Fleapit revisited:Crock of Gold:A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan.

"I've been loving you a long time. Down all the years, down all the days. And I've cried for all your troubles, smiled at your funny little ways" - A Rainy Night in Soho, The Pogues

"You want Paddy. I'll give you fucking Paddy" - Shane MacGowan 

I've loved the music of The Pogues for over three and a half decades now. My first Pogues purchase was their third single, 1985's A Pair of Brown Eyes, and so impressed with it was I that it wasn't long before I bought the album it came from. Rum, Sodomy & the Lash was brilliant from its raucous start (The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn) to its emotional epic closer, a cover of Eric Bogle's And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda.

For me, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash remains the high point of The Pogues career (though '86's Poguetry in Motion EP ran it close). The melding of traditional Irish music (fiddles, tin whistles, and uileann pipes) with punk energy was powerful enough but Shane MacGowan gave the band an extra dimension that propelled the band directly into my heart. Both in the brilliant devil-may-care style of his vocals and in the deep, romantic poetry that imbued these tales of drinking, loving, emigrating, and contracting syphilis in Cologne. MacGowan wrote so beautifully about London life that I truly believe he was one of the main attractions, chief pulls, of me moving here.

When I loaned the tape of Rum, Sodomy & the Lash to my Irish grandad, Tom, I warned him there was swearing on it. He told me he'd swear straight back at it. I never found out what he thought of it but, one afternoon, I returned home to find it resting on a kitchen surface. Returned without a comment. In retrospect, their star shone brightly and brilliantly but it didn't shine for all that long. Convention would have it that that was down to singer Shane MacGowan's propensity for alcohol and drugs but would Julien Temple's Crock of Gold:A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (BBC4/iPlayer) prove that convention untrue?

Not exactly. But it was more nuanced that. A film made by people (Johnny Depp & MacGowan's girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke are both involved) who clearly adore MacGowan will, necessarily, be a partial retelling of his, and The Pogues, story but it is far from a hagiography. 

Interviews with Shane (usually drinking - at one point a glass of Asahi Japanese beer, smoking, swearing, being pushed around in a wheelchair, and making that weird hissing sound that his laughter has evolved into) are interspersed with informal chats with his parents Maurice and Therese, his sister Siobhan, his girlfriend Victoria, Bobby Gillespie, Johnny Depp, and Gerry Adams.

Quite a line up on its own but when you chuck in vintage interview footage of Joe Strummer, Gay Byrne, Danny Baker, The Dubliners' Ronnie Drew, and wrongfully imprisoned member of the Birmingham Six Paddy Hill you've got a very rich seam of British and Irish history and it's abundantly clear what side of that divide Shane MacGowan identifies with.

He fondly remembers growing up in a "sepia brown house" in Tipperary and hearing stories about Black and Tans as well as being introduced to booze, fags, and song at an early age. His memories that follow his move to London are less rose tinted but he tells them with the same relish. Being taught by Franciscan nuns in Tunbridge Wells (pointedly, he drops the Royal), having a nervous breakdown, and walking the streets in an era of paddy bashing and "no blacks, no Irish, no dogs".

The young MacGowan got into reggae and sniffing glue. He lived with his family in one of the Barbican tower blocks and attended Westminster School (a "stupid fucking cunt of a place", according to his father) where he sold speed to posh kids wanting to go out dancing or cram for exams. He got, predictably, expelled and ended up stacking shelves in a supermarket and going even more off the rails.

Eating acid and becoming a rent boy (a story told in The Old Main Drag) eventually lead him to a spell in Bedlam psychiatric hospital where he got into painting and writing songs (his first composition, Instrument of Death, was about the atrocities carried out by American soldiers in the My Lai massacre during the Vietnam War).

Released from Bedlam, he fell into the orbit of The Sex Pistols and the punk scene. A life changing moment for him as he saw people like him up there doing it. John Lydon, then Johnny Rotten, was even another London Irish boy. Lydon wasn't sure what MacGowan was doing dressing up in a Union Jack outfit but the fact he accessorised it with the letters IRA written on his forehead suggest he was far from one of today's flag-shaggers.

MacGowan's infamy grew when he appeared in the NME having had part of his ear bitten off at a Clash gig. He started putting out his own fanzine, Bondage, and formed his first band, The Nipple Erectors. Later The Nips. They were a decent enough garage punk band but it was when MacGowan, along with friends Spider Stacy and Jem Finer, formed a new band that things really began to change.

Demotivated by the catwalk the punk scene had become and the new romantic movement that followed in its wake and none too inspired by the alternative route of listening to African or South American music, their idea was to play their own indigenous music. Infused with the spirit of punk and the heart of the great Irish writers that MacGowan so admired.

The name, Pogue Mahone (famously Gaelic for Kiss my Arse), was shortened to The Pogues and under Frank Murray's management they grew to be London's most rowdy and most unmissable live experience before converting that passion and energy into songs that broke into the charts (unusual enough for that sort of band in those days), and then reached the top ten and even made number one.

They worked as hard as they partied and for the first three albums, in MacGowan's retelling, it was all great fun but, eventually, three hundred gigs in one year took its toll as surely as did MacGowan getting into strong drugs to such a degree that he's never quite come back. Doctors gave him six months to live (thirty years ago!) but MacGowan says now it was his reaction to having perform songs like Fiesta which he believed was total crap.

Not what The Pogues were about at all. He also claims he felt a deep sense of shame that he'd never joined the IRA and was affected by falling out of a van drunk in Japan (going as far as to say he went into a 'coma'). Either way, it caused tensions within the band and soon he was fired. An event he claims he was delighted about and one that freed him up to form The Popes. 

A band in which he was undoubtedly number one and called the shots but a band, despite some great music, whose legacy will never surpass that of The Pogues. As this life story is slowly coaxed out of Shane, it is interspersed with footage of The Pogues at the peak of their powers. Ripping through stone cold classics like Sally MacLennane, A Pair of Brown Eyes, London Girl, Sick Bed of Cuchuillan, Dark Streets of London, Waxie's Dargle, A Rainy Night in Soho, and If I Should Fall From Grace With God.

The Broad Majestic Shannon, Dark Streets of London, And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda, Boys from the County Hell ("lend me ten pounds and I'll buy you a drink"), The Wild Rover, and, of course, A Fairytale of New York with Kirsty MacColl. These scenes almost made me ache with nostalgia and showing at a time of lockdown during a global pandemic the idea of being at a gig jumping around with others looked like the tastiest forbidden fruit imaginable.

Some of the other scenes that are interspersed into the film work less well. While stories of the Great Hunger, Irish Republicanism, and Jesus (most definitely the Roman Catholic iteration of) are important to give us a feel for the milieu into which MacGowan grew up but I wasn't quite sure the stock footage of Irish peasants riding around on horses and baling hay really brought much to the party.

The leprechauns were simply unnecessary. The animated sections, too, won't have been to everyone's taste. Weird cartoons of Fin McCool (the hunter-warrior of Irish mythology), the Salmon of Knowledge, and an infant Shane MacGowan drinking and dancing on tables could come across a touch twee (in a film that already had too much Fairytale, we didn't need too many fairy tales as well) and later, more druggy, animations of MacGowan's introduction to LSD had a kind of R. Crumb Fritz the Cat vibe.

There was even a nod to William Blake's Ancient of Days. They distract, slightly, from the story more than they embellish it and with such a rich and fascinating tale there's no need for embellishment anyway. MacGowan comes armed with amusing anecdotes. From the time he was told he'd go to hell for pushing his sister's face in a cow-pat to the occasion when he ate a Beach Boys album in the hope of persuading a Russian ambassador of the worthlessness of American imperialism.

There are tales of daubing the legend IRA on Elvis Costello's stage outfits on a joint tour, a youthful initiation ceremony that involved having a dustbin put on his head and banged solidly for half an hour, torturing kids at school by rubbing stinging nettles on their balls, and having sex on acid with a girl who kept changing colour like a chameleon. 

A good shag, apparently. Must try it. It's not the only story involving alcohol or recreational drugs. There's the time he took speed in a New Zealand hotel that had been built above a Maori burial site. Which resulted in MacGowan stripping naked and painting himself blue (I did wonder where he got hold of the paint). There's also the tale of a juvenile drunken escapade which ended with the young Shane talking to farmyard animals.

Which, of course, brings us to the subject that MacGowan himself claims to be incredibly bored off. His relationship with the drink. He started drinking and smoking at the age of four (which gave him more confidence when singing and dancing on the table, a party trick he'd got into a year earlier) and he'll freely admit that The Pogues played better when they were sober. Even if they enjoyed it more when they were drunk.

He talks of liking drinking cider on his own in the park. how interesting the lives and stories of 'dossers' are, and claims he had no self-destructive impulses whatsoever. That, if he had a death wish, he'd be dead. It's not that difficult. He also makes the point that it's up to him if he destroys his body and his life. It's his body and his life and it's his to do what he wants with.

Which is all true. While at the same time sounding very familiar to anyone who's lived with, or been close to, an alcoholic. A well practiced routine of jokes, denial, and acceptance that somehow shifts the conversation and provides no real insight into what makes MacGowan tick. If you come to Crock of Gold looking for insight you probably won't find that much.

If you want insight into MacGowan listen to the songs, read his poetic lyrics. In interview mode he can be defensive at times, highly amusing at others (he tells Depp he fell asleep watching Pirates of the Caribbean and jokes that life as a rent boy was simply about "the job in hand") and passionate when talking about both those he hates (Bob Geldof, the "boring" new romantics, and, surprisingly, W.B. Yeats who is dismissed as not a real Irishman but a "West Brit" and a "wanker") and those he loves.

In the credit ledger you'll find James Joyce, Graham Greene, Flann O'Brien, Karl Marx, the Marquis de Sade, Brendan Behan, Jimi Hendrix, and Creedence Clearwater Revival but you'll also find his family, his friends, and his girlfriend Victoria. It may often be blurred by booze and masked by ribald humour but MacGowan, ultimately, comes across as a lover not a fighter and as sure as he loves those close to him they clearly cherish him equally.

He was never really much of a pop star but he was, undoubtedly, the real deal. When a birthday tribute concert is not being ruined by Bono murdering one of his finest songs, you can see the love and affection that the likes of Nick Cave and Bobby Gillespie have for him. They know he's a poet, they know he's a rebel, and they know he's a free spirit. As much as Shane MacGowan loves the bottle, his own free spirit can never be bottled and all our cultural lives are richer for that.