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Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan (25 December 195730 November 2023) was a British-born Irish singer-songwriter and musician, best known as the lead vocalist and primary lyricist of Celtic punk band the Pogues. He won acclaim for his lyrics, which often focused on the Irish emigrant experience; he also received widespread media attention for his lifestyle, which included decades of heavy alcohol and drug abuse. A New York Times obituary noted his "twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life."
Born in Kent, England, to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early childhood in County Tipperary, Ireland, before moving back to England with his family at age six. After attending Holmewood House preparatory school, he won a literary scholarship to Westminster School but was expelled in his second year for drug offences. At age 17 to 18, he spent six months in psychiatric care at Bethlem Royal Hospital due to his drug and alcohol abuse. He became active on the London punk scene under the alias Shane O'Hooligan, attending gigs, working in the Rocks Off record shop, and writing a punk fanzine. In 1977, he and his then-girlfriend Shanne Bradley formed the Punk rock the Nipple Erectors (subsequently the Nips). In 1982, with Spider Stacy and Jem Finer, he co-founded the Pogues—originally called Pogue Mahone, an anglicisation of the Irish phrase póg mo thóin, meaning "kiss my arse"—who fused punk influences with traditional Irish music. He was the principal songwriter and lead vocalist on the band's first five studio albums, including Rum Sodomy & the Lash (1985) and the critically acclaimed and commercially successful If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988). With Finer, he co-wrote the Christmas hit single "Fairytale of New York" (1987), which he recorded as a duet with Kirsty MacColl. A perennial Christmas favourite in Ireland and the UK, the song was certified sextuple platinum in the UK in 2023.
During a 1991 tour of Japan, the Pogues dismissed MacGowan due to the impact of his drug and alcohol dependency on their live shows. He formed a new band, Shane MacGowan and The Popes, with which he released two further studio albums, including the singles "The Church of the Holy Spook" (1994) and "That Woman's Got Me Drinking" (featuring Johnny Depp, 1994). His solo projects after leaving the Pogues included the singles "What a Wonderful World" (a duet with Nick Cave, 1992), "Haunted" (a duet with Sinéad O'Connor, 1995) and "My Way" (1996); he also collaborated with artists including the Jesus and Mary Chain, Dropkick Murphys and Cruachan. In 2001, he rejoined the Pogues for reunion shows and continued to tour with the group until it dissolved in 2014. At a January 2018 gala concert to celebrate MacGowan's 60th birthday, the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, presented him with a lifetime achievement award for outstanding contributions to Irish life, music and culture. Later that year, he married his long-term partner, journalist and writer Victoria Mary Clarke. Following years of deteriorating health, he died from pneumonia in Dublin in November 2023, aged 65.
MacGowan lived in many parts of southeast England such as Brighton, London, and the home counties, and attended an English public school. His father encouraged his precocious interest in literature; by age 11, MacGowan was reading authors including Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Steinbeck, and James Joyce. At 13, he was among the winners of a literary contest sponsored by the Daily Mirror. In 1971, he left Holmewood House preparatory school in Langton Green, Kent, with a literature scholarship for Westminster School. Found in possession of drugs, he was expelled in his second year. At age 17, he spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction; while there, he was also diagnosed with acute situational anxiety. Briefly enrolled at St Martin's School of Art, he worked at the Rocks Off record shop in central London, and started a punk fanzine under the pseudonym Shane O'Hooligan. He was first publicly noted in 1976 at a concert by London punk rock band the Clash, where his earlobe was damaged by future Mo-dettes bassist Jane Crockford. A photographer took a picture of him covered in blood, which was reported in the music paper NME with the headline "Cannibalism at Clash Gig". Shortly after this, he and bassist Shanne Bradley formed the punk band the Nipple Erectors (later known as the Nips).
The Pogues' most critically acclaimed album was If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988), which also marked the high point of the band's commercial success. Between 1985 and 1987, MacGowan co-wrote "Fairytale of New York", which he performed with Kirsty MacColl, and remains a perennial Christmas favourite; in 2004, 2005 and 2006, it was voted favourite Christmas song in a poll by music video channel VH1. Other notable songs he performed with the Pogues include "Dirty Old Town", "Sally MacLennane" and "The Irish Rover" (featuring the Dubliners). In the following years MacGowan and the Pogues released several albums. In 1988, he co-wrote "Streets of Sorrow/Birmingham Six", a song by the Pogues which proved highly controversial due to its support of the Birmingham Six – six men wrongly convicted of the 1974 Birmingham pub bombings, but still serving prison sentences for the bombings at the time – and was banned on British commercial TV and radio.
In Yokohama, Japan, during a 1991 tour, the Pogues dismissed MacGowan for unprofessional behaviour. The band's performances had been affected by MacGowan's drug and alcohol problems, and his bandmates parted ways with him following "a string of no-shows, including when the Pogues were opening for Dylan".
In 2006, he was seen many times with the Libertines and Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty; on occasions MacGowan joined Babyshambles on stage. Other famous friends included Johnny Depp, who appeared in the video for "That Woman's Got Me Drinking", and Joe Strummer, who referred to MacGowan as "one of the best writers of the century" in an interview featured on the videogram release "Live at the Town and Country Club" from 1988. Strummer occasionally joined MacGowan and the Pogues on stage (and briefly replaced MacGowan as lead vocalist after his sacking from the band). He also worked with Nick Cave and joined him on stage.
About his future with the Pogues, in a 24 December 2015 interview with Vice magazine, when the interviewer asked whether the band were still active, MacGowan said: "We're not, no", saying that, since their 2001 reunion happened, "I went back with the Pogues and we grew to hate each other all over again", adding: "I don't hate the band at all – they're friends. I like them a lot. We were friends for years before we joined the band. We just got a bit sick of each other. We're friends as long as we don't tour together. I've done a hell of a lot of touring. I've had enough of it."
Following on from the success of Feis Liverpool 2018's finale, in which he was joined by artists such as Imelda May, Paddy Moloney, Albert Hammond Jr and many more, MacGowan was announced to appear on 7 July alongside a host of guests for the Feis Liverpool 2019's finale. The event was ultimately cancelled due to a lack of ticket sales and funding issues. Feis Liverpool is the UK's largest celebration of Irish music and culture.
In 2020, MacGowan reportedly returned to the studio to record several new songs with the Irish indie band Cronin.
In 2010, MacGowan offered a piece of unusual art to the Irish Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (ISPCC) to auction off to support their services to children: a drawing on a living room door. It earned €1,602 for the charity.
In a 1997 interview with The Irish World, MacGowan said that he wished for "the peace process" to succeed, but believed it would "be a long, drawn-out process". He added that he wished for a quicker resolution that led to "the English" giving up all control of Irish lands, and that Ireland be made into a "socialist republic".
MacGowan began drinking alcohol at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep. His father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. (2025). 9780802137906, Grove Press. ISBN 9780802137906 He suffered physically from years of binge drinking. MacGowan also used LSD, and he developed a heroin addiction during his tenure with the Pogues. In the 1980s, he "was repeatedly injured in falls and struck by moving vehicles". While in New Zealand during a 1988 Pogues tour, MacGowan "painted his hotel room, face and chest blue, apparently because 'the Maoris were talking to me'". Problems arising from his alcohol and drug abuse led to his firing from the Pogues in 1991, and he experienced stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis in the 1990s. MacGowan often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland.
In November 1999, MacGowan was arrested in London after Sinéad O'Connor found him passed out on his floor, and called emergency services. MacGowan was charged with heroin possession in January 2000. When police formally cautioned MacGowan (a process that "requires the accused to admit their guilt"), MacGowan accepted the caution and the criminal case against him was terminated in March 2000. O'Connor said she took this action in an attempt to discourage him from using heroin. Although he was furious with O'Connor at first, MacGowan later expressed gratitude to her and said that the incident helped him kick his heroin habit.
MacGowan experienced years of ill health toward the end of his life. In mid-2015, as he was leaving a Dublin studio, he fell and fractured his pelvis. After that, he used a wheelchair. Later that year, MacGowan said: "It was a fall, and I fell the wrong way. I broke my pelvis, which is the worst thing you can do. I'm lame in one leg, I can't walk around the room without a crutch. I am getting better, but it's taking a very long time. It's the longest I've ever taken to recover from an injury. And I've had a lot of injuries". He continued to use a wheelchair until his death in 2023.
In 2016, Clarke told the press that MacGowan was sober "for the first time in years". She indicated that MacGowan's drinking had "not just been a recreational activity", but that "his whole career has revolved around it and, indeed, been both enhanced and simultaneously inhibited by it". She said that his drinking problem was made much worse by the introduction of hard drugs such as heroin. Clarke added that a serious bout with pneumonia—compounded by his 2015 hip injury, which required a long hospital stay—was ultimately responsible for his sobriety. The hospital stay required a total detox, and MacGowan's sobriety continued after he returned home.
MacGowan was long known for having Tooth decay. He lost the last of his natural teeth around 2008. In 2015, he had a new set of teeth—including one gold tooth—fitted in a nine-hour procedure. The new set of teeth was secured by eight titanium . The procedure was the subject of the hour-long television programme Shane MacGowan: A Wreck Reborn.
In early February 2021, MacGowan broke his knee in a fall at his home. This left him bed-ridden for a short time.
MacGowan was hospitalised for an infection on 6 December 2022. He was diagnosed with viral encephalitis. Days after MacGowan had entered hospital, Clarke told the Irish Independent that he "seems perfectly normal now – he is pissed off because he can't have a drink in the hospital". Clarke reportedly added that she had urged MacGowan to "ditch his hard-living lifestyle", but that her efforts had not been met with success.
On 8 December, MacGowan's coffin was borne through the streets of Dublin on a horse-drawn carriage as fans lined the streets for his funeral procession. Later, hundreds gathered inside and outside Saint Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, County Tipperary, including celebrities Nick Cave, Johnny Depp, BP Fallon, Bob Geldof, Aidan Gillen, President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins and former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. There was dancing inside the church as "Fairytale of New York" was performed by the Pogues with Glen Hansard, Lisa O'Neill and John Sheahan from the Dubliners.
"Fairytale of New York" went to No. 1 in Ireland on the weekend of MacGowan's funeral. On 13 December 2023, the Pogues reissued the song as a charity seven-inch single in tribute to MacGowan and to benefit the Dublin Simon Community, an anti-homelessness organisation that MacGowan had supported.
A pair of posthumous portraits, following MacGowan’s last London visit by artist Dan Llywelyn Hall, were unveiled in London to support the Encephalitis Society.
The New York Times described MacGowan as "a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish immigrant life."
Following MacGowan's death, Tom Waits wrote on X: "Shane MacGowan's torrid and mighty voice is mud and roses punched out with swaggering stagger, ancient longing that is blasted all to hell. A Bard's bard, may he cast his spell upon us all forevermore."
Nick Cave called MacGowan "the greatest songwriter of his generation, with the most terrifyingly beautiful of voices". Bruce Springsteen said the "passion and deep intensity of MacGowan's music and lyrics is unmatched by all but the very best in the rock and roll canon... I don't know about the rest of us, but they'll be singing Shane's songs 100 years from now."
When Bob Dylan performed a concert in Dublin in 2022, he paid tribute to MacGowan while onstage, describing the former Pogues frontman as one of his "favourite artists".
Paul Simon said MacGowan was "that kind of artist that needed to burn very brightly and intensely. Some artists are like that. They produce work that we treasure but they pay for it with their health – their bodily health and their mental health. That was Shane."
The twelfth track on the 2025 Dropkick Murphys album For the People, “One Last Goodbye (Tribute to Shane)”, is a tribute to MacGowan.
Aside from Rake at the Gates of Hell: Shane MacGowan in Context, which covered a portion of his musical career, MacGowan was the subject of a 2015 biography, A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan, published by Omnibus Press. He was also the subject of several books and paintings. In 2000, Tim Bradford used the title Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive? for a humorous book about Ireland and Irish culture. Is Shane Macgowan Still Alive?: Travels in Irishry, London: Flamingo, 2001 (; LCC-DA959.1) () Shaman Shane: The Wounded Healer by Stephan Martin brands Shane as a latter-day London-Irish spirit-raiser and exorcist. This commentary is found in the book Myth of Return: The Paintings of Brian Whelan and Collected Commentaries. London Irish artist Brian Whelan has painted MacGowan (for example Boy from the County Hell); his works are featured on MacGowan's official website, and he is also the illustrator of The Popes' Outlaw Heaven cover.
As Shane MacGowan and The Popes
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