It was Christmas Eve, babe
At the peak of his considerable powers, Shane MacGowan brought a lot of people a lot of solace. This Welsh-English Australian was one of them
You scumbag, you maggot
You cheap lousy faggot
Happy Christmas, your arse
I pray God it's our last
Shane MacGowan, Fairytale of New York
I should be talking about the pure unbridled genius of Shane MacGowan and how he was the greatest songwriter of his generation, with the most terrifyingly beautiful of voices — all of which is true — but what struck me at that moment was the extraordinary display of love for this man, so powerful and deep, that poured forth from the audience.
Nick Cave
[He was] kind of an old romantic [who] told tales, told stories in songs, strong characters, he painted a lot of pictures and fairytales… In certain difficult times of my life I could speak to him. When I was in jail, he knew some people, who knew some people and he helped me out of a few spots and I just felt close to him.
Pete Doherty
Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them… The genius of Shane’s contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams – of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from.
Michael D Higgins, Irish president
There are moments in life when you know this will happen one time and one time only, when you get the opportunity to spend time with greatness… I fell in love with him the second I met him and I’m still in love with him today.
Johnny Depp
I don’t know about the rest of us, but they’ll be singing Shane’s songs 100 years from now.
Bruce Springsteen
It’s a first-world problem. Even worse, it’s almost always a middle-class, first-world problem. (And Shane MacGowan was, contrary to all appearances, upper-middle class.)
But it remains a fact that wordsmiths – we’d probably call them ‘content creators’ nowadays – are both widely beloved and massively undervalued.
That’s undoubtedly been true since time immemorial, but I fear it’s become even more true since the dawn of the neoliberal era four decades ago. After all, a song such as Fairytale of New York, a poem such as Ozymandias, or a novel such as Brave New World typically generates relatively little revenue for its creator or anyone else.
A Kenneally case study
Thomas Keneally has been one of Australia’s most successful writers for many decades. After a chance conversation with a Holocaust survivor, Keneally wrote Schindler’s Ark (1982), which was turned into Schindler’s List (1993). Keneally has been described as the Australian Balzac. Both Australians and the wider world have benefitted considerably from his content creation. (Like MacGowan, Keneally is a product of the Irish Catholic diaspora who seriously considered becoming a priest.)
I don’t think Keneally is short of a quid. But given his immense cultural contribution, he’d be justified in believing he’s been rather modestly remunerated for his artistic contributions. This raises the question of why anybody would choose to be a ‘content creator’.
It’s possible, if vanishingly unlikely, that you’ll win the content-creator lottery and become a Paul McCartney. (You guessed it, another product of the Irish Catholic diaspora. As were, more or less, all the Beatles.)
It’s hardly surprising that many young men – from all class backgrounds – see a content creation role as a shortcut to a life where you get “your money for nothing and your chicks for free”. Sadly, the odds of any garage-band wannabe morphing into a commercially successful artist are at least 1000 to 1. Almost everybody soon gives up their dreams of rock ’n’ roll stardom and starts concentrating on their day job.
So why do writers persist in their folly well into their thirties, forties and, ahem, fifties? Don’t they realise they could probably earn more money and enjoy better working conditions doing something else? Why do so many people devote hundreds, often thousands, of hours to writing a book? Especially if they are not a first-time author, they must realise they’ll be lucky if the book gets read by a couple of thousand people and they end up making $1 an hour for their labours.
I’ve thought about this often as I’ve grown older. The best answer I’ve thus far come up with is that people gravitate to doing work they consider important, even if their society doesn’t currently value or reward that work.
The MacGowan paradox
MacGowan was vast and contained multitudes. He was a fierce Irish nationalist – indeed, an unabashed IRA supporter – who was born and grew up in England. The solidly bourgeois town of Royal Tunbridge Wells, to be exact. (The next most famous person to emerge from Tunbridge Wells was Danny La Rue, yet another product of the Irish Catholic diaspora.)
Most of the Irish who migrated to the UK in the post-war period did the kind of unpleasant, poorly paid jobs migrants typically do. But this wasn’t the case with MacGowan’s father. He was middle class even back in Ireland and became upper-middle class, or at least upper-middle-class-adjacent, after relocating to the UK.
As affluent parents frequently do, MacGowan’s father encouraged his children to read. According to Wikipedia legend, Shane was wolfing down James Joyce and Fyodor Dostoyevsky at 11. At 13, he won a literary contest. Shortly thereafter, he won a scholarship to the posh Westminister School. (Half its students go to Oxbridge and seven have gone on to be the UK Prime Minister).
Partly due to substance abuse and mental health issues, MacGowan soon set about dismantling the golden bridge to upper-middle-class respectability his powerful intellect had facilitated. You’re probably familiar enough with the rest of the legend for me not to have to go into detail here. MacGowan gets expelled from Westminister for selling drugs, then dives into London’s burgeoning punk scene. He forms one punk band – the Nipple Erectors – that goes nowhere. He then starts another that cross-pollinates punk with the Irish folk music he experienced during family holidays back in his ancestral homeland. MacGowan becomes briefly rich and enduringly famous thanks to the music he and his Anglo-Irish bandmates create. Music that gloriously blends, as so much Irish art does, riotous joy with inescapable melancholy.
Long story short, he then destroys himself with drink and drugs and does little of note in the second half of his life. Much like Johnny Depp’s other great writer mate, Hunter S Thompson, who never wrote anything world-changing after Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971).
There’s a dark, vampiric aspect to the relationship between rock stars and their fans, with the latter vicariously getting off on the debauchery and inevitable dissolution of the former. Fortunately, some artists, such as Nick Cave, eventually manage to corral their demons and mature out of the ‘tortured artist’ persona they once found so appealing.
Unfortunately, many others don’t.
Nobody puts up statues of tax lawyers
I wasn’t surprised, but I was surprisingly saddened by MacGowan’s long-anticipated passing. I didn’t think his death would get much public or media attention, but my Facebook feed was filled with friends, acquaintances and former colleagues posting heartfelt tributes. (In many cases, I had no idea these people were MacGowan fans and would never have guessed they would be.) It was to be expected MacGowan’s celebrity friends would eulogise him. But I was delighted so many other memorable lyricists did as well. Who would have guessed the Boss was a Pogues fan?
MacGowan’s words mean a great deal to a great many people. Especially people who believe, or secretly fear, they’re losers. One of the many unfortunate consequences of the economic and social hyperliberalism of recent decades is that many of those in the bottom four quintiles of the income distribution are frequently made to feel like losers. Shane wrote about the losers with clear-eyed compassion. They – we – loved him for it.
(Ironically, people in the top quintile of the income distribution probably worry about being insufficiently successful at least as much as those in the bottom quintile do. Or at least fret that one misstep could see them exiled from the winner’s circle. But that’s a whole other Musing.)
MacGowan somehow managed to pull off being a loser while simultaneously being a rock star. I’m not sure how that made rock stars feel, but it sure gave the ‘losers’ some much-needed hope. Rewatching some docos about MacGowan on the weekend, I was struck by just how unaffected by fame he seemed to be, wandering around pubs – seemingly without any security guards or personal assistants or PR flacks – and drunkenly nattering away with the denizens of whatever dive he found himself in.
It’s impossible to quantify MacGowan’s impact in economic terms. Not so long ago, nobody would have ever thought to. But we now exist in societies that know the price of everything and the value of nothing, to quote yet another Irish wordsmith. (I don’t want to reopen any old wounds here. But I think it’s only fair to point out at this juncture that while both sides can lay claim to Wilde, Yeats, Swift, Shaw and Beckett were all Protestants.)
And it’s not like Éire, for all the romantic, leprechauny bullshit that continues to be endlessly spouted about it, has dodged the frigid, soulless embrace of the beancounters. It gulped down the free-market Kool-Aid decades ago and bears increasingly little resemblance to the dreamland MacGowan penned paeans to. (MacGowan reportedly started writing Fairytale of New York in 1985. If he were dreaming it up in 2023, it would likely be about a Muslim migrant from the Middle East turning up in Dublin and sparking off a race riot.)
But all that ephemera will shortly be forgotten. Soon, those hearing or performing a Pogues song will know little to nothing of MacGowan’s life. Or the socio-economic, political and geopolitical circumstances that informed his art.
How many people under 30 know anything about glam rock and David Bowie (1947-2016) nowadays? Nonetheless, I’m certain the hair on the back of the youngsters’ necks stands up when they first hear Heroes.
Whatever the hardships of his life – and they were legion, despite his privileged upbringing – MacGowan may just have achieved immortality. It’s just possible humans – or human-machine hybrids – will be joyously and mournfully belting out the lyrics he wrote on planets that are yet to be discovered thousands of years from now.
That’s not nothing. It may even make up for everything else.