In the late nineties, a work colleague said to me that Shane MacGowan had a great voice. “Sure” I said with a dose of incredulity. We had both been enthusiastically discussing the music and lyrics of the Pogues but I wasn’t going to say the lead singer had the voice of an angel; or even a singer.
That was my initial reaction, but I re-examined it. I had been suckered by the myth that MacGowan was a celebration of extravagant dissolution.
It’s true that by this stage his voice had become more ragged since his emergence two decades before. He sang songs that kicked viciously at the changing world. They seemed to relish disaffection with the world and a refusal to fit in.
Obstinate rejection of the norms of the world was part of the image, but these songs had far more to them than reactionary recalcitrance. Buried somewhere in the punk excess of agitated energy was the conscience of a boy in rural Tipperary trying to reconcile the atomization of the ultra urbanized city, with a cultural awareness of community.
It was a view torn by equivocation and uncertainty and, despite the intense frenetic energy of his music, sadness.
I remember listening to The Best of the Pogues late into the night and being struck as much by a loneliness of the lyrics as much as the trademark rambunctiousness of the music. MacGowan was in a sense the joker who hides his profound search for meaning behind a façade of insouciant revelry.
However, this sensitivity was not what I went to the ‘Shane MacGown and the Popes’ New Year’s Eve concert in the Olympia Theatre every year to hear. That was to have a most intense and insane and wild and enjoyable night.
His memories recalled kin-connected social settings in rural Tipperary. Standing on the kitchen table and singing for relatives when he came back to the cultural sanctuary of family-orientated communities in rural Ireland. This was the cultural consciousness that MacGowan visited and must have planted a sense of longing somewhere in his mind.
His songs, in their exuberant surrender to a self immolating indulgence, tinted with this grief of something lost, gave succor to many Irish diasporas working in London, separated from home.
Michelin chef, Richard Corrigan, recalled once how A Rainy Night in Soho resonated with his experience as a young chef in London. The pangs of loneliness in the hustling city. The absence of human connection. All these things are within these lyrics.
I’m not singing for the future
I’m not dreaming of the past
I’m not talking of the first times
I never think about the last
Now the song is nearly over
We may never find out what it means
Still there’s a light I hold before me
You’re the measure of my dreams
The measure of my dreams
This sense of alienation was palpable in much of his lyrics and many people in that situation that Corrigan found himself in, found comfort in MacGowan’s music. MacGowan knew well that this sharp pain was perhaps the most piercing message within these songs. “I can’t be a spokesman for the rest of the London Irish” he once said, “but I know a lot of them who are very bitter, yeah, especially the ones who’ve been in prison.”
MacGowan’s most famous song, Fairy Tale of New York, goes even deeper. It explores the alienation of an immigrant culturally divorced from the city he resides in, and the alienation of the deepest bonds between man and woman. This is an exploration of dysfunction of the human spirit. As a priest in our parish used to say, “how can peace reign in the world if it cannot reign in the home.”
Then the Body of an American has new world frenetic energy, in the contemplation of the ceremonies of death. MacGowan took a draught from the well of Irish cultural memory and inverted the most common trope of 19th Century Ireland; the American Wake. It’s comical and dark and unruly and chaotic, but touches profoundly on the essence of our relationship with eternity.
I could go on, and many lines will be written about MacGowan’s brilliance, but I do want to discuss the other side of the “Myth” of creativity that I mentioned in the opening of this rumination. What drives and fuels creative people to create?
There is a creative energy that comes from chaos. Some people don’t get this. On the other hand, some think that creative energy is fed by chaos, and that it is necessary then to feed the chaos to inflame creativity. This is an error also.
John Coltraine was one of the most creative Jazz musicians of the past century, and some of those he worked with fed him drugs to encourage his creative energy. High on heroin he worked like a demon.
However, a review of his work during this period reveals that John Coltrane on drugs descended from creative chaos to just chaos. Listen to his ode to his salvation which came after his descent and recovery. A Love Supreme is widely regarded as the best Jazz album ever made.
I recently read Graham Hancock’s book, Visionary, and it made a profound impression. A conclusion from his work is that creativity comes from what some call mysticism or spirituality. If one is to pursue purpose one needs to have a spiritual life. This is the realm of the mysterious and creative. Imagine Joseph Plunket’s poetry if he had not this yearning to understand and express the mystic.
Late one night, last summer, I discussed this very thing with a poet friend from across the water, who is deeply involved in the poetry scene in his country.
He told me he knew all the poets of his country. “Some are very good at following the rules” he told me, “and can write very good boring poetry.”
“But all the best have some form of addiction” he said. “It’s not the addiction that makes them great poets. But it’s the same madness that drives them to obsession about poetry that drives them to abuse alcohol or whatever their addiction is.”
“The drink doesn’t make them great poets, it’s whatever makes them great poets that makes them drink.”
I can understand this completely. Every great poet had an obsession. Patrick Pearse was driven by the ghost of Ireland’s cultural past. Gerard Manley Hopkins was driven by spiritual agony to know his purpose as a servant of God. I would say that Shane MacGowan tried to express the pain of alienation in the modern world stripped of spiritual purpose.
And by the way, I did change my mind about his voice. It was actually quite melodious.
We are sometimes suspicious of the esoteric realm of creativity. But there is more to creativity than chaos. There is mystery and spirituality, and truly creative conservative minds acknowledge this mystery.
Isaac Newton, before he could make his magnificent revelations of the nature of the universe, had to acknowledge that most of creation could not be understood, and that he was like a little boy on the beach playing with a smoother pebble or a prettier shell “whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me”.
I agree with Shakespeare who acknowledges the mystical in his greatest works. His countercultural hero, Hamlet, puts it well: “there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy”. Incidentally, Mel Gibson’s portrayal of Hamlet is an unequaled screen masterpiece.
If you want to “binge” on the mystical experience you could do much worse than putting on The Best of the Pogues and following that with Mel Gibson’s Hamlet. Now there’s a mystical, creative, indulgent, spiritual experience.
MacGowan contributed more in his life to Irish culture than the sordid headlines of his life indicate. Indeed he was recognized by many as one of the greatest lyricists in the world during his lifetime. Take him with all his flaws, and enjoy the rich legacy of music he has bequeathed.
Lorcán MacMathúna