‘MacGowan opened a door that has never closed…’

About two weeks ago when Shane MacGowan left hospital for the last time, a fellow fan pointed out to me how apt it would be if the pallid-faced Pogue clung on until Christmas Day.

“Born December 25, 1957. Composer of the greatest Christmas song of all time. Dies Christmas Day, 2023,” he prophesised.

“Can you imagine? They would have to rebrand the festive holiday ‘MacGowan-mas’. God would have to fast-track the Second Coming of Christ just so that Jesus could reclaim Christmas from Shane.”

I laughed and didn’t give it much more thought.

However, when I got the text last Thursday to say MacGowan was dead, I thought again about what my friend had said, and wished his prophecy had come to pass. Though the great man would still have been gone, such a fated ending might have made it a bit easier for us to accept. As is the way of the world though, we were not handed such a perfectly wrapped parcel of poetic conciliation; instead, we were left to find our own comfort.

Like most people my age, Shane MacGowan was a part of my life before I could even talk.

Every December, when the world went into the attic and brought down the decorations, the box containing ‘Fairytale of New York’ was always one of the earliest to be unloaded.

The first time I heard it I was probably staring up at the ceiling from my cot.

A few years later, when my brain had developed enough to remember and regurgitate lyrics, but not yet enough to fully understand them, I would sing along in joyful ignorance as Shane and Kirsty spat vodka and venom at each other, knowing that for eight-year-old me this meant Santa would soon be coming to town.

But the years went by and the times they changed, and so did my relationship with MacGowan and his music.

For a good part of my life, I was one of the many on MacGowan’s lyricism and insight was lost behind the smokescreen of drunkenness and debauchery that surrounded him.

However, though I was yet to ‘get it’, I knew that among the pantheon of pop idols, rock stars, rappers and folk artists that for me at that time constituted ‘music’, there was nobody quite like MacGowan. Why, though, still remained a bit of a mystery. That epiphany, however, eventually arrived just after I left school.

One evening, sitting alone in my room in Belfast, I stuck on the Pogues second album, ‘Rum, Sodomy and the Lash’ and looked up the lyrics to help figure out what was being said. The door that was opened that night has never since closed.

Such a rich range of references, I had never heard from any other artist before. He was singing about Irish mythology, literature, politics and history, and at the same time talking about pubs, bookies and brothels. He was speaking about Irish nationalism and the uglier sides of London life. It was at times romantic and otherworldly, and at others vulgar and brutally unsentimental. The language seemed to be at once divine and dirty, with angels, psychos, dreams and whiskey all given their just dues. It was funny, cutting and true, and when it came to matters of the heart, I had never seen anybody write about love and loss with such raw humanity.

It was a revelatory moment for me. I had finally found my man. This was my music, and that it will always be. Now MacGowan is gone, but hopefully he and his late friend Sinead O’Connor, if not lounging back upon cartoon clouds, are resting contentedly in some more peaceful plane.

This Christmas, do yourself a favour and make sure you listen to plenty of The Pogues – and even the first album from the Popes, ‘The Snake’. Your life will be a better one for it.

I’ll end with a few of my favouite – and rather fitting – lines from ‘The Body of an American’.

‘And as the sunset came to meet, the evening on the hill, I told you I’d always love you, I always did, I always will…’