Michael Morrison, the main character in my novel The Choreography of Ghosts, is determined to leave an imprint on the world. The passing of Pogues' frontman Shane MacGowan made me realise just how much people can leave behind. I wrote this on hearing the news...
STARING at the footprints left by early risers in the snow, it felt like a little bit of Christmas had gone forever.
It’s December 1 and there’s no more Shane MacGowan. Except there is. So much of him is still here.
It started for me in 1984 with an advert in the NME. Offering little more than the band name, The Pogues, the title of the debut single, Dark Streets of London, and a picture of the seven or eight members, it still managed to tell me everything I needed to know.
They didn’t look like the shiny pop stars of the time and, as I discovered on hearing said song on John Peel’s late night Radio One show, they weren’t singing about the same cheesy subject matters and sounded like none of their contemporaries.
At first I was attracted only by the riotous mix of punk and Irish folk, and the fact the frontman looked like he had gone 14 rounds (of boxing, not drinks) with the heavyweight champion of the world.
I saved up and bought their fantastic debut album, Red Roses For Me, from Jumbo Records in Leeds, and the songs, it felt at a young and impressionable age, spoke to me. They were about prisoners, Irish navvies, death, down and outs, the underworld, the darkness, imperfect romance and far flung lands.
The lyrics were, in turn, deep and considered, yet snarled in disrespect of those that deserved to be disrespected. They were poetic yet there was enough swearing to threaten supply lines in a factory producing those parental advisory lyrics they used to (still do?) stick on LPs that contained profanity.
Most of all, the songs oozed humanity. They told of history and the forgotten and ignored whose existences may otherwise have gone unrecorded. They were written with understanding, empathy and feeling.
By the second record, Rum Sodomy & The Lash, Shane was writing the poetry of the dispossessed, painting vivid pictures of cities and those who slept on their streets, the drugged, raped and pillaged.
He managed this for one more album, maybe two, before the mythical tales contained in the drinking songs became reality. He was always honest about this, as he seemed to be about most things. That’s the rub. There’s plenty say it and sing it, but they don’t mean it. You could see in his eyes that he saw the horror as well as the beauty and that must have hurt.
He connected with most people in one way or another and eventually he connected with almost everyone through the Christmas hit Fairytale of New York. Suddenly, all those who had dismissed The Pogues as nothing more than an updated old-style Irish country showband or a Dubliners for a new generation knew there was so much more to them. The Dubliners themselves said so.
The first time I went to see Shane, in London, he was 30 minutes late for the gig, stared out at the audience with a look of surprise on his battered face, gave an almost toothless grin and cracked straight into a faultless Boys From The County Hell.
He lived for the moment, you see. The moment’s gone now though. Gone before Fairytale of New York made Christmas number one on his December 25 birthday. As the song says, he won’t see another one.
I stare down at the thousands of fossil-like leaves trapped in the snow, freezing to death. It seems there’s one for each of us and there is no fairytale ending. RIP Shane.