In 2018 John Kelly hosted Shane MacGowan's 60th Birthday celebrations at the National Concert Hall – an event attended by President Higgins, with performances from Sinéad O’Connor, Bono, Nick Cave and many more. Here, with the permission of the National Concert Hall, are John’s notes from the official programme for the event.
LONDON: He was known before he was known. They said his ear had been bitten off at a Clash gig, and then pictures appeared in the papers of his young and bloodied face. He was always in the front row at gigs, sometimes dressed in a Union Jack suit, and yet his name was Shane MacGowan. So by the time I first spied him on the streets of Camden Town, he already seemed like some kind of mythological figure.
BELFAST: The band arrived onstage like a punk flying column, and what with the evident booze, and Spider whacking himself over the head with a beer-tray, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it all. Was it stage-Irishry or stage-irony? Or was it neither of the above? To be honest, it threw me completely. I liked what they were doing but, as a fan of Planxty and The Bothy Band, I wasn’t entirely sure I should approve. I think a lot of people felt that way – at least for a minute or two. But all it took was one audible lash of Shane’s extraordinary lyrics for the true nature of things to become clear. These were the wild and edgy cousins I hadn’t yet met – a very particular corner of the Irish diaspora in uncompromising action. These guys weren’t a bunch of Yanks just landed in Shannon, they’d come over on the ferry and their accents were unmistakably English. This was a brand new dynamic sure to cause cultural ructions and I made a point of being in the front row the next time they played. It may have been New Year’s Eve at the Ulster Hall. I wore a suit of 1960’s Kilburn black with a white open-necked shirt.
by President Michael D. Higgins, in the company of his partner Victoria Mary Clarke
and Johnny Depp.
DUBLIN: The first time I properly met with Shane we had a long talk about the various saints who had guarded our childhoods like an elite force of superheroes. We talked about Saint Martin de Porres – a Peruvian Dominican known to the jazz composer Mary Lou Williams as The Black Christ of the Andes, and to gullible husbands in mixed marriages as Sugar Ray Robinson. I got the full Shane experience that night – the sheer pleasure of a conversation with someone with a million reference points. Whether it was music, history, literature or the lives of the saints, here was someone who’d grown up curious, tuned-in and acutely aware. It was something I brought up again when I interviewed Shane for the Irish Times. "I was very precocious," he said, referring to his childhood in Tipp, "I learned to read, write, walk, talk and understand adult conversations very early. And I listened very carefully to everything that was said, and watched everything that was done." I think perhaps that might go a long way in explaining how Shane has written so many unsurpassable songs. It’s all that rich and valued hinterland, observed and re-presented with the sensibilities of a poet. Plus, of course, sheer genius.
NEW YORK: Shane has just brought the house down at Carnegie Hall. In the upstairs room of a swanky saloon we have ordered deviled eggs. Neither of us are exactly sure what they are, or how to eat them, but we eat them anyway. How complicated can a boiled egg be? Lou is looming, all in black. He’s messing with his flip-up glasses. One lens is flicked up like a little skylight. Now both are up. Now both are down again. He’s talking about amps and guitar strings. He’s asking about Shane. He’s shaking his head and saying these very words. "Oh, he’s a talented rascal that one, You see, song-writing doesn’t always go where you think it’s going to go. It’s right over there, and he’s got a lot of it. It’s spilling out of him. Periodically I’ll be at a movie or something, and there’ll be a song and I’ll think, that’s really good. And sure enough, guess who?"
