugh, a sibilant, saliva-drenched hiss which at that particular juncture recalled an asthmatic gargling gravel. In August, a 23-year-old scaffolder was imprisoned for three years for the assault. "I didn!t have to grass him up, and I wouldn't have. Why not? That's just the way I am."
There was another rumpus in 2001, around the publication of A Drink With Shame MacGowan. It's an autobiography of sorts, in the form of transcripts of conversations between MacGowan and his long-term girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke. As we might surmise from the title, it gave plenty of detail on his extra-curricular activities, from barstool to Borstal and back... Well, from drinking two bottles of stout a night (aged five), to a drug- enforced exit from Westminster public school, to Tower Hamlets juvenile court, to a psychiatric hospital (aged 17), to St John Of God's, "a loony bin for alcoholic nutters in Dublin" (in 1988), to another nervous breakdown when his last album came out (in 1997). There was also plenty about literature, religion, Irish Republicanism, and a fair amount of bile for the rest of The Pogues. It was very entertaining. If not wholly reliable. 'It's not a biography," he would backtrack in 2003. 'It's just a garbled bunch of tapes of me out of my brain's talking to my missus, yeah?"
In November 199, the long-running rumours of his death came perilously close to being accurate. Sinead O'Connor shopped him to the police, so concerned was she at his Class A drug habits - six months previously, a friend of his had died at his then-home in Hampstead from a cocaine overdose. After a lifetime of indulgence MacGowan had, in the manner of Charlie Watts, come to heroin late in life. 'I love Shane and it makes me angry to see him destroy himself," O'Connor was quoted as saying in The Sun. MacGowan shot back that he would see her in court, "on three counts [of] defamation of character... One, she said I was an addict; two, that I was skint; and three, that I was incapable of functioning at any level. That's just rubbish, so I'm suing her." He never did. (O'Connor declined to con- tribute to this story.)
So far, so good for headlines... but what about the music? It's been 13 years since he was kicked out of the Pogues, and seven since he released an album (The Crock Of Gold, made with post-Pogues band The Popes). MacGowan has been talking about a new set of songs called Twentieth Century Paddy for ages now, describing it as 'the most political one yet. It's the story of the 20th century... and I'm gonna use the RTE Orchestra..." He still hasn't recorded it, no doubt in part because he is "between record deals". Although he did claim in the summer that it was coming soon and would feature Johnny Depp on guitar. The actor had played on the first Popes record, The Snake, and the pair had renewed their acquaintance during the recent filming of a new Depp film called The Libertine, a 17th century romp in which MacGowan stretched himself by playing a "drunken minstrel".'Then, a few months back there was the unusual case of a single released to raise money for the Motor Neurone Disease Fund. A "triple A-side", the CD featured MacGowan, Celtic legend Jimmy Johnstone (who suffers from the disease), Jim Kerr of Simple Minds and John McLaughlin, a Scottish pop songwriter who was involved with Busted in the early days. Welcom
e, then, to MacGowan's World: a scary, slightly seedy demimonde lit by fading glory and the light bouncing off the optics. It's a strange place he's come to. A place not many dare enter, few would even begin to comprehend, and from which no-one save Shane would emerge alive. A place, you might say, of unfulfilled promise and talent squandered. But now, in late 2004, it seems like he's been thrown a lifeline.
WHY DO A reunion? Shane MacGowan (46): "Money, cackle." Spider Stacey (45): "Filthy lucre. That's always a good reason. Been three years since the last one. It's not the sort of thing you want to keep doing all the time - it starts to lose its allure. But every now and again..."
James Fearnley (50): "I've lived with these guys in my head since I was in my twenties. I dream about Shane the same amount as I dream about my dad. He's just one of those figures you can't get shot of And nothingæs riding on it, nothing's happening next."
Terry Woods (56): "To be honest, I'd like it ifthe Pogues did some more work. When we got together three years ago the reaction was so good, and people were genuinely interested. That kinda surprised me. Some bands have their sell-by-date - some manage to come back years later to good effect. But [with] most bands, when it stops, it stops. We've been lucky in that we obviously meant a lot to a lot of people. Although I'd never go back to the way it used to be -Jeez, it was like being on a never-ending merry-go-round..."
Andrew Ranken (51): "To take some more drugs, heh heh."
Philip Chevron (47): "It was such a hoot [in 2001] we thought we'd do it again. But being The Pogues it took all this time. Everything has to be agreed, argued over and signed in triplicate."
Darryl Hunt (54): "It's like lining up the planets. Is everyone available? Are they in agreement? It's not like a normal group where everybody sits down and goes right we're gonna do this and this and this. Anthony {Addis, long-term band accountant and fixer] juggles it all, says' they've offered you do this and this, can you do it?'Then when the record company heard about the tour they decided to get the stuff out quickly..."
Spurred on by this uncommon amount of coherent activity from these nine individuals scattered round England, Ireland and America, Warner Bros are reissuing The Pogues'seven studio albums. Depending on who you talk to, this plan was originally set in motion after: (a) Fearnley discovered that only the last album (1995's Pogue Mabone) was available in the US, or; (b) Hunt, Chevron and Stacey approached the label about doing a Pogues boxset of outtakes. As is the way of the reformatting/repackaging-crazy record industry, assorted extra tracks - B-sides, singles, EP tracks, album out-takes - have been added to each album. As is less the norm, the albums come bolstered by testimonials from an eclectic bunch of cultural big-hitters: author Patrick McCabe, film director Jim Jarmusch, activist Bob Geldof, revolutionary Steve Earle, actor Matt Dillon, legend Tom Waits and foot-baller Stuart 'Psycho' Pearce.
"From the moment Shane walked on stage at the Manchester Apollo on their reunion tour in 2001," writes Pearce, now coach at Man City, "and announced that it was good to be back in Liverpool, through to the last song, I realised I'd forgotten just how good The Pogues were. Having watched them perform over the last couple of decades, turning out classics like Fairytale Of New York and Thousands Are Sailing with that great energy that they give to their performances, I for one hope they carry on entertaining us music fans for years to come."
That was The Pogues for you: they were fixed in the popular imagination as a bunch of rabble-rousing, hurly-burly entertainers who mixed traditional Irish music, rock'roll and punk, as well as an awful lot of drink and drugs. All that, and a frontman who couldn't tell if he was coming, going or had been already. As MacGowan confided in the on-the- knuckle A Drink With... , "people didn't want another bunch of straights, playing 'world music'. People wanted The Pogues, which was a bunch of rowdy, out-of-it nutters playing headbanging Irish music."
Or, as he would say later on in our Highgate afternoon, considering why the band struck such a big, rambunctious chord in early'80s Britain, "we weren't a faggot and a guy with a synthesiser. I've got nothing against faggots - we have one! [This was a reference to Chevron] I'm leaving out the exceptional case of Soft Cell, ABC, all that. In fact, Soft Cell were playing down Cabaret Futura the week me and Ollie asked Richard Strange politely for a gig..." This account, plus his general demeanour, summoned up the other stereo- typical view of The Pogues' frontman: the acid-tongued, sardonic, rambling drunk cursed with short-term memory issues but blessed with a vivid memory for long distant detail. (We'll come to "Ollie" and the 1981 Cabaret Futura gig in a minute.) And throughout the course of our afternoon he didin't do much to dispel this view. Having seemingly woken from his sofa slumber under a stormy cloud, he more or less stayed there.
But there are other versions of Shane MacGowan. The youthful literary prodigy who won a scholarship to top drawer London public school Westminster, his entry secured by an essay on TS Eliot's Preludes. The young punk tyro who wanted his new band - despite the aggravatory tone of their first name, Pogue Mahone, which means "Kiss my arse" in Gaelic - to dress smart in suits and shirts. "Brendan Behan uniform," he called it in A Drink With....
There's the Shane who knows the history of Irish music inside out, and of Irish literature back to front. Discussing in our interview the period when Elvis Costello (one of his favourite whipping boys) occupied a berth on The Pogues'tour bus while dating O'Riordan, MacGowan likened him to Ambrose "the foul smelling pig" who takes over the house in Flannery O'Brien's The Poor Mouth. Indeed, the most animated he got all afternoon was when describing the new Penguin edition of Joyce's Finnegan's Wake. Apparently it's missing the sub-chapter headings. To MacGowan's mind, that's something like sacrilege.
He had his shades on and kept them on. He had refused to start the interview until his chosen tunes played on the jukebox. He glanced at me with something like disgust when I mistook his selection of an early Van Morrison tune for something by Arthur Alexander. "Although he is on there too," he offered, which was as close to conciliatory as he would get. When, three questions in, I asked whether they'd managed to get rid of tensions that presumably surrounded his being kicked out of the band in'91, he replied (with feeling): "What tensions?"
As to his match-fitness, he replied: "I've never stopped gigging since I left The Pogues. But I'm seriously thinking about jacking it in after this."
Why?
MacGowan [irked]: 'What?"
Why?
"Gaarghh, I'm forty-six... forty-seven years old this Christmas [MacGowan was born on 25th December 1957], and, you know ... That's not to say I won't ever if it was.... I'm just not gonna go on tour anymore."
But you're doing a month-long Sunday residency at Ronnie Scott's in Soho in the new year...
MacGowan [ignoring the comment]: 'Thinking about it, I've had a few short holidays this year. Next year I intend to have a lot of holidays."
Ha ha. But what about the residency at Ronnie Scotts? MacGowan: [annoyed] "What?"
You're doing...
"No I'm not."
Says on your website that you are.
"Well it fen through."
Why did it fall through? "I don't know. But I'm glad it fell through because I wasn't looking forward to it. The relief is great."
And here he made a noise like an asthmatic dolphin. He began to attack his baguette, feeding it into the side of his mouth and masticating it with a great deal of gummy jaw action. There were no teeth as such visible, only the glint of bits of metal, set centimetres apart, in an unholy maw.
Maybe I'd caught him on a bad day. But overall I found myself recalling the famous words of the judge describing that other quixotic songwriting son of the Irish diaspora, Stephen Patrick Morrissey. This Shane MacGowan fellow was devious, truculent and unreliable.
But what did I know? "Spider said Shane was on good form," offered Darryl Hunt when I met him and Andrew Ranken a week later. Really? I'd hate to see him on bad form.