Richard Balls on his Shane MacGowan biography: "I really did feel that weight of responsibility"

In 1984, 17-year-old Elvis Costello obsessive, Richard Balls, was in the audience at the Lower Common Room, at the University of East Anglia, excited to catch his first Attractions gig. Then the support band walked on.

“I had no reference point for what I was watching,” Richard recalls. “I’d never seen or heard anything like it before. Some bands were starting to emerge then - The Men They Couldn’t Hang, Boot Hill Foot Tappers – that kind of roots stuff, but this was next level. You’ve got Spider (Stacy) smashing a beer tray over his head and Cait (O’Riordan) who looked like she might jump into the audience and hit somebody. And Shane was just out of it, wandering about the stage, sitting by the drum-kit. That was my introduction to The Pogues.”

Richard subsequently caught The Pogues at the Hammersmith Palais promoting Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and at Brixton Academy, during the If I Should Fall From Grace With God tour. He bought their records, went to gigs, was your normal Pogues fan. Then in 2012, researching a book on Stiff Records, Richard contacted Shane MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke. He hoped to interview Shane about the label that signed The Pogues. It was organised through Shane’s friend Paul Ronan.

That interview proved tricky, but Richard was fascinated with Shane. When Be Stiff: The Stiff Records Story was published, he offered to write MacGowan’s biography. “He’s not against it,” Paul Ronan told him. So, in 2018, Richard started accompanying Paul on trips to Shane’s home in Ballsbridge.

A reporter once compared interviewing Shane MacGowan to tracking a snow leopard.

“It’s like wildlife photography,” Richard laughs. “You’re there for hours and you might get five seconds of footage. There were times when it was it was maddening, I wasn’t trying to interview him with the clock running, because you just can’t do that.”

Instead, Richard sat in Shane’s Dublin flat, watching Sergio Leone, Scorsese and Peckinpah movies, waiting for a window.

“It didn’t matter when you arrived at the flat, he was sat there watching films. He’d watch something and then go and put it on again. So, I just sat beside him. Paul would be there. And we’d be just hanging out with him. And then at various times, if the conversation was going to something that I wanted to record, I’d stick the recorder on and grab a bit.”

Richard Balls. Credit: Brittany Woodman, Archant

Richard tells me the only thing that Shane hated more than being interviewed was being interviewed about his music – hence the need to interview over 60 people researching the book. These included Pogues Jem Finer, James Fearnley, Darryl Hunt and Terry Woods, as well as Tom Simpson, his English teacher at Shane’s primary school, Holmewood House, who had never spoken about Shane before.

“He had kept all these extraordinary little school books of Shane’s,” Richard relates, “penned in a large and distinctive hand. He’d never kept any schoolwork from any other pupil. I returned them to Victoria, so she now has them. They’re just incredible because you can see that Shane was already using the vernacular in these stories, written at school. Shane was like a sponge, he just soaked up everything he’d hear.”

Shane was precocious. Still at primary school, he was reading Graham Greene, Dostoevsky, D. H. Lawrence. Richard also interviewed his publisher Liam Teeling, old pal Kathy MacMillan and ex-girlfriends Mary Buxton and Merrill Heatley. They’d rarely if ever spoken publicly about him.

“Women were very, very important in Shane’s life,” says Richard. “He had a very close relationship with his mother and obviously with his sister Siobhán. He loved women and had a great many female friends – the interview I did with Sinéad O’Connor for the book was one of the most useful.”

How does Richard feel about the book, following Shane’s death?

“I feel very, very privileged that I’ve written a book which he did cooperate with and which the family endorsed. Also because Siobhán and Maurice (Shane’s father) wanted the book to be written, and were hugely supportive. They provided all the information I needed and hooked me up with other members of the family. So, it was authorised in that kind of wider sense as well.

"Whilst sitting in St. Mary’s Church in Nenagh, before the service started, I really did feel that weight of responsibility. It’s massive – you’re writing about somebody who people really, really loved. So, you just hope that you’ve done him justice.”

• The fully updated paperback of A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan is released today, April 4.