Shane McGowan: The Intimate Outsider

In tribute to the incomparable Shane McGowan, who has died, I present this chapter from my 2010 book 'Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland.' Shane was one such, though not for any usual reason.

JOHN WATERS

Shane McGowan, ‘Fecker!’

The last thing any of us had imagined was that the leaden, desperate ejaculations of our drunken uncles might be turned into gold.

Perhaps nobody, in all the history of traffic between the two islands controversially known as ‘the British Isles’, has done as much to make the native Irish feel inadequate as a shambling songster called Shane McGowan. With his band, The Pogues, McGowan, a young London-Irishman claiming connections to County Tipperary, did something with Irish music that was unforgiveable.

In fairness, McGowan did his best to camouflage himself in a way that would undersell his arrival, and avoid provoking the congenital ire and resentment of the native. His gap-tooth grin and incoherent speech patterns seemed designed to counterbalance his capacity to hear Irish music as it had never been heard before and to render it anew for a generation of Irish people who immediately began to kick themselves in the realisation that they should have been able to do this for themselves. Were it not for his unprepossessing appearance and self-effacing mode of non-musical communication, McGowan might well have provoked homicidal fits of jealousy among the indigenous population.

For when an intelligent and unprejudiced Irishman heard The Pogues, he was immediately struck by a sense of inadequacy that made him want to cry. (Strangely, women did not seem to feel the same thing, perhaps because they felt less of a responsibility to define, by Joyce’s stern injunction, the unreconstructed conscience of their race.)

The music of The Pogues was in one sense pure formula: traditional Irish ballads put through the punk mangler, a straightforward forced collision of incongruous elements. Perhaps an uninitiated ear might hear the music and not be moved by anything other than a deep existential laughter, an urge to dance, or just to jump up and down. But this was a luxury unavailable to the Irish, for we knew what this was. It was our culture as it might have been if it hadn’t been interrupted. It was something from the parallel zone of Irish possibility, something that seemed blissfully to be unaware of how history had actually happened and was proceeding of the basis of this glorious ignorance.

McGowan, from a slight distance, had been able to hear and identify something in the music we had grown up trying to escape from — a tradition that we, the insiders, could approach only with great caution, because it attracted and repelled us in almost equal measure. The preciousness and exaggerated reverence which the native music of Ireland had come to be regarded by those seeking to effect a reconsecration of indigenous virtue had provoked in the young an uneasy scepticism that, by its very nature, made them feel both guilty and free. Surrounded by the mythic balladry of their fathers, the post-Emergency Irish had rushed headlong into the arms of David Bowie and Johnny Rotten, pausing only to barf discreetly on account of a rumbling distaste for what had been emerging as an ‘authentic’ musical version of the native soul. The mawkish, sickly-sweet ballads of the be-sweatered jolly Paddies and the puritanical purism of the custodians of the indigenous ‘tradition’ were the inevitable consequence of the execution of Pearse, the unavoidable payoff from the insularism of [the notorious Jesuit] Rev R.S. Devane.

In a healthy society, any undue solemnity towards the artefacts and baggage of the past is, as appropriate, lightly or roundly mocked by the young. This challenge is what keeps a culture honest. But in a society in which the question of culture foreshadows matters of life and death, the necessary contempt of the young is necessarily suppressed out of a fear of causing undue offence. In Ireland, unable to square the circle, we of the liberated young of late 20th century Ireland found new outlets of self-exploration, shaking off the sentimental yoke of a culture that reduced everything to victimhood. But still we could not entirely walk away.

Our attitudes and policies towards the ballad revolution of the 1960s had been characterised by both an involuntary affection and a distaste born of the grim passion it invoked among our elders. It touched on something at once laughable and sacred. Our rebellion against its earnestness was countered by a grudging awe at its indisputable if tattered dignity. The stuff, we knew, had been road-tested under conditions of great privation and desperation, and it still travelled with a lifted heart and a grin of something not too far off exultation.

But this also troubled us. The pain in the music could not help coming to the surface, sometimes in the form of a sentimentality that seemed to ooze like an inadequate self-understanding struggling to find the right key. It disturbed us, and yet we could not bring ourselves to mock it. There was something here that reminded us of something, even if we could not bear to listen long enough to work out what it might be. This music, perhaps more than anything else in the culture we had inherited, provoked in us a capacity for self-recognition that the culture we now inhabited, though ostensibly of our own creation, or at least of our co-option, did not enable us to approach. We possessed neither enough love nor enough hatred to do with the music what The Pogues did. But, the moment we heard it, we knew what it was. The last thing any of us had imagined was that the leaden, desperate ejaculations of our drunken uncles might be turned into gold.

For here was a music that simultaneously expressed both our attachment to a slightly false version of ourselves and an ironic repugnance of it. As though insisting on some undefined ethic of rigour and clarity, it reached into the body of the music, wrenched the sentimentalist heart out of it and cast it away. It was at once a celebration and a refusal, a kick and a kiss. It was a soundtrack for the neurosis born of the post-independence failure of Irish culture to find a way of jumpstarting itself — but also, for the same reasons, a living, jumping, soaring blurt of the spirit that had become suppressed. It was a deconstruction of something recognisable as having been put together in slightly the wrong way — the clue that much more than this was fundamentally wrong. The Pogues offered a rejection, but only of the superficial presentation, the sugar coating. The deeper qualities were subjected to a firm and passionate embrace, pulled together and kicked onstage. The music conveyed an unmistakable sense of nostalgia, but also a rage that seemed to announce itself as deriving from the overall tragedy of Irish history. There was mockery, too, but of a gentle kind that seemed to comprehend the extent of the pathos to be dealt with. It had both pride and the awareness of a received loathing. It celebrated and mocked at the same time. It did not choose between allegiance and disdain, but crammed them both into the same mix.

Shane McGowan, by virtue of both his intimacy with and outsiderness in Ireland, had access to the culture of his ancestors but was not hidebound by the characteristics which caused the natives to become struck down by cultural paralysis. Removed by a generation and a stretch of water, The Pogues had been enabled to achieve a degree of detachment that gave them a vantage point on Irish culture that the insiders could not achieve. This slight distance from the clammy embrace of the culture allowed them to understand something that baffled the indigenous population. On hearing the results, we were jerked into a new sense of ourselves, but also visited by new feelings of inadequacy. How had we missed this? What else were we missing? And who was this bastard McGowan to be showing us up in this way?

Source: John Waters Unchained