Grace expectations

As inspiring a rock documentary as any in recent memory, the all-new Shane MacGowan biopic If I Should Fall From Grace has done a remarkable job of condensing its chaotic hero’s lifespan into a coherent ninety-minute narrative – and along the way, it contains an extensive soundtrack of Shane’s most awe-inspiring songs, making it essential viewing for anybody with the faintest trace of musical taste.

Though the film’s primary purpose is to celebrate its subject – and the magnificent body of work he has created – If I Should Fall rarely makes for comfortable viewing. MacGowan is interviewed at some length, and while his balls of steel and razor-sharp sense of humour are well in evidence throughout, there are inevitably a few moments where the man’s obvious pain and distress becomes almost too much to witness, calling to mind the singer’s own lyric: “I had to sit and talk to you and see your face go white/This shadow hanging over me is no trick of the light/This spectre on my back will soon be free/ The dead have come to claim a debt from me.”

When informed that this observer found If I Should Fall tragic and emotionally draining in the extreme, its director Sarah Share seems genuinely astonished.

“That’s a real woman’s reaction!” she avers. “I’ve noticed there tends to be a clear distinction here between men’s views and women’s views – most blokes I know laugh when Shane’s around and think he’s a scream and really respond to him, and it’s always the women who turn around and say ‘Oh, isn’t it terrible now what he’s doing to himself.’ Shane himself, obviously, subscribes to the William S. Burroughs school of thought – I’ve loads of footage of him saying as much – that the artist needs to find a route to oblivion through disorientation of the senses, and you have to disengage your intellect and your consciousness in order to find your muse.

“And, as such, he claims that being out of it is an intellectual stance. I don’t swallow it, and Shane knows I don’t swallow it, I think it’s self-deprecation on his part. My personal view would be that everybody has to get out of bed in the morning and put on a coat to allow themselves to function and get through the day, and everybody has to dress up their past in whatever way they’re comfortable with, and who am I to criticise the way Shane does it? He may do it more violently or more chaotically than I would, but I have my own myths that allow me to function as a human being, and Shane has his. You can criticise it, but his attitude is very much fuck-you, take me or leave me.”

Much of the previous commentary about MacGowan’s career would give the impression that what might politely be called his ‘declining health’ was, primarily, a side-effect of the Pogues’ success and the constant touring it entailed. There’s no doubt that this treadmill was a factor, but If I Should Fall... hints strongly that MacGowan’s personal demons predate the band’s existence. His teenage nervous breakdown, and subsequent spell in a mental hospital, are referred to as fairly pivotal life experiences, and the distinct sense is of a man whose self-destruct button has been firing for a very long time.

“I don’t know why, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, he embraced drugs and pills more totally than most teenagers do and at an earlier age,” Share professes. “But it did damage him, he did end up in hospital, and he did come out dosed up on valium and tranquillisers and stuff. And he says now, if you ask him, that even if he came off everything else, he would have to be on prescribed drugs because he’d suffer panic attacks and all that stuff.

“I mean, he takes so much that you would hardly notice a Shane panic attack at this stage – but I think he patently, as a teenager, couldn’t function very well. One of the interviewees, Dee O’Mahony, who knew him when he was much younger, described him to me at that stage as like having a layer of skin less than everybody else, that maybe he saw the world too clearly. You know those people who have such empathy and just seem to absorb all the shit in the world, and have such emotion in them.

“And apparently, even at the age of twenty, he had this quality, which was almost scary. And he was incredibly popular, and women adored him, he really loved meeting people’s parents, he was a big believer in the whole idea of family. He definitely has some type of sensitivity that other people don’t have, that meant he couldn’t cope with life at an early stage because he was just too attuned to everything. And he’s been at it ever since. But I couldn’t tell you what the initial hurt is about or whether he’s just like that. The single most important thing in the film was to capture that breathtaking sweetness and kindness that is there: Shane just wears his heart on his sleeve all the time, and he’s right to, and fuck all the assholes who don’t.

“In making the film,” Share continues, “I wasn’t trying to romanticise or de-romanticise anything about his lifestyle – I wasn’t really trying to do anything, I just let him go off and do his own thing and followed him. I couldn’t have stitched him up even if I’d wanted to, because he’s not stupid and he knew he’d have to sign a release form and he wasn’t going to sign one until he saw the finished film. And I think it’s an affectionate portrait, and it’s an accurate portrait of what he presented to me.

If I Should Fall From Grace is currently showing at selected cinemas nationwide.