A Furious Devotion: The Life of Shane MacGowan

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a b "Shane MacGowan shows off his new teeth; calls it quits with the Pogues. (by Derek)". Anglotopia.net. 29 December 2015 . Retrieved 5 March 2016. Shane's Sunny Delight". Shanemacgowan.is-great.org. 21 November 2010. Archived from the original on 30 July 2013 . Retrieved 19 April 2014.

Across the Broad Atlantic: Live on Paddy's Day— New York and Dublin (with Shane MacGowan and the Popes, February 2002) Shane was heavily involved in the London punk scene in the 70s and was friends with The Sex Pistols, Joe Strummer and others in the scene. His first band, The Nipple Erectors, was a punk band but never got off the ground. It was after the broke up that he formed the Pogues and decided the style would combine his 2 loves Irish music and punk. Shane loved Ireland from a young age where he would spend lots of time with his mothers family on a farm near Nenagh in County Tipperary. Balls will spend a great deal of time with Shane over a two-year period, but the subject is not always game to talk. “Day blurs into night and night into day,” Balls writes of a 2018 episode in MacGowan’s Dublin flat. “He will only talk when he is in the mood …” and spends most of his time watching television (gangster films and Westerns are particular favorites). His glass is never far out of sight. The real strength of A Furious Devotion is the author doesn’t try to sugar-coat any of the stories. He lets MacGowan and the interviewees speak, it’s warts and all. A Furious Devotion does a brilliant job capturing the ‘colourful life’ the singer has led, highlighting his thirst for knowledge from an early age, reading DH Lawrence and Dostoyevsky before he was 12 and his lifelong acute shyness. Initially disowned by much of the Irish Music community he’s now rightly lauded, both ends of this are covered in great detail. The latter especially with an event to celebrate his 60th birthday at Dublin’s National Concert Hall. The night featuring a stunning line up of musicians and actors he’s influenced and wanting to pay tribute, was topped by Irish President Michael D. Higgins presenting Shane with a special NCH Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of the power and poetry of his work, and his singular contribution to Irish music. When reading that section it feels like the climax of a film, the long-awaited triumph of the outsider who we’ve been cheering on from the start.Ali Ryan (30 October 2016). "Shane MacGowan's partner reveals he is 'sober for the FIRST time in years' ". Goss.ie. Archived from the original on 27 January 2019 . Retrieved 26 January 2019. In 2009, MacGowan starred in the RTÉ reality show Victoria and Shane Grow Their Own, as he and his now-wife Victoria Mary Clarke endeavoured to grow their own food in their own garden. She described herself as “a bit of a hoarder” who collected bits of paper for years “not knowing if they had any value”.

Like most good movies from my youth, this is definitely a tale of two halves. The first half tells the story of Shanes life up until he wrote Fairy Tale of New York. Growing up around London with Irish parents during the height of the troubles Shane was an outsider from the very beginning, espeically at the private Westminster School, which he attended due to his precocity with English literature. He was reading the likes of James Joyce by the time he was 10, encouraged by his Dad. Whilst encouraging him to read his Dad is accussed of lax parenting that landed Shane in rehab as a teenager after he had been expelled from school. President Higgins presents Shane MacGowan with lifetime achievement award". The Irish Times. 16 January 2018. Archived from the original on 25 December 2019 . Retrieved 6 May 2020. Myth of Returned. Roseberry Crest, 2007 pg. 16. 2007. ISBN 978-0-9555048-0-8. Archived from the original on 8 December 2012 . Retrieved 16 December 2012.

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Peter Walker (20 December 2015). " 'Everest of dentistry': Shane MacGowan gets new teeth in TV special". The Guardian. Archived from the original on 20 December 2015 . Retrieved 20 December 2015.

MacGowan has suffered physically from years of binge drinking. He often performed onstage and gave interviews while drunk. In 2004, on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week, he gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland. [36] MacGowan began drinking at age five, when his family gave him Guinness to help him sleep, and his father frequently took him to the local pub while he drank with his friends. [37] When pop stars like Bob Dylan, Ronnie Wood, and Lou Reed become artists, they lose touch with the wildness within. They forget they are rebels, and get all respectable on us. They want to be taken seriously. At least most of them do. So…is this also true of Shane MacGowan? Don’t be an eejit! Of course not! Art cannot tame Shane for the same sorts of reasons that no one has ever tamed a Tasmanian devil. It can’t be done.” Dwyer, Michael (2 August 1987). "Mac the Mouth". The Sunday Tribune. Archived from the original on 8 June 2009.Furious Devotion" details Shane's life growing up in and around London with his frequent trips to Co. Tipperary to visit his extended family in the summers of his youth where the Irish mythos seeped into his soul. The book does a great job at situating him in the early London punk scene as he was a staple at shows put on by The Clash and The Sex Pistols. I learned a lot about his first real band, The Nips, and how he met Jem and started The Pogues -- all of this was really helpful as I try to understand the history of the music that is most important to me. As The Pogues grew in popularity due to their genius song-writing and Shane's beautiful and deep poetry, he could handle the fame less and less, driving him further into a substance abuse that began when he was just a kid. It's awful to watch as you read about his continued decline -- the wealth of photographs in the book detail this all too well also -- though it's amazing to see Shane's iron constitution as his body was able to somehow handle the severe and continued amounts of poison he was (and still is) putting into it.