Bright-eyed and grey bearded, Ronnie Drew’s authoritatively gravely tenor seemed to erupt from his barrel chest and golden throat. In herringbone and flat cap, with maybe a cigar in hand and a half-glass of stout in the other, Drew and his group the Dubliners recorded any number of standard Irish folk songs—“Finnegan’s Wake,” “The Rocky Road to Dublin,” “Whisky in the Jar.”
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Among the most haunting ballads to which Drew ever lent his voice was “The Dunes,” the fourth track from his 1995 solo album Dirty Rotten Shame, recorded when he was 64. “I walked today on the cold grey shore,” he sings, a slight pipe drone in the background accompanied by the gentle tapping of a bodhran, “Where I watched when I was much younger / Where they built the dunes upon the sand / For the dead of the Great Hunger.”
The narrative which follows is about a family’s sole survivor of that cursed year of Black ’47, the height of the genocidal famine which decimated Ireland in the nineteenth-century (the country’s population still hasn’t rebounded), returning to the beaches he recalled from his youth. Now, children playing upon those same beaches, “kick the sand around/And the bones they are revealed then.”
Drew sings about the starving millions in the far west of Ireland forced to bury their dead in the sandy embankment, too weak to dig into the frozen soil of the land itself, how they “ate the last of the berries./Then knelt and said the rosary/Round the mounds of dead we buried.” If a tune is a folk song because you could imagine it having been performed a century ago and if it’s a classic because you could envision it being played a century hence, then by every standard “The Dunes” is both.
Yet the song wasn’t one collected by folklorist Tom Munnelly in the twentieth-century traipsing through Galway and Sligo, nor was it something encountered decades earlier by John Millington Synge after he’d learned Gaelic and traveled along the rock-strewn shores of the Irish edge of the Western world. Rather it was something commissioned, penned by a man whose appearance was the opposite of the dapper and professorial Drew, another musician who entered the public consciousness some time in the late ‘70s, first appearing in an article in NME about an attack at a punk show in London that left the composer’s ear bloodied, with the title “Cannibalism at Clash Gig.”
In the grainy black-and-white photo, blood pouring from Shane MacGowan’s ear either after he was bitten by fellow musician Jane Crockford or glassed with a pint (accounts differ), the gleaming future frontman of The Pogues is both ugly and puckish, grotesque and glowing, the same tension that thrums through his poetry.
MacGowan—punk, prophet, and poet—claimed that “The Dunes” was based on his own experiences as a young boy vacationing in County Mayo, unearthing bleached femurs and skulls beneath the white sand of the beach. Haunted by Catholicism and the Irish Republicanism which he felt life-long guilt for not assisting more, MacGowan was most of all haunted by death, an idee fixe in his music and his biography.
Beloved for his punk-rock charisma, the haggard, shambolic MacGowan is too oft-remembered for the demons that ultimately took him when he died from complications of life-long alcoholism two years ago, but as “The Dunes” should demonstrate, the musician tapped into something deep and wide, ancient and subterranean. “His motor skills seemed shot,” recalls Richard Balls in a 2012 interview for his authorized biography A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan. “Several times, he clumsily knocks over his cutlery through the slats in the wooden table… Food is spilled down his shirt.” MacGowan spent the last decades of his life in late-stage alcoholism, yet even then Balls notes how in this state MacGowan is “highly intelligent, extremely well-read… with an encyclopedic knowledge of pretty much everything,” someone with “quite unique talents as a writer.”
“When I first came to London, I was only sixteen / With a fiver in my pocket and my ole dancing bag / I went down to the dilly to check out the scene / And I soon ended up on the main drag,” he sings on the second track of their third album, 1985’s Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash. Young MacGowan’s London is that of the addict and the junky, a kid turning tricks as the “old man with the money would flash you a smile / In the dark of an alley you’d work for a fiver” because “there were boys in the cafes who’d give you cheap pills / If you didn’t have the money you’d cajole or you’d beg.” Rock-bottom music, a song of desperation and brokenness, of “dribble and vomit and grovel and shout,” though not without the dark humor that accompanied MacGowan his whole life, for the narrator was “beaten and mauled… [which] ruined my good looks.” Remember, this is a song narrated by a child, bluntly singing in a litany of polysyndeton about how he has been “shat on and spat on and rapped and abused.”
A single accordion chord drones in the background as MacGowan sings, only to have it abruptly end at the final verse, now the lyrics sung in a dead monotone—“I know that I am dying and I wish I could beg / For some money to take me from the old main drag.” Always risky to read autobiography into poetry, but it’s fair to assume a bit of MacGowan in those lyrics, a high school dropout who was reading James Joyce and Dostoevsky at the age of eleven, sent to London’s Bethlem Royal Hospital—better known as Bedlam—for drugs, alcohol, and extreme anxiety when he was only 16. The Pogues are a dive-bar jukebox band, for sure, but the lyrics aren’t for euphoria, but the hangover.
Like any great group, the Pogues had a particular alchemy, this strange chimera of London punk and Dublin folk, a mixture of that which you’d hear in an Irish pub alongside that which would play at a club where you might get stabbed. Cait O’Riordan’s husky vocals and the high-pitched squeal from Spider Stacy’s intricate penny whistle fingering, Phillip Chevron’s banjo and mandolin picking, the nautical squeeze of James Fearnely’s accordion. But it was MacGowan who was the integral element. Just listen to how anemic the Pogues’ later tracks when Clash headliner Joe Strummer, normally a brilliant musician as well, subbed in for MacGowan. It was lyrical genius delivered with a snarl through cragged and broken teeth that made the band what it was.
If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I’m buried in the sod
But the angels won’t receive me
Let me go, boys, let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud, where the rivers all run day.
MacGowan expels the lyrics as if spitting whiskey onto the audience performing the eponymous number at Glasgow’s Barrowlands concert hall, a joyful scrum of people in green Celtics jerseys moshing. “Bury me at sea / Where no murdered ghost can haunt me,” sings MacGowan, “If I rock upon the waves / And no corpse can lie upon me / Let me go, boys, let me go, boys.” The lyrics are unsettling, but the music is raucous and free, for MacGowan’s poetry is inscribed in performance as much as words, the intonation and shrieking, the mumbling and pausing, as central as anything else.
Irish music purists disdained them at first; the antics of the band sometimes dismissed as embarrassing buffoonery, while the fact that MacGowan was born in Kent, England to immigrant parents and the bulk of the band was English by birth (though Irish by ancestry) added to the charge of vulgar appropriation, though interpreting the band as Irish was always less correct then understanding his lyrics are often about being Irish somewhere other than Ireland, a pining for the “shores where his fathers laid.” Besides, the skeptics are long since quiet, and no less than Irish President Michael D. Higgins (a poet himself) eulogized MacGowan as among “music’s greatest lyricists.”
In that canon there is Dylan, who deserved that Nobel even though the overall batting average is lower than MacGowan’s. Springsteen’s early Jersey Shore stream-of-consciousness surrealism and his American Gothicism on Nebraska could be included, as would Joni Mitchell’s ethereal mysticism and Patti Smith’s sacred blasphemies, along with Leonard Cohen’s Psalmic eroticism. But MacGowan doesn’t always get proper respect, perhaps because the sad memories of intoxicated BBC and RTE interviews overshadow his genius, reducing him to a stereotype.
The Pogues grew from the same London scene as the Clash or the Jam, the Buzzcocks and the Damned, their name from the Gaelic phrase “Pogue Mahone,” or “Kiss my ass,” with MacGowan sometimes performing under the name “Shane O’Hooligan” in groups like the Nipple Erectors, but the melodies themselves recall Drew’s Dubliners or the Clancy Brothers, a fusion of traditionalism with punk anarchism. There are examples throughout MacGowan’s oeuvre, certainly in the lovely “Fairytale of New York,” the greatest Christmas song of the twentieth-century, as performed in heart-breaking duet with Kirsty MacColl. But no Pogues’ album is as perfect as Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash.
“Voice by voice, the band’s songs diluted into the commotion of the tavern room,” Jeffrey T. Rosegen writes in Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, his contribution to Bloomsbury Publishing’s 33 1/3rd book series. “Soon, there’d be more songs to sing,” Rosegen writes, “the kind that all trodden men must indulge.” An album of trodden men (and a woman) is a good way to describe Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, its iconic cover reproducing Theodore Gericault’s 1818 painting The Raft of the Medusa, one of the doomed shipwreck’s sailors replaced with a sunglass-wearing MacGowan. Across the course of the album, MacGowan’s great concerns are explored, from Irish Republicanism to the immigrant experience, the forever-deferred promised of freedom in the future and addiction’s enslaving consolations in the present, all permeated with a Catholicism that understands fallenness.
“There’s a glass of punch below your feet and an angel at your head / There’s devils on each side of you with bottles in their hands / You need one more drop of poison and you’ll dream of foreign lands,” MacGowan sings in “The Sick Bed of Cuchulain,” the album’s first track. Poetry between heaven and hell, with all the sublimity of Yeats and the profanity of Behan, where they “took you up to midnight Mass and left you in the lurch / So, you dropped a button in the plate and spewed up in the church.” Wild music, but haunted. Shades of the dunes when on “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” a MacGowan describes “blood and death neath a screaming sky… And the arms and legs of other men / Were scattered all around, / Some cursed, some prayed, some prayed then cursed / Then prayed and bled some more.”
Back when I used to drink, Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash was a favored album to shell out quarters for in the neon cacophony of the barroom jukebox; “Farewell to New York City boys, to Boston and PA!” belted out at Silky’s, Kelly’s, the Cage. “I’m a free born man of the USA!” goes the chorus in “Body of an American,” from the EP of Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash, a declaration of independence, but half-hearted, knowing that the inverse of freedom can always be another form of servitude.
I quit drinking, but I still listen to the Pogues.
By all accounts, Shane rarely could keep to sobriety, stringing together a few months at a time like moving rosary beads on a string, until he inevitably found himself at the brass rail again. Victoria Mary Clarke, his wife and indefatigable protector, took to begging tourists in Dublin’s Temple Bar neighborhood to quit buying Shane drinks, but the allure of getting a photo with the Pogues frontman was too much for some. Maybe it couldn’t be helped, this man who was soothed to bed at night as a child with two pints of Guinness, for choice in either direction is normally not a question of who ends up on the old main drag and who gets a clean pillow instead.
There are millions of drunks, but few of them are geniuses—Shane happened to be both. Like Orpheus he descended into hell, but unlike Orpheus he never returned, yet such beautiful music came from their lyres. Who gets to come back and who doesn’t—that’s the mystery of grace, which Shane sang about, praying that the hauntings would abate. We’re lucky to have had him.
