"If at first you don't suceed, try, try again…" I can't help but smile wryly to myself when I see it. It's just after 9pm on Tuesday, March 13th, and the 'Thought For The Day' on the Avis calendar sitting atop the reception desk of Dublin's Bloom's Hotel seems hugely appropriate, given the task at hand. Not for the first time in my journalistic career, I'm here to meet the infamous Shane MacGowan, but, seeing as all of my previous attempts at securing an interview with Irish rock's most legendary (living) lush have come to nothing, I'm not particularly optimistic that it's going to happen tonight. In fact, I'm not particularly optimistic that it's ever going to happen.

I have my reasons to be fearful. You see, we have a history of having no history, do Shane and I. About eleven or twelve years ago - shortly before his fellow Pogues finally decided that enough was enough and unceremoniously chucked him out of the band he had fronted for almost a decade - a particularly drunken MacGowan stumbled off the stage and fell arse over tit into the moshpit of Galway's Leisureland venue, injuring his shoulder and consequently scuppering our scheduled post-show interview (or rather, our rescheduled interview - we were actually supposed to talk before the gig but he was already too pissed to communicate). His tour manager promised to organise a consolatory phone interview but, predictably enough, it never happened.

Years later, in the spring of 1999, myself and photographer Jill Furmonovsky spent a fruitless few days hanging around Filthy McNasty's Whisky Café - Shane's London local - waiting for the singer to show up. Frustratingly, he never did, despite manager/minder Joey Cashman's repeated reassurances over the phone that he'd be there in "an hour or so". Eventually, seventy-two "or so" hours later, I just gave up on him and flew home, exasperated, annoyed and more than a little disappointed. Although I've bumped into him on several occasions since, we've never actually talked on tape. So here I am once more, trying, trying again, and fervently hoping that it'll be third time lucky with this most elusive of

interviewees…

"Is Shane MacGowan here?" I ask the receptionist.

"Who wants to know?" she enquires, suspiciously (apparently the hotel has been mildly besieged by fans and freaks ever since a Sunday newspaper revealed that he had taken up residence there).

I tell her, she calls his room and, following a short whispered conversation, hands the receiver over to me. Well, at least he's in the building. "Hi Shane, it's Olaf Tyaransen," I say. "HUH?" comes the ear-splitting reply. "We met in the Voodoo Lounge last week," I remind him, "and organised an interview for tonight - remember?" There's a long pause, followed by another loud and unintelligible grunt. Telephone etiquette is obviously not his strongpoint. "Em, so are we on then, Shane?" I continue, hopefully. "You the bloke from hotpress?" he eventually asks, gruffly. "That's me." "Down'n'minute," he mumbles, before noisily crash-landing his receiver. Result!

"He'll be down in a minute," I beam delightedly at the receptionist, handing her back the phone.

"I wouldn't hold my breath if I were you," she laughs. "He left somebody waiting for about three hours yesterday."

"Don't worry," I tell her, "I've waited for him a lot longer than that before!"

I go to the bar to sit, and reflect a little more on the just-published A Drink With Shane MacGowan - a 360-page long-form interview with his

long-term (and, presumably long-suffering)

girlfriend, Victoria Clarke - which covers

everything from his childhood in Ireland and

troubled London adolescence, to his various incarcerations in mental hospitals and dry-out clinics and, of course, his constantly fluctuating musical career.

Although naturally somewhat biased and occasionally rambling and repetitive, the book offers more of an insight into the weird, warped, wild and wasted world of Shane MacGowan than any journalist could ever hope to get. Or at least, any journalist who hasn't lived with the man for more than a decade could ever hope to get (as well as being in love with him, Victoria's a well-respected music writer). He's never been regarded as being particularly talkative - at least not to the press.

"Shane's the most intelligent man I've ever met," Victoria told me on the phone, "but he's also quite anti-intellectual. I think he finds it easier to dumb things down. It's kind of, like, exterminate all rational thought! So sometimes he doesn't make any sense to people who don't know him. Journalists are always getting the wrong end of the stick."

My cunning plan tonight therefore, is to have as many drinks as I can possibly handle with the man himself, and use whatever pearls of wisdom and gory drunken details I can pick up to fill in around pre-existing quotes from the book for a lengthy profile piece. I don't really expect him to be sober, coherent or compliant, but as it happens, I'm to be pleasantly surprised. When he eventually staggers out of the lift and shuffles into the bar (having kept me waiting only half an hour or so), it's immediately obvious that he's not quite sober - but, despite a constant vocal slur, an obvious lack of co-ordination and an alarming tendency to occasionally repeat the phrase "D'ye know worra mean?" ad infinitum, he's actually in far better interview-form than I could've ever hoped to expect (which is to say, I understand a good half of what he says to me, at least half of the time).

"I'm always coherent," he'll tell me several hours - and drinks! - later. "Reports of my incoherence have been greatly exaggerated."

Tonight, Mr. Shane MacGowan is dressed in, well, undoubtedly the same clothes he was dressed in last night. And the night before. And probably the night before that as well. Sartorial elegance is obviously not an obsession. His black suit and coat are mapped with myriad marks, stains and burns, and there's enough dirt under his nicotine stained fingernails to sow a small crop of potatoes in (he claims not to have taken a bath in years). His unkempt hair looks like it has never encountered a comb and his bleary eyes seem to come in and out of focus of their own accord. He looks completely wrecked. In other words, he looks pretty much as I'd expected. Shane as he ever was.

"Would you like a drink, Shane?" I ask (rather stupidly, in retrospect).

"Large vodka 'n' white, double peach schnapps and forty Carrolls," he recites mantra-like, before collapsing into his seat and staring off at nothing in particular.

When I bring the drinks and cigarettes over (the barman had smiled, sympathetically, when he handed me my change), I nervously break the ice by reminding him of the time he left me hanging around Filthy's for three days, and jokingly calling him a "wanker." He takes a healthy slug of schnapps, replaces the glass and starts to laugh. "Kersh -sh -sh -sh." MacGowan's death-rattle laugh - the sound of air escaping through his few remaining blackened and tombstone-like teeth - sounds something like a gas leak or a dentist's suction pump. It's the sort of laugh a cartoon character would have. I hear a lot of it over the course of the evening. He seems to be in good form (though, having said that, he also seems to laugh at just about anything and everything that enters the orbit of his thoughts).

He immediately tells me that he usually hates doing interviews - especially with the English press. "The English press basically give me a hard time but the rest of them have been alright," he says, in his rather skewed London-Irish accent. "Especially the Irish press. But the British tabloids always hammer me! But that's only to be expected really seeing as I've been saying what a bunch of bastards they are and how they should get the fuck out of the six counties - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

What's the worst thing they've ever written about you?

"There's been loads of stuff over the years," he grins. "Bono once gave me and Vicky a loan of his Martello tower, and some fucker wrote that I stole all his gold discs off the wall while he was out and ran down the road and sold 'em. They fucking printed that! Can you imagine the idea of me running down the road with all of Bono's gold discs under my arm? Where the fuck was I gonna flog them? What the fuck was I gonna be doing that for? This sort of shit comes out all the time."

Why don't you just sue them?

"It's better to be in the papers than not be in the papers - kersh-sh-sh-sh," he sniggers. "I just say it straight and the fucking press just print what they fucking like. I could've made millions over the years suing the fuckers for all the shit they wrote about me. Even that last bunch of press - it was all libellous fucking shit. But I couldn't be bothered."

Instead, he bypasses the legal route and simply abuses the hell out of journalists he doesn't like. And if that doesn't get rid of them, he sometimes beats them up (despite his apparent physical ruin, he's still a big bloke). "I enjoy winding them up for the first while and then I lose my temper and just fucking shout at them," he says. "The last one I had to deal with, I had to deck him. Followed me around fucking Dublin! I told him to fuck off, my friends told him to fuck off. You know, 'come back tomorrow!' He was all, like, (adopts whiney English accent) 'I wanna go out drinking with you boys. I wanna have the rare ould craic with you boys!' And we were like, 'we don't fucking wanna have it with you'. He got told all that in no uncertain terms and still he fucking followed us. When we finally managed to lose him, he made his fucking way back to this hotel, insulted the night manager, making out that he was with me. He tried to put his fucking bag in my room! Wanker! Kersh-sh-sh-sh."

"They look after you well in this hotel, don't they?" I observe.

"Well, I've been staying here for years," he nods. "So we get on - kersh-sh-sh."

Although he still owns a flat in London and claims to be currently living on the Tipperary farm where he grew up, by all accounts MacGowan has actually been residing in Blooms Hotel since early January. He's currently in dispute with his publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson, over the bill. They claim that they did agree to pay his accommodation expenses for a couple of days while he did interviews about the book in Dublin; but they didn't agree to pick up the tab for the two months - and counting - he has thus far stayed. He's not too concerned about the publishers (of which more in a moment) but when I mention that the hotel sounds like a far better option than the farm - which, I've heard, has no running water - he gets visibly annoyed.

"There is running water on the place!" he insists. "You read that in the paper - you read that in the fucking Observer. There was no running water when I was a kid. It's really remote, but I like it like that. Yeah, there's a sink and there's an outside jacks."

What do you do for amusement down there?

"I hang around down in Tipperary, where people have known me all my life. Go out drinking and, eh, just stay sitting in the old house. Big field out in front of you. I like the Irish weather. When I was a kid I used to stay out till well past dark - especially if it was raining and windy, ye know what I mean. I'd just stand there with the rain lashing down around me… "

He drifts off for a moment, smiling to himself, presumably lost in his childhood memories.

"Are there still many parties there?" I ask (there's a lot of detail in the book about the non-stop drinking, talking and musical sessions that went on in his childhood home).

"No, I'm just there on me own," he replies, suddenly snapping back to attention with a violent electric jerk. "My parents moved up the road, ye know what I mean. It's a complicated story, but they're just up the road… (pauses). No, but they're all dead - all the old people who used to hang around the house. I mean, apart from a couple but they don't live in the house any more. I live there, you know. But they're not dead to me, you know, they're still there. When I've had enough poitin I have little chats with 'em - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

By all accounts, his return to the home soil was rather spontaneous. According to Victoria, he went to Dublin in early January for a Popes gig, and simply never returned. Nor has he any intention of doing so. "I'll never live in London again!" he declares. "I might go there to do some business for a day but, like, if I can get outta there then I'll get out the same night."

But don't you have a flat there? And surely you've loads of mates in London?

"I haven't got loads of mates in London!" he snaps. "Well, I've got a few friends there but most of them are Irish anyway - and the ones that aren't I don't fucking like anyway - kersh-sh-sh."

He claims that he finds it easy to make friends. No surprise there. Whenever I've encountered him out and about, he's usually surrounded by crowds of sycophantic slimeballs - all pathetically anxious to be seen drinking with him. What qualities does he look for in people?

"Straightforwardness, honesty and a good heart," he declares.

Not much of that in the music business, surely?

"Very little. But more than you'd expect. There's certainly a lot more than there is in the FUCKING PUBLISHING BUSINESS!!!!"

Ah yes, the publishing business. Although he's been obligingly doing interviews to promote it, Shane claims to be extremely unhappy with some of the content of A Drink With Shane MacGowan (as indeed are his family, certain friends and bandmates, and former Pogues manager Frank Murray). He doesn't necessarily deny that he said the things he said, just maintains that he didn't actually mean most of them.

"There's a lot of things I wanted to change," he says. "I was very drunk when I said some of the things that are in there. It's not by any means an official biography or autobiography or anything of the kind. It's simply what it says it is - a drink with Shane MacGowan, yeah. And, like, I mean like, the opinions expressed in it, I wouldn't stand by any of them, ye know worra mean. I was very drunk, ye know worra mean - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

Are you drinking much these days?

"Well, I've slowed down a lot, yeah," he mutters with a sly grin, taking another slug of vodka.

Well, do you think you drink as much as people think you do?

"No. I just do what I do - kersh-sh-sh."

Well, are you not scared that all of this constant alcohol abuse will eventually take its toll. You know, that you might just fall over and die some day?

"I suppose I'm fucking scared of death if I think about it. But I don't - kersh-sh-sh. I'm gonna live till I'm ninety, ye know worra mean. And anyway, I've a pure soul! Inside I'm glowing with a pure white light! And there's no point in fucking redemption if you don't do any sinning."

Do you sin a lot?

"No, I don't think I ever committed a sin in my life. And, if I have, it's only because of the influence of fucking London, ye know. It's a fucking godless way of life."

When I tell him that Victoria Clarke had told me that the original working title of the book was Confessions Of A Scumbag, he sneers sarcastically. "Yeah, the publishers loved that one, yeah. But I thought of that when I was drunk, ye now worra mean? And then I realised that I've got nothing to confess and I'm not a scumbag. The people who come and see me and the people who like me aren't scumbags either - and it'd be an insult to them to fucking call the book Confessions Of A Scumbag. So in the end we went for A Drink With Shane MacGowan. But, in fact, it's several drinks with Shane MacGowan."

He motions to the barman to bring the same again, and starts to warm to his theme. He's really not happy: "The other thing is, I don't see the point of it being called 'by Victoria Clark and Shane MacGowan' when it was already called A Drink With Shane MacGowan. I didn't have anything to do with the writing of the book, I didn't have anything to do with the editing of the book and, in the end, I couldn't stop them fucking putting in the stuff I didn't want to have fucking put in. Right? Yeah? And, like, it was totally changed. And I said to Victoria, 'why did you have me listed as one of the fucking authors when I had nothing to do with the writing of it, nothing to do with the editing of it?'

"All I did was shout into a fucking tape recorder, ye know worra mean? When I was in full flight, ye know worra mean, about this, that or the other. Then it was misquoted by the fucking typist. Vicky handed it to an American typist, who's a really nice person but couldn't understand most of what I was saying. So she misquoted a lot and then handed it over to the fucking publishers - who're supposed to have copywriters, yeah - who misquoted it all over again, yeah.

"I mean, I quoted a WB Yeats poem at one point - 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death', yeah. "My country is Kiltartan Cross/My countrymen Kiltartan's poor/No likely end could bring them loss/Or leave them happier than before." And when you see it in the book, like, it's just a load of gobbledeegook. James Joyce couldn't have done it better - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

Didn't you bother reading it before it went to print?

"No, I didn't read it, I didn't do the editing. I was given the chance to read it but I'm a musician, I'm not interested in fucking publishing a book, you know - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

But surely you can't complain if you didn't bother reading it?

"Kersh-sh-sh-sh," he hisses gleefully. "Kersh-sh-sh."

Did you ever have any interest in writing something more substantial than lyrics?

"Well, yeah. I'm always writing things down but they usually turn into songs. I'm a songwriter. I'm a fucking musician!"

As it happens, drunken quotes aside, Shane's only actual written contribution to the book is a hand-written 'Uncoditional (sic) Apology' at the end: "I was speaking from the heart when I spewed this stuff. I was a stranger in my own soul. To those who can accept it, particularly the Pogues, family - including Frank - I offer uncoditional love - L-O-V! To those who can't, I'll see you at the gates of Hell!"

"Yeah, that was just to get me out of all the shit that the fucking publishers put me in," he says, by way of explanation. The way Shane sees it, the publishers are responsible for leaving in any offensive things he may have said in the troublesome tome.

"Anything I said about Frank Murray or anything I said about the Pogues or anything I said about my family - they're all well dodgy, they're all well suspect, they're all misquoted, they're all garbled and taken out of context and fucked up and generally I wish I could just burn every fucking copy. But I can't, right."

You'll probably sell more copies for them by saying that!

"I'm not interested. I don't need the money. Not their poxy money anyway!"

Money isn't important to you?

"Money is bloody important to me!!" he hisses. "Money is freedom and power, you know. And I want freedom and power. I spent half of my life without any money or any freedom or any power, so I'm fucked if I'm gonna fucking let them get away with fucking stitching me up like this. If they think they have done then they're fucking wrong, yeah."

Still, you're not losing sleep over it?

"I'm not gonna lose sleep, no."

And, with that, he dozes off again for a moment or three. Shane MacGowan doesn't lose sleep. Instead he seems to catch brief snatches of it at every given opportunity. Especially, it should be noted, when he doesn't like the question he's being asked. When I mention Sinéad O'Connor - who, two years ago, shopped him to the police for allegedly using heroin - he sneers, "Sinéad who?" before completely zoning out. And when I touch on the subject of his former bandmate Terry O'Neill's son (who fatally overdosed in Shane's flat in 1999), he practically goes into a coma, not coming out of it until the conversation has moved on. It's a neat trick and one which leads me to believe that he's nowhere near as out of it as he's letting on. Having said that, he's certainly putting the booze away.

After about an hour or so, we're briefly joined by a bearded thirty-something gentleman. "This is Peadar," Shane tells me, "he's the manager of a band called Cruachan - whose album I've just produced. He's one of the reasons I got fucking stuck here in Dublin in the first place. I just came here to do the fucking interviews for the fucking book… which I FUCKING HATE…"

Shane goes off on another rant about his publishers, while Peadar - who seems like a nice enough fellow - gives me the hard sell on his band, before politely departing and leaving us to it. When I turn my attentions back to Shane, he's still spewing darkly into my tape-recorder: ". . . and FUCKING Gordon better sleep with one FUCKING eye open!!!!" (Who 'Gordon' is exactly, I'm not quite sure but, if he's reading this, he has been warned!).

A moment later, he's calmed down somewhat and I ask him how the album production went with Cruachan. "It's good," he says. "They're a great band, a great little band. You know, a producer's job is to… is to… is to… is to… (pauses) We had a great engineer - Denis O'Connor who works in Sun Studios - and me and Denis and the kind of maestro in the band kind of like collaborated on the production, ye know worra mean."

Production duties aside (and, personally, I get the strong impression that Cruachan are just using him for whatever cred he still carries, rather than his superior studio skills), it'd be fair to say that MacGowan hasn't been particularly busy on the musical front in recent years. In fact, let's face it, his career has been in steady decline ever since the Pogues threw him out. Although still fronting the Popes live, he only guested on their third album - last year's under-whelming Holloway Boulevard - and is currently without a record deal. Still, given that Warners have just released another Pogues 'Best Of', the royalties (and booze) should continue to flow for a while yet.

"I didn't know anything about it, I haven't even seen it," he mutters, when I mention the new release. "I heard something about it, but I've no involvement in any aspect of it."

How do you feel about the Pogues' output after all these years?

"Great! Yeah, I mean it's great stuff. I wrote it - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

Are you still writing many new songs?

"I have no idea when a song is coming to me," he shrugs. "I don't try and do anything - it either comes or it doesn't. And then I edit it all down."

What do you think is your best song ever?

"All of them - kersh-sh-sh-sh."

Do you get nostalgic for older songs like 'Dirty Old Town' or whatever?

"Well, I still play it!" he says, indignantly. "What would I be getting nostalgic about?"

Well, for younger days…

"I don't feel old," he declares (he turned 43 last Christmas Day). "Music is what I do. I'm not gonna stop doing it ever. Even if I'm just singing in bloody pubs. I can make a living singing in bloody pubs. I've done it before, I'll do it again."

Do you still get a kick out of being on stage?

"Of course I do, otherwise I wouldn't do it! It's the audience that makes it. I don't give a fuck whether I'm singing in a pub or singing on fucking stage, right, in front of a huge audience. It's just that if they've paid good money to see me, I might pay more attention to fucking remembering the words. In other words, I'll put my energy into a live performance. There might have been some occasions when I'm slightly more drunk than the audience, but very rarely."

Ahem, right. And when are you next playing live?

"I'm probably going down the country tomorrow and then we're flying out from Shannon to America. We're playing Paddy's Day in New York and then we're doing a tour of America. And we're doing a tour of Ireland in May."

Are you looking forward to it?

"I'm looking forward to the money! Kersh-sh-sh-sh."

I understand from the book that you're sometimes not allowed onto planes…

"I have had problems flying on planes, yeah, but I don't like flying on fucking planes anyway so I don't really give a fucking flying fuck, you know."

You holiday in Thailand fairly regularly, don't you? Those 12-hour flights must be a killer!

"Well, Thai Airways are a fucking decent fucking airline. They treat you like a human being, you know worra mean. They don't give a fuck how much you drink, they don't give a fuck. They don't fucking throw you off the plane before you even take off. Some fucking airlines don't let me on. Aer Lingus ain't like that, Ryan Air ain't like that, domestic flights in the USA aren't like that - but BA is probably the worst fucking airline I've ever fucking travelled on. Bunch of fucking arseholes!"

Somehow I can't imagine him having a conversation with an airline steward. In fact, I can't imagine him having a conversation with any kind of authority figure. Does he have to deal with officialdom much?

"Yeah. Getting my own fucking money out of the fucking music is a full-time fucking job."

This new Pogues 'Best Of' will probably make you a packet.

"Yeah, but I'll have to fucking chase it! It doesn't matter whether it sells or not, I'm still gonna have to chase the fucking money. They ain't just gonna hand it over. I'll have to have people chasing it for me."

Fortunately for him, he has more than just royalties from album sales in the pipeline. Something else that will keep him in booze, fags and whatever else it is he spends his dosh on for the foreseeable future is his planned wedding to Victoria. If they can attract enough celebrities, he tells me with a particularly long "kersh-sh-sh-sh", Hello or OK magazine will pay them up to half a million pounds for exclusive photographs (the mind boggles!). Does Shane MacGowan enjoy being famous?

"Fame is something I don't mind," he shrugs. "I can play the music that I want to play and I can make a living out of it. I just play Irish music, ye know worra mean?"

You said in the book that making Irish music was your contribution to the republican cause because you didn't have the balls to join the IRA.

"That was a load of drunken blarney, you know worra mean. There's no way I'd have been let into the IRA even then. I was too pissed up, too fucking lazy to join the fucking IRA. They wouldn't have me and I wouldn't have fucking insulted them by trying. But the old folks back at home did their bit, ye know. When I was a kid in Ireland in the seventies there were still very tangible realities, you know, our house was a house where you'd meet people all the time, and they'd tell you stories that were true stories about what they'd done and all that that. But I don't really wanna go into that.

"Like, most of what I said in the book was a load of old drunken bollocks," he continues. "I generally can't remember what I say the next day anyway. I'm not some fucking reporter, you know. I don't take notes. So I just let rip. I change my mind about everything every day. I'm trying to remember what day it is most of the time, so whatever the fuck I said in the book, if anybody wants to challenge me about it, I'm like… (raises glass) good luck!"

There's a few moments silence as I rack my brains trying to think of something else to ask him. To be honest, I hadn't expected him to be nearly so talkative and so hadn't prepared that many questions (plus, I'm completely pissed by now). Eventually, I ask him is he looking forward to his forthcoming tour of America?

"Wot?" he asks, looking somewhat puzzled.

"Your tour of America," I say. "You're going in two days, aren't you?"

Suddenly he looks almost scared and starts to shift uncomfortably in his seat. "Em… like… you know… I don't really wanna talk about that shit," he stammers. "I mean, like,… I wanna go up to my room for a minute. I'll be back in a minute, yeah."

When he does eventually return, he looks more than a little the worse for wear (for whatever reason) and makes absolutely no apologies for keeping me waiting. To be honest, I'm surprised he remembered to come back at all. Not that I'm one to talk - I'm pretty out of it myself so, rather than continue with the interview, we just sit there drinking, smoking and swapping lewd jokes for a while. Eventually he announces that he'd like to go to nearby Eamon Dorans for a late drink. The two of us get up to leave and, as we walk out of the hotel, I'm surprised to find that I'm doing the Shane shuffle as well. Must be the peach schnapps lowering my centre of gravity, I decide.

Out in the open, we soon encounter one of the city's many street junkies, who immediately recognises him and calls out "Shane! Shane!" as we pass. MacGowan turns to me. "Gorr any money?" he asks. I hand him a few pound coins and he wanders over and has a brief chat with the guy. I keep a respectful distance. Shane's standing over him, holding the guy's hand and looking for all the world like a priest giving his blessing. It looks like a moment I wouldn't particularly understand.

"I like to cut out the middle man and give straight to the source," he explains, when he comes back. "Which isn't to say that I'm like some great fucking charity or anything like that. But I'll usually give beggars twenty quid or something to get them a bed or a bottle, ye know worra mean?"

Speaking of bed, I'm starting to crave mine, but I join him in Dorans for one last drink. He insists that I have another. And then another. My head starts to ache. My cup starts to hic. Fortunately, we're eventually joined by a couple of starstruck girls, who provide enough distraction for me to be able to make my escape, unhindered. "How the fuck do you do this, Shane?" I manage to blurt out, just before I leave. "How are you still alive?"

"I just keep cruising, ye know worra mean?" he laughs. "Keep cruising - and watch out for the icebergs! Kersh-sh-sh-sh."