Shane MacGowan, Pogues Front Man and Punk Icon, Dies at 65

Higgins, the Irish president, said “his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams. ... His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history, encompassing so many human emotions in the most poetic of ways.”

Born on Christmas

Born on Dec. 25, 1957, in England to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early years in rural Ireland before the family moved to London. Ireland remained the lifelong center of his imagination and his yearning. He grew up steeped in Irish music absorbed from family and neighbors, along with the sounds of rock, Motown, reggae and jazz.

He attended the elite Westminster School in London, from which he was expelled, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown in his teens.

MacGowan embraced the punk scene that exploded in Britain in the mid-1970s. He joined a band called the Nipple Erectors, performing under the name Shane O’Hooligan, before forming the Pogues alongside musicians including Jem Finer and Spider Stacey.

The Pogues — shortened from the original name Pogue Mahone, a rude Irish phrase — fused punk’s furious energy with traditional Irish melodies and instruments including banjo, tin whistle and accordion.

“It never occurred to me that you could play Irish music to a rock audience,” MacGowan recalled in A Drink with Shane MacGowan, a 2001 memoir coauthored with Clarke. “Then it finally clicked. Start a London Irish band playing Irish music with a rock and roll beat. The original idea was just to rock up old ones, but then I started writing.”

Playing pubs and clubs in London and beyond, the band earned a loyal following and praise from music critics and fellow musicians from Bono to Bob Dylan. Their 1980s output, including the albums Rum, Sodomy and the Lash and If I Should Fall From Grace With God and the EP Poguetry, featured many of their best-known songs, including “Fairytale of New York,” “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” “The Broad Majestic Shannon,” “A Rainy Night in Soho” and “The Body of an American,” which was sung at the wakes of Baltimore police officers in the TV series The Wire.

“I wanted to make pure music that could be from any time, to make time irrelevant, to make generations and decades irrelevant,” MacGowan recalled in his memoir.

Heavy drinking, rotten teeth

The Pogues were briefly on top of the world, with sold-out tours and appearances on U.S. television, but their output and appearances grew more erratic, due in part to MacGowan’s struggles with alcohol and drugs. He was fired by the other band members in 1991 after they became fed up with a string of no-shows, including when the Pogues were opening for Dylan.

His close friend Sinead O’Connor once called in the police when she saw MacGowan taking heroin, according to the BBC. That cured him of the habit, but he continued to defy doctors’ warnings about his alcohol intake.

After recording two albums with a new band, Shane MacGowan and the Popes, he reunited with the Pogues in 2001 for a series of concerts and tours, despite his well-documented problems with drinking and performances that regularly included slurred lyrics and at least one fall on stage.

MacGowan had years of health problems and used a wheelchair after breaking his pelvis a decade ago. He was long famous for his broken, rotten teeth until receiving a full set of implants in 2015 from a dental surgeon who described the procedure as “the Everest of dentistry.”

He received a lifetime achievement award from the Irish president on his 60th birthday. The occasion was marked with a celebratory concert at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with performers including Bono, Cave, O’Connor and Johnny Depp.

“I am blessed beyond words to have met him,” Clarke wrote on Instagram, “and to have loved him and to have been so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him, and to have had so many years of life and love and joy and fun and laughter and so many adventures.”