You can have a talent for music and poetry, but a life marked by addictions and a propensity for violence. One of Shane MacGowan's earliest memories is that at the age of five he was already drinking pints of Guinness. In his teens, he also drank (and sold) speed. The first time he appeared in a newspaper was because, at a Clash concert, he was bitten by his friend Jane Crockford on the earlobe and continued dancing bloodied: "Cannibalism in The Clash bolus" was the headline in the tabloin. That was before MacGowan fronted The Pogues, the band that updated traditional Irish music in the light of punk in the early eighties. And this wild and almost always drunk guy brought out an exquisite sensitivity in his songs. From his broken voice, from a toothless mouth from fights and drugs, came verses of an intoxicating melancholy.
The documentaryCrock of Gold: Drinking with Shane MacGowan (on Prime Video) is a Johnny Depp production, directed by Julien Temple, about a key figure in Irish diaspora culture over the past half-century. He was the son of emigrants to England, and spent time in Tipperary, his mother's land. But only in London could the phenomenon that ended up being The Pogues emerge.
As his fame grew, it is said, MacGowan lost control of his career while sinking into vices: they forced him to move away from his roots, to sing songs as commercial as they were distant from his ideology. An example is Fiesta, with verses in Spanish macarrónico about the Feria de Almería. They ended up kicking him out and he founded a new band that was only at his service, with a very similar name: The Popes. The breakup was traumatic (and unprofitable) for both; the singer returned with The Pogues in 2001 to hit the road again, although there were no further studio albums. A serious broken hip in 2015 left him in a wheelchair, in which he does not stand straight. Three years later, when he turned 60, he received the tribute of colleagues such as Bono, Sinéad O'Connor or Nick Cave (and the president of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins) in a concert in Dublin.
The film, from 2020, portrays him in all forms (archive images, interviews, dramatized scenes, cartoons) without saving anything of the crudest. We see that he is still a drinker and quarrelsome. And that, although he claims to be clean of other addictions, it will be better that nobody offers him a heroin spike because he would be able to put it in. He only regrets his life that he didn't have the guts to enlist in the IRA. Among those chatting with him in a pub is Gerry Adams, historic leader of Sinn Féin, formerly the political arm of the terrorist group, today the first political force in Northern Ireland.
A decrepit MacGowan, punk to the end, regrets nothing. To Johnny Depp he says, "You're so handsome you're disgusting." He boasts of ugliness, even though there is so much beauty in the music he created.
You can follow EL PAÍS TELEVISIÓN on Twitter or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
Subscribe to continue reading
Read without limits
Read more
I'm already a subscriber
