Shane MacGowan death: Tributes pour in to The Pogues singer known for Fairytale of New York

Former The Daily Show host Jon Stewart remembered working with MacGowan early in his career, writing on X/Twitter: “Pogues. City Gardens. 1986. One of the best shows I ever worked. Thank you Shane. RIP.”

Here’s MacGowan speaking about his musical influences in one of his final television appearances:

Here’s MacGowan singing “Dirty Old Town” on Dublin Simon’s Christmas Eve Busk in 2021:

Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello remembered MacGowan with a video of his and Sinead O’Connor’s 1995 duet “Haunted”. O’Connor died in July this year at the age of 56.

For many years, one only had to look at MacGowan’s mouth to get an idea of his intemperate lifestyle. Writing for The Independent in 2015, journalist Richard Jinman described it as “a monument to rock’n’roll excess; a frightening cavity hollowed out by misadventure and misbehaviour”. MacGowan confirmed a longstanding rumour that some of the damage was caused by biting into a vinyl copy of The Beach Boys Greatest Hits, Volume 3: “I was out of my head,” he told The Independent. Convinced he was conducting talks with “the Americans” after World War Three, he declared, “this is what I think of American culture”, and took a bite out of the record.

Read Independent Music Editor Roisin O’Connor’s MacGowan obituary here:

Among the clips doing the rounds on social media is an interview Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland gave on Ireland’s The Late Late Show in 2019.

In it, the 24 star recalled meeting MacGowan for the first time while he was out to dinner with Ronnie Wood and Sinéad O’Connor.

The pair apparently had a disagreement over politics and ended up “rolling around on the floor” fighting.

“Shane MacGowan at that time had a cast on his right arm that looked as well lived in as anything I’ve ever seen,” Sutherland said, “and he did not have a lot of teeth at the time either, so fighting just seemed unfair.”

Hours later, the actor said MacGowan tapped him on the shoulder and said he needed a place to stay that night.

“I was so impressed with his directness that I said, ‘well do you want a drink?’”

The two went back to Sutherland’s hotel and when he got up early the next day, “all the blankets were perfectly folded… [and] there was a note that he had written on hotel stationery and it was the most beautiful letter I’d ever read.

“It was like poetry. It was just a thank you note but it was so generous, the things he had to say about me and our night and humanity, and it was quite long. And I’ve still got this letter to this day, because it changed my perspective – don’t judge a book by its cover and very rarely trust first encounters.”

The last time I listened to the Pogues’ debut album, I thought I heard a ghost. In the fade-out on side one, a Corkman recites a Gaelic phrase that translates as “There’s no place like home”, and performs a brief, solo lilt.

This was my uncle, Tom O’Grady, whose voice I had not heard in the decade since he died – his contribution appears only on the vinyl LP, if you let the needle run out. Tom was no singer, much less a musician. His appearance on the record was down to his friendship with Shane MacGowan, the band’s frontman and chief songwriter, who has sadly died today aged 65.

The pair met in the early 1980s at Rocks Off, the record shop on Hanway Street, an alley off Tottenham Court Road in central London, where Tom shopped and Shane worked before The Pogues took off. They bonded over a mutual passion for music, film and general carousing, though their shared ethnicity was doubtless important to the friendship, too. As was the case with most migrants to Britain in this period, you gravitated to your own.

Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald has described Shane MacGowan as “a poet” who was unique in how he told “the Irish story”.

She said that Ireland “has lost one of its most beloved icons and the world one of its greatest songwriters”.

“Shane was a poet, a dreamer and a champion of social justice. He was a dedicated Republican and a proud Irishman.

“Nobody told the Irish story like Shane – stories of emigration, heartache, dislocation, redemption, love and joy.

“Shane brought his musical unique style to all corners of the world, and his music will continue to be enjoyed for generations to come.

“Today we mourn his passing. He was one of the best of us. Ni bheidh a leitheid aris ann.

“I want to extend my deepest condolences to his wife Victoria, his sister Siobhan, his extended family and very wide circle of friends.”

“Fairytale of New York” is a drunken hymn for people with broken dreams and abandoned hopes. It is, therefore, a perfect contrast to some of the perkier perennial favourites we wheel out each Christmas.

The song begins with its narrator, an Irish immigrant, being thrown into a drunk tank to sleep off his Christmas Eve binge.

Hearing an old man sing the Irish ballad “The Rare Old Mountain Dew”, he begins to dream about his memories of the female character in the song, and so begins the story of two people who fell in love in America, only to see their plans of a bright future dashed.

A lovely musical tribute to MacGowan from the Ivor Novello-winning multi-instrumentalist Nitin Sawhney, performing a solo piano version of “Fairytale of New York”: