Tipperary's toddlin' lad returns home to stay
By Cian McCormack
Special to The Irish American Post

After leaving Nenagh and traveling the back roads of one of the most remote places in north Tipperary, I found myself standing at the white glossed door of a 350-year-old cottage looking for Shane MacGowan. A note book was clutched tightly in my hand.
Rumors of an unaccommodating defensive rocker, who despised all journalists, came to mind and worries of a disastrous interview played nervously on my mind.

Following a loud knock, the door creaked open. "Come in," prompted a voice. "He's in there."

Directed by Joey Cashman, MacGowan's manager, I turned into an old parlor. Sitting, watching a documentary about film director Martin Scorsese, was the pale figure of Himself, Tipperary's resident folk legend.

As the conversation flowed, worries of a bumpy interview dissipated, because MacGowan, proved himself to be a respectful gentleman worthy of being called a scholar, intellectual and caring person.

To MacGowan, time was not a difficulty as he explained during a marathon conversation which lasted more than four hours. The chat rambled on about his past, his future and his healthy regard for the media.

MacGowan slouched in an armchair in the corner of his parlor before moving on to the kitchen to sit beside an open hearth fire. Beside him, on a low table, was a bottle of vodka, milk and Tia Maria which he poured from regularly into cardboard cups. He was not drunk but offered a drink that was declined. MacGowan's demeanor was calm and — although slurring the occasional word — he told his story with great clarity.

This musician was clear on one thing. The pebble-dashed romantic cottage, equipped with a sodded turf roof presumably from the Famine era — now covered with galvanize — held memories.

"I will stay here for the rest of my life. This has always been my home. However far I wander, this is where I belong," said the singer, as he inhaled deeply from a freshly lit cigarette.

"This is the only place where I ever lived in and it is where I am living now and it is the last place that I will ever live," he emphasized.

To many, MacGowan is the quintessential Modern Irish Folk Hero, a troubled rogue responsible for great musical exploits and lyrical passion.

But he viewed his status more modestly. "I am a modern Irish dance band leader and bar singer and a writer," offered the songmeister of the famed Pogues.

"I don't see myself as anything more. I am a lucky f-----r because there are hundreds of people more talented than me playing around the country in bars who, god help them, will never get anywhere."

MacGowan's success began in an unlikely place. While the 1970s were in the throes of the anarchist punk movement, he gained prominence within London's musical circles.
There, in 1976, he was attracted to rebellious fast-paced rock-'n- punk music after taking in the antics of the Sex Pistols, the first band he said he ever saw.

Following in that group's wild footsteps, 18-year-old MacGowan became a regular at local punk shows and started his own band, The Nipple Erectors.

Since then, MacGowan has fronted two other bands: The Pogues (originally Pogue Mahone) and Shane MacGowan and the Popes.

MacGowan's musical style, an amalgamation of punk rock, Irish trad and ballads, has ensured that his music always remained fresh, lively and to the forefront of the industry. But his childhood in Tipperary was the main influence on his work.

Although MacGowan was born in 1957 in Kent, England — while his parents were on holidays there — he spent a lot of his childhood in his native county.

"I was always going backwards and forwards to London from the time that I was 7. When I wasn't at school, I used to spend all my school holidays over here," he explained.
His mother, Therese, grew up at her grandparent's farmhouse at Carney Commons Three months after MacGowan's birth, the family returned home to Ireland. There, his childhood was saturated with traditional Irish music. His mother's Irish home was the boiling pot for her son's lyric exploits in later years.

"We used to have ceilis here at weekends and all night here in the parlor. This is where you would have all the civilized behavior. This was kept for visitors. For the doctor or the priest or for say, anyone who needed to get away from the mayhem out there," MacGowan said fondly of the memory.

However, now the Carney Common's home was less busy, MacGowan spends his days there writing literature and music. Currently, he is also working on an historical novel about Eoin O'Duffy and the Blue Shirts Irish fascist movement in the 1930s. In addition, he is continuing to write new songs and ballads on his Spanish guitar and for the piano.
One piece, a hauntingly sad little tune called "Little Irish Blue Shirt Boy," tells of a broken-hearted mother worrying as she sows a patch onto the uniform of her son, as he goes out to defend what he believes in, according to MacGowan.

As such music is still a large part of his life. MacGowan was also set to play a concert with his band The Popes at the Ned O' the Hill festival, a small rural community event. They'll appear on Aug. 10 in a marque at Upperchurch outside Thurles in Co. Tipperary. He is then scheduled to play in Dublin the following night. He usually plays gigs in the States, New York and Ireland close to St. Paddy's Day.

His anger and dark humor are considered by critics to be the key to his successful songwriting abilities. "I am angry about lots of things," he said, adding the best way to write a song ""is to be amused in a very black way and to be angry and bitter."

"The anger is something that is in the past. It is not something that is eating you away and eating you away. It is not baggage anymore but there when you perform a song. When you sing the lyrics, when you feel music going through you, the anger comes back through you like magic," he explained.

"It is a joyous sort of anger. It is anger as an energy, it is not hatred or even bitterness. It is just anger mixed with 'ah! let's have a good time.'"

However, in the past, MacGowan's antics and lifestyle have been reported, sometimes to the extreme, by the media. But he said the press has not "given him a rough ride."

"They give me loads of publicity. Bad publicity is great. They love bad publicity and I love any publicity. So, if they think that I am an awful person and want to keep writing about it all the time, that means that I am in the papers all the time, on the telly all the time, on the radio all the time.

"Everyone knows who I am. Every one knows what I do, what I look like," MacGowan pointed out, adding that means there is more of a chance that fans will come to a show or buy a record. "There really is no such thing as bad publicity," he claimed.

He said he was never hurt by reports in newspapers but he worried about the effect the stories have on his parents, relations and friends. "I don't get upset. My parents get upset. An awful people get upset because they don't really know what is going down."

"Being Irish, you have relatives and friends all over the world and if they read in the paper that you are on death's door because you are drinking 18 gallons of rat poison a day or something people forget that you should never believe the press," he added.

"I am not doing harm to anyone else and obviously I couldn't be taking loads of drugs and all that drink or I would be dead. I am 43, for god's sake, how many years have they been saying that 'that guy is going to be dead in a year.'"
 

(Cian McCormack is a journalist living in Co.Tipperary.)