Hear the Banshees howl, let the poets weep. Shane MacGowan is no more. The great Pogue, that Anglo-Irish rogue, the last of the punk rock wild men has left this earthly vale, shuffled off this mortal coil, sunk his last dram and vanished into the Celtic mist. “Fare thee well, gone away, there’s nothing left to say,” as the man himself once sang in that gnarly but tuneful voice of his. “With a slainte, Joe, and Erin go … / the calling of the Rosary, Spanish wine from far away / Say adieu to your eyes as blue as the water in the bay.”

His lifestyle was hardly conducive to good health, and his public image was one of ragged dissolution. But the man was loved and admired, deservedly so, for a talent that shone through his dishevelment and an unapologetic commitment to living life to the full. Sure, he may have been a disreputable, self-abusing drunken blaggard and drug fiend, but he was also one of the finest songwriters of his time, a curiously honourable figure who followed his own crooked path in the name of art, beloved of the general public in the way that rogues, scoundrels and outlaws can sometimes be. You might not want to be Shane MacGowan, but we can still be thankful that he walked (or more often stumbled) amongst us.

MacGowan was chiefly celebrated as leader of fearsome folk punk pioneers The Pogues for their most fertile years in the 1980s. It is sometimes sarcastically noted that MacGowan was actually born in England and the product of a public school education, winning a literature scholarship to Westminster School in 1971, albeit he was subsequently expelled aged 16 for being found in possession of drugs. But he considered himself Irish, a culture that infused his work. His parents were Irish immigrants (his mother was a typist, his father a manager at C&A), and he spent family summers in County Tipperary, where he claimed to have started drinking at the tender age of four. 

He was a fixture of the original London punk scene, singing with the never particularly successful The Nipple Erecters (later renamed The Nips). Then in 1981, he formed a new outfit with other Anglo-Irish musicians, concocting a style that bashed together the sounds of Irish traditional music with the energy of rock. Originally and rather rudely known as Pogue Mahone (pidgin Gaelic for “kiss my a---”), the six-piece band featured tin whistle, bodhran, mandolin and accordion as well as electric keyboards and rhythm section, in a ragged ensemble that very quickly established a reputation as one of the most exciting live bands in the country.

MacGowan revelled in a kind of plug-ugly charisma, spitting lyrics through his famously terrible teeth, but the real secret of the Pogues was the quality of his songwriting, concocting succinct narratives of the Irish diaspora in Britain and America that drew on the poetry and culture of his homeland. His songs were peppered with finely observed details, and had, at their heart, a bittersweet romantic longing for a shattered community clinging to its historical identity, and a beautiful empathy for outsiders and the downtrodden. 

Of five Pogues albums recorded between 1984 and 1990, at least two are bona fide masterpieces – Rum, Sodomy & The Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall From Grace With God (1988). MacGowan’s finest work includes A Pair of Brown Eyes, A Rainy Night in Soho, Haunted, Streams of Whiskey, The Body of an American and Sally MacLennane, many of which have become so firmly established in the repertoires of Irish folk artists that they have effectively turned into folk songs themselves.

His greatest hit, of course, is Fairytale of New York. Composed with banjo player Jem Finer and recorded as a duet with the late Kirsty MacColl, it is a sprawling, rumbustious, foul-mouthed, tempo and mood-shifting narrative of immigrants loving, fighting, falling out and reminiscing about a bitter winter in New York. Reaching number two in the UK at Christmas 1987, in so many ways it seemed an unlikely festive song, full of drunkenness and woe, violence, swearing, insults, sadness and disappointment, but it has gone on to become a seasonal classic, returning to the charts year after year. With over two million copies sold, it is officially the most-played Christmas song in the UK of this century. No doubt, we will all be hearing it a few more times over the coming weeks. And every time we do, many of us will raise our glasses, wipe away a tear, and sing along to Shane and Kirsty: “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank…”

Unfortunately, it was his familiarity with the drunk tank that really did for MacGowan as a creative force. By the end of the 80s, MacGowan was an increasingly shambolic figure, stumbling off stage and forgetting the words he himself had written. He was eventually ejected from his own band in 1991. Although he managed to record a couple of solo albums as Shane MacGowan and the Popes, he never achieved the heights of his 80s songwriting again. 

The Pogues continued (with the Clash’s Joe Strummer deputising on vocals) before petering out in 1995 and then reconvening with MacGowan essentially as a live nostalgia outfit from 2001 to 2014. MacGowan’s health continued to deteriorate, and he became confined to a wheelchair in 2015, after breaking his pelvis in a fall. He continued to express himself creatively through drawings and paintings, cared for by his devoted wife, Irish journalist Victoria Mary Clarke. The couple married in 2018 but had already been together for over 20 years.

As a music writer and fellow member of the Irish diaspora, I’ve had a few encounters with the great man, some more pleasant than others. I have seen him so wrecked he couldn’t stand, couldn’t speak coherently, urinating on the floor of a friend’s living room. I sometimes came across him drinking in a local north London hostelry, The Boogaloo, where he could be alternately accommodating and intimidating, depending on his state of inebriation. 

I only officially interviewed him once, in 2015. He was extremely overweight, dressed like a debonair hobo, with not a tooth left in his mouth. He was already ensconced with his second bottle of white wine when we met at three in the afternoon. He was not an easy man to interview, waxing and waning between lucid comment, poetic fancy, good humour and mumbling aggression. He laughed frequently, emitting a sound halfway between white noise and an industrial accident. In my view, MacGowan paid a heavy price for his success. Fame had become his enabler, his alcoholism facilitated by friends, fans and barmen. He didn’t see it that way. “It’s fair to say I like a drink, so what?” he slurred dismissively, when I tried to question his alcoholic intake.

He was hugely admired by his peers, collaborating over the years with Nick Cave, Steve Earle, Joe Strummer and Dubliner Ronnie Drew, who once told me “Shane has a great talent to use very few words to get an idea across. I like to sing his songs, they suit me. He’s a great Irish writer and as for the rest, well, Ireland’s a big drinking culture, and I’ve had a few drinks myself, and what anybody does I can’t comment on.”

U2’s Bono let MacGowan and Victoria live rent-free in a guest house on his property in south Dublin for a while, but eventually asked them to leave because the police kept getting called. They remained friends, and Bono was one of the performers at a 60^th birthday gala tribute to MacGowan, where Irish President Michael D. Higgins presented him with a Lifetime Achievement Award. Other guests included Johnny Depp, Bobby Gillespie and Sinead O’Connor (who previously duetted with MacGowan on his song Haunted in 1995). O’Connor and MacGowan fell out in 2001 when she reported his heroin habit to the police, although MacGowan subsequently expressed gratitude to her for helping him kick the drug. 

Another admirer of MacGowan’s was legendary singer-songwriter Paul Simon, who displayed a framed letter from MacGowan on the walls of his office in New York. “I paid him a visit in Dublin,” Simon revealed to me. “Shane didn’t have any sound system so I sent him one. He was totally stoned in the time that we spent together, but I just waited to get into the rhythm of his stoned speech, then the stuff he’s got to say was pretty interesting. He’s a great writer and I love his voice.”

Even as he became frailer, MacGowan seemed indestructible, but that, of course, was just an illusion. Like his great hero Brendan Behan and many other alcoholic talents, ultimately his gift was ruined by his vices. MacGowan’s public persona of Bohemian belligerence belied his deep understanding of the Irish lyrical tradition. Mixing ancient themes with contemporary concerns, MacGowan had a wonderful turn of phrase, exemplified by his succinct description of New York in his famous Christmas song: “They’ve got cars big as bars, they’ve got rivers of gold / But the wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old.”

His oeuvre was filled with songs of deaths and farewells, all the more poignant now that the man himself has left us. It is a body of work that will survive him, because it has become part of a living tradition. We could shed a tear and cite the burial refrain from If I Should Fall From Grace With God: “Let me go, boys / Let me go, boys / Let me go down in the mud / Where the rivers all run dry.” But I prefer to raise a glass and dance a jig to the Sick Bed of Cúchulainn: “Now you’ll sing a song of liberty for Blacks and Paks and Jocks / And they’ll take you from this dump you’re in and stick you in a box / Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground / But you’ll stick your head back out and shout “We’ll have another round!”