Live Report: Raising Hell and a Glass to Shane MacGowan – 20th Century Paddy Album Launch at Whelan’s

Christmas Day, 1987. In the MacGowan family home in Tipperary, a cake has been made for Shane’s thirtieth birthday. Dinner is over. The family gather around the television for the charts. Somewhere beyond that room, their son and brother is becoming part of other people’s Christmases. Inside it, they are waiting to see whether his song will make it as the Christmas Number 1 in the UK.

Almost four decades later, his little sister Siobhan tells the story in Whelan’s, of ‘Fairytale of New York’ being Number 2 at Christmas and a tremendous boo goes up against The Pet Shop Boys who landed Number 1. Everyone knows that ‘Fairytale’ is always Number 1. Siobhan gives us the cake, the television, the family waiting together – the domestic particulars that survive when a life becomes a legend. For a moment, we can see Shane among his own, thirty years old, with a song about to travel further than any of them could have imagined.

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Siobhan and Victoria Mary Clarke, Shane’s wife and companion across decades, knew the man at the table – the humour, the tenderness, the formidable reader behind the formidable writer. Now they are custodians of a great man of letters whose songbook holds whole worlds – the tenderness and terror of belonging, the emigrant’s divided heart, the wild hope of finding love amid the wreckage.

Victoria has helped turn that custodianship into 20th Century Paddy: The Songs Of Shane MacGowan. Working with Rubyworks, she has brought together friends, collaborators and artists from across generations, each finding their own way into his extraordinary songbook. Listening to her describe its assembly, you hear the personal labour beneath the famous name – asking and encouraging, gathering and carrying the undertaking through. A woman who shared his life making room for the lives these songs will have after him.

That generosity reaches beyond the record. At least half of the participating artists’ royalties will go to Dublin Simon Community, supporting its work with people experiencing homelessness. In a catalogue so alive to the precarious business of finding shelter, keeping company and making somewhere your home, the connection runs deep. Tonight, the charity’s presence brings those concerns into the room.

Dublin Simon Community CEO Catherine Kenny gives the crisis a scale everybody in the room can picture – a packed 3Arena. Imagine the gig ending, the crowd streaming out, and nobody having a home to go to. Thousands of people spilling into the Dublin night, without a front door to put a key in. It’s an image that stays with you.

The great Dave Fanning gets proceedings underway, introducing Victoria. With Hot Press aboard as media partner, there’s a long-shared history in the room. Editor Niall Stokes traces the magazine’s first awareness of Shane back to The Nipple Erectors, later The Nips, before recalling the covers, a 1989 interview, and the formidable humour of the man.

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He considers the range of the songwriting. Take the tribute album’s opening side alone – ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’, ‘Fairytale Of New York’, ‘Sayonara’, ‘Aisling’, ‘Streets Of Sorrow/Birmingham Six’, ‘Turkish Song Of The Damned’ – enough imaginative territory to keep another songwriter occupied for several careers.

Stuart Clark chairs the conversations, drawing out the affection, revealing stories and inevitable mischief. Victoria, Siobhan, Rubyworks’ Sara Meneghini, Johnny and Mick Cronin discuss the undertaking. The next panel brings Mundy, David Keenan, Camille O’Sullivan and Jimmy Artache into the picture.

Mundy is tremendous company. There are Donegal all-nighters and nocturnal adventures that he shared with Shane, whose particulars will remain within Whelan’s jurisdiction. His account of manoeuvring himself onto the album, appropriately enough with ‘Victoria’, is a delight. David Keenan speaks eloquently about ‘The Sick Bed Of Cúchulainn’ and the impeccable songwriting chops of MacGowan; while Camille talks about first meeting Shane and her choosing of ‘You’re The One’.

Then the chairs go, the band assemble, and everything discussed acquires muscle.

Cronin begin with ‘London, You’re A Lady’, and there she is – Shane’s enormous, impossible city, her arms full of emigrants, her pockets full of their dreams. Johnny Cronin sings with an old friend’s understanding, finding the ache inside the grandeur.

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I’ve been following Cronin around a little lately – Longford Town, the top of the Hill of Uisneach for Samhain, now Whelan’s. Each time, the family seems to have grown. They’re approaching E Street Band proportions. Another musician, another instrument, another name to learn. There’s a flautist now, whose name I still have to catch, giving a brilliant turn.

Nobody understands this circus like Cronin. Shane’s last band, his friends and collaborators, they know the tenderness beneath the tumult and precisely when to let the whole thing roar. Mick Cronin’s drumming lends the music propulsion without sacrificing its lilt; Johnny’s singing and exuberant calls draw the audience into the performance. Fiachra Milner’s supple, commanding bass keeps the ensemble swinging, his answering shouts adding to its communal force. Brian Murphy’s guitar brings a definition and brilliance to the crowded arrangements, while Andy Nolan plays the accordion with a physical intensity that makes its wheezing bellows seem almost animate.

Their command allows the gathering to grow increasingly unruly without losing its musical centre. Even at its most crowded, the stage has room for the songs to breathe.

Around that formidable engine, the company expands – Barra John on harmonica, Feargal Murray at the piano, Seamus Ong on uilleann pipes. Having watched this gathering grow over the past few weeks, there’s something magical about seeing everybody find their place inside the music. Another musician arrives. Somehow, they make room. Cronin keep everybody aboard, making this crowded little stage feel capable of carrying Shane’s whole unruly world.

And threading through it, Colm Mac Con Iomaire’s fiddle. Two nights earlier, I’d watched him beneath canvas at Uisneach’s Samhain gathering, his beautiful new music carrying Palestine into the November dark. Now the bow is moving again, drawing another gathering close. There’s something astonishing about the distance he can travel inside a phrase – a little lift and we’re airborne; a turn and the sorrow catches up. Around him, the stage fills, yet his fiddle finds a path through everybody.

‘A Rainy Night In Soho’ follows, then Jimmy Artache takes on ‘USA’, with Áine Cahill lending her voice. Brendan O’Connor is shouting up to Victoria. Guggi is bopping away. Up on the balcony, Mary Lou McDonald is taking it all in. Elsewhere in the gathering are Sack’s John Brereton and film director Paul Duane.

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“Tom Creagh!”

The calls keep coming for Shane’s great friend and factotum. I spot him on the balcony, surveying proceedings like the king of all he possesses, apparently untroubled by the search underway below. Meanwhile, a younger singer materialises at the microphone – Tom Creagh with fifty fewer years on the clock. He gives a cracking turn. His name? I’m working on it. Musicians are arriving faster than I can write them down. So many moving parts, and most of them now singing. Give a reviewer a break.

“The Hog!” The calls fly between the Connemara and Nenagh contingents until Michael Casey arrives with his banjo and 'Paddy Public Enemy No 1' acquires another jolt of life, the banjo adding its bright, percussive chatter to the gathering tumult. The distance between the stage and the floor shrinks further. Everybody appears to know somebody up there; everybody has a candidate for who should join them next.

Here is the crawling, grasping, glorious humanity of MacGowan’s songs. The highbrow and the lowbrow at the same counter. Tipperary, London, Dublin. A man of letters whose words make people dance with hearts going like the clappers.

Mundy hauls himself up by the overhead speakers for ‘Victoria’, good-naturedly snarling at the crowd. Fiddle and whistle join the racket. David Keenan tumbles aboard trailing a duo of concertina and double bass among the reinforcements, throwing himself into ‘The Sick Bed Of Cúchulainn’.

David Keenan at Whelan's on November 9th, 2026. Copyright Zoltán Szabó/hotpress.com

Thirteen onstage now. Chairs are stolen, piano territory contested. Sharon Shannon appears as though beamed down through the magician’s curtain. Keenan is yelling. Backstage has become onstage; onstage has become backstage.

Through all this, Cronin keep the thing moving. There is real craft beneath the apparent mayhem – room for another voice, another instrument, another lurch into the song.

Tom Creagh eventually arrives, tells his stories and gets stuck into ‘Paddy Public Enemy No. 1’ Mark II. Then comes an extraordinary swing into Camille O’Sullivan’s ‘You’re The One’.

With Feargal Murray at the piano, the evening gathers itself around her. You find yourself watching almost breathlessly. Such feeling and command; the phrasing tender, the beauty catching you unprepared. Amid the crush and commotion, she finds the space to break your heart. Absolutely spellbinding.

20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan at Whelan's on November 9th, 2026. Copyright Zoltán Szabó/hotpress.com

Then Siobhan takes us back to that Tipperary Christmas, before Camille and Mundy lead ‘Fairytale of New York’. Everybody piles aboard and a glass is raised to the great man. The Pogues’ Christmas nights in Dublin once marked the year for many of us. How good to have some of that feeling back. And there is a London night ahead, Cronin on the road, listening parties around the country. The album itself arrives on Friday.

Afterwards, walking up Synge Street beneath the elm trees on a mild November night, I’m thinking about the people inside those songs, and the people who have carried them into their own lives – sung them at weddings, bawled them across counters – somewhere along the way, Shane’s words became things we wanted to say to one another

Try imagining this city, this country or London without Shane MacGowan. Impossible, really, you’d miss the circus terribly.

20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan is out on Friday, November 13, via Rubyworks.