A Very Drunken Interview with the Pogues’ Shane McGowan
Then again, is there any other kind? This is from The Quietus:
Shane MacGowan is unwell. In a hotel room in London Bridge, the Pogues frontman is sat up in bed fully dressed, eating soup with his fingers. He runs them around the nearly empty bowl on the tray beside him, licks them delicately and then wipes his hand on the bed sheets.
The television is on, chattering about the news, but nobody’s watching. There’s a pack of Gauloises on the bedstand and another pack of Bensons lying on the bed. Shane’s partner Victoria Mary Clarke welcomes me in. “Do you want a glass of this?” she says, proffering a bottle of red wine. “It’s very good. It costs £50.”
She pours me a glass and tops up herself and Shane. He apologises for the drag of having to conduct the interview from his bed. He’s had gastroenteritis. “I’ve been ill. Nothing to do with the food. I just overdid it. The food was great. The whole thing was great. Too great. Now I’m paying the price.”
So now he’s laid up in his sick bed like Cúchulainn, the mythical Irish warrior who, when his enemies finally came for him, was said to have tied himself to a standing stone so as to be able to die on his feet.
When Shane wrote his song ‘The Sick Bed Of Cúchulainn’, he transposed one of the stories of the indefatigable hero onto a tale about a fighter with Frank Ryan’s anti-fascist Irish nationalists. The opening track of The Pogues’ flawless 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & The Lash, it’s archetypal MacGowan songwriting: an exuberant celebration of boozing delivered with a punk snarl yet somehow timeless, as if the song had been passed down through the ages.
