At Home With... Shane MacGowan

Let’s face it – Christmas just wouldn’t be Christmas without the majestic sound of The Pogues’ classic ‘Fairytale Of New York’ wafting through the airwaves. Not only is it regularly voted best Christmas song of all time – it’s without doubt one of the finest Irish songs ever recorded. Astonishing though it might seem, it celebrates twenty years as a Christmas classic this year.
“It certainly feels like twenty fucking years ago to me,” cackles the song’s creator, the irrepressible Shane MacGowan. “It comes out every year – it’s out on a Christmas hits album again this year. But that’s what musicians try and achieve, isn’t it? It’s always a buzz to hear your music on the radio. After twenty years it’s an even bigger buzz.”
We find The Pogues frontman in surprisingly good form on this seasonably cold day, sat in the kitchen of the Dublin abode he shares with long-time partner and journalist Victoria Mary Clarke. The typically red-bricked, bay-windowed Donnybrook house is neat and homely, the only tell-tale signs of the occupants being a Gibson acoustic guitar standing against a wall and a large cardboard box of, er, “empties” in the corner of the kitchen. Though he calls the farm in Tipperary where he grew up home these days, he spends much of his time in Dublin, as he explains:
“I try to get back to Tipperary whenever I manage to get out of this frigging city. I used to like Dublin a lot. My father’s from Dublin and he doesn’t like it anymore either. But at least it’s in Ireland – and it’s still my favourite capital city. It’s too developed. The city was blasted twice in the last century and there’s still time for it to be blasted to bits again, only this time let’s blast all the new buildings – not the old ones (laughs).”
Presumably life is much quieter down the country compared with life in the capital?
“No, it’s far more exciting,” he contradicts. “For a start nobody gives a damn about the laws on drinking or smoking, which suits me fine. And nobody gives a damn about the poitin laws either which are still on the statute books, it’s ridiculous.”
Nursing a pint glass of cider and sucking on a cigarette MacGowan looks a lot healthier than he might have done in the past. Just returned from a Pogues tour of the West Coast of America he even looks slightly tanned.
“I live a healthy lifestyle,” he announces somewhat surprisingly. “I spend as much time in the countryside as possible and I don’t eat crap. Anyway, most of the people who predicted I would die young have already died themselves. From the time we started out they thought we were a bunch of drunken hooligans who wouldn’t last. They were wrong on both counts.”
The Pogues head out on what has become their annual Christmas jaunt across the UK and Ireland with dates in both Dublin and Belfast. Given the rock and roll lifestyle he leads he says there’s no such thing as a typical day in the MacGowan household.
“I play music at home and if I’m not playing it I listen to it. I’ve been trying to build back up my vinyl collection. A lot of my old stuff was in storage all over the place and it went missing . But Dublin’s a great place for getting vinyl, most of the stuff I buy on CD is re-issues of stuff I used to have on vinyl or stuff I used to want to have on vinyl. Things like the Jeff Beck Group with Rod Stewart, Cream, Led Zeppelin, all that.
“I like to go out to movies but I don’t go to gigs that much in Dublin. The most recent one was Sinéad O’Connor at the Olympia, which was great. We’ve been friends for years even though there was a mishap between us a long time ago, which I don’t really want to talk about. I’m not one to hold a grudge and what she did for me turned out to be good for me anyway.”
MacGowan has always been politically aware - a fact that is reflected in his best songs. How does he keep up to date with what’s happening in the outside world?
“I look at RTÉ news which is the best of the lot,” he insists. “In fact it’s so good that it’s jammed in England. However many fucking channels you can get on your space-station Sky dish or whatever you can’t get RTÉ. I know Irish people in London who can get 500 shitty channels but they can’t get RTÉ. They can get fucking Al-Jazeera but they can’t get RTÉ. Obviously, it’s deliberate because we tell the truth about what’s going on. They’re afraid people might see a great documentary by someone like Cathal O’Shannon.”
Finally, we all know what our favourite Christmas song is – what is MacGowan’s own personal favourite?
“It’s certainly not ‘Fairytale Of New York’,” he chuckles. “It would probably be Nat King Cole’s ‘Christmas Song’. Do you know it? The one that begins ‘Chestnuts roasting on an open fire’. He was a class singer – the first black man to get his own TV show. He died very young, in his late forties.”

Photos by Cathal Dawson