Anyone out there who’s a fan of The Pogues really needs to check this documentary out. It’s a bit under two hours long, and covers Shane’s life from his early days as a immigrant from Tipperay to central London, his early music career, through to his break-up with The Pogues. Fascinating stuff.
There’s a lot of early footage, including Shane’s first (and awful) band, The Nips, where Shane looks all of twelve years old. There’re a handful of Pogues music videos, including one starring Johnny Depp (That Woman’s Got Me Drinking) And there are some fascinating interviews with Jem Finer, Nick Cave, Shane’s longtime girlfriend Victoria Clarke, Paul Simonon from The Clash, and both of Shane’s parents. And, of course, Shane himself.
My God, Shane looks bad. His teeth have almost completely rotted away. His eyes are sunken, his hair is greasy and his skin sweaty. He’s got this raspy, smirking laugh that sounds like a death rattle. He’s always drunk. He mumbles, repeats himself constantly (“I mean like, you know, I mean like, you know, I mean like…” all the while holding a cigarette in one hand and a lit lighter in the other, the two never quite making contact.) It’s beyond tragic; it’s pathetic. You watch this slurring, stumbling wreck of a man until you can hardly stand it anymore… and then they cut to him singing, and it’s fucking magic. It’s heartbreaking: the guy has such an immense talent, even with his alcoholism. It’s not so much that his drinking is destroying his talent: I like his latter stuff with The Popes, even though it’s not up to his earlier standards. It’s more that his drinking is clearly killing him. It’s not just destroying his talent, it’s cutting it short.
Seeing him with his girlfriend, Victoria, is particularly heartbreaking. I read the book she authored a little while ago, “A Drink with Shane MacGowan”, and got the impression that she was a complete twit. She comes across much better in the film, but she’s so clearly enabling Shane’s drinking. And I think she knows it, but seems genuinely afraid that if she made Shane choose between her or the bottle, he’d choose the bottle. And it seems like she’s all that’s holding him together; that if she were gone he’d just crawl into a whiskey bottle and die.
But the movie keeps bringing you back to the music. Like I mentioned earlier, there are a bunch of music videos. Fairytale of New York and Rainy Night in Soho both stand out, as does the beatifully shot Summer in Siam, although I still don’t like the song itself. And he does a duet with his dad for Last of the Irish Rover, which is kind of touching, although they don’t show the entire song.
Anyway, it’s a damned good movie: at turns exhilarating and depressing. If you’re at all a fan of The Pogues, you really have to see this movie. And if you’re not a fan, you need to see it twice as badly, so you can get an idea of what you’re missing.
