CAVANMAN'S DIARY: Unreconstructed MacGowan has been 'coming up threes' for decades

Paul FitzpatrickThere’s a line of Shane MacGowan’s, from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, which refers to a sailor flailing in the high seas and the old belief that a drowning person will surface three times before, finally, going down for good. 
“He’s coming up threes, boys, he’s coming up threes, boys,” is drawn straight from dark maritime lore, the sort of delicious detail from whence the great man mined all of his best stuff.
MacGowan's work is crammed with such bleak, at times morbid and nihilistic, imagery, although he usually lures the listener into his pitch-dark world before signing off with some light.
The classic Rain Street is one of the best examples. The Rain Street MacGowan describes is a quintessential grubby slice of life, where “young girls hawk their wedding rings”, teenagers (“stiffs” who are “turning blue”) die from drug overdoses and priests pick up venereral diseases.
Yet the almost throwaway last verse is a classic MacGowan pick-me-up. In the midst of the doom, he says, he can find a way to get on with it.
“I took my Eileen by the hand/Walk with me was her command/I dreamt we were walking on the strand/On Rain Street.”
Fairytale of New York, which will be on heavy rotation for the next couple of weeks, offers another example. In one of the original drafts of the song, MacGowan sings the following: “The dead stay dead, they say/The blind will never see/The lame won't walk but babe, there's nothing me and you can't do.”
That pattern is replicated across so many of the Pogues' lyrics.
I have been a Pogues fanatic for years. I've worn their albums out, soaked up the lyrics and seen them live in various countries. In my opinion, MacGowan is touched by genius but, as we all, bar him, know, he is deeply troubled. Or, he is when viewed through the prism of the conventional in any case.
The last couple of decades have seemed like a slow suicide of sorts. Creatively, he has done nothing of much worth. His status, to many, has been reduced to the cartoonish drunk in the corner of the showbiz room, ignored apart from when he is the butt of the joke. 
Then again, there always was that tendency on the part of the media to sneer at him – contemporaneous articles from the early days of the Pogues laud his ability in passing while focusing on his excessive drinking – and across the water, there is the usual anti-Irish side to it too, the pissed up Paddy, at it again.
The tragedy is that he will be remembered by many as much for his fatalistic relationship with drink as for his beautiful songwriting. Maybe that's the trade-off.
Long before the Pogues were ever thought of, MacGowan was a punk and a well-known face on the London scene. At 18, he worked in a bar and, legging it home for an hour-long lunch break, he would drink a bottle of vodka before returning to finish out his shift.
He would talk, around that time, about what he would do if he couldn't turn a shilling playing music and would reference the drunks along the Thames, many of them Irish labourers who never returned home. “If all else fails,” he would say, “I will go down to the embankment.”
There is a terrible pathos to that, to a young man with such talent and charisma who viewed life as a wino, drinking cheap cider on a river bank, not as a hellish worst case scenario but as a viable career choice.
That scene was one he painted over and over. “The drunks, the pimps, the whores”, the old-timers in Tube stations who “dribble and vomit and grovel and shout”.
There was always the sense in his words that he was running from something and hiding in the bottle. On one track, he sings “Been drunk as a skunk since I've been home/ From bar to bar like a ghost I roamed/ I can't forget those things I saw.”
And on another: “May the wind that blows from haunted graves/Never bring you misery.”
Last Christmas Day, MacGowan, amazingly, made it to 60; a concert in his honour in Dublin the following month sold out in minutes and drew out the great and good of the Irish music industry. I remember thinking at the time that there was something unsettling about that gig. 
Okay, 60 is a landmark birthday but the man himself admitted he was apprehensive about it, that he wasn't in great form. He appeared briefly on stage looking frail, wheelchair-bound, his voice a sad imitation of the powerful vigour he possessed back in the day; the songs went on, to paraphrase Lullaby of London, though the lights were gone... 
I was glad, in the end, that I hadn't been able to get my hands on a ticket.
Of course, reports of MacGowan's demise have been greatly exaggerated over the years and his propensity for drugs and alcohol is legendary. His descendants lived into their 90s and the man himself believes that such longevity is hereditary. 
“He'll make old bones,” the Pogues bass player Cáit O'Riordan once said.
Shane MacGowan, the greatest Irish songwriter of them all, has appeared to be drowning for a long time, coming up threes for decades, but he’s still here. No ordinary mortal would be alive. Yet recent despatches reckon he is in better shape than he has been in years.
“One place I don’t want to go…” he howls on one track, “Down in the ground where the dead men go.”
And yet on another, he states it plainly: “I will not be reconstructed.” 
Neither will he - and he wears the scars of It, too. But Shane has always been able to magick up a chink of light when all else seems lost in his songs. Maybe, he will do it again in life, with his "lust for vomit" out-lasting us all.


*Originally published in November 2018.