Shane MacGowan’s funeral was both a farewell to a cherished icon and a spectacular tribute concert. Nick Cave performed the Pogues’ “A Rainy Night in Soho,” Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill duetted on “Fairytale of New York,” and the surviving members of the Pogues raised “The Parting Glass,” an Irish folk song they recorded in 1985. The service, held shortly after MacGowan’s death in December 2023, toasted the talent of a songwriter whose legacy was making Irish folk music improbably hip. Among those attending were Irish President Michael D. Higgins, Bono, Primal Scream’s Bobby Gillespie, controversial Irish politician Gerry Adams, Johnny Depp, and Game of Thrones actor Aidan Gillen.
For MacGowan’s widow, Victoria Mary Clarke, the send-off was transcendent. “It was like he was just on the roof of the church looking down, beaming this energy into everybody,” she says on a Zoom from her home, where she’s surrounded by her own colorful paintings. “I felt it and I got up and danced, and I felt him celebrating.”
Watching her husband’s friends interpret his music at the funeral moved her profoundly. “It felt like that was something I’d like to have a record of,” she says. She also loved hearing other renditions of his music at a 2024 tribute concert held in New York. So she started making calls to see how many artists would contribute cover songs to a MacGowan tribute record. She ended up with enough music for three LPs.
The album, 20th Century Paddy – The Songs of Shane MacGowan, comes out today and demonstrates the late singer-songwriter’s range. After emerging from the dark streets of London during punk’s first boom (when he fronted the Nips), MacGowan drew inspiration from Irish reels and music-hall ballads and infused them with punk spirit as a member of the Pogues and, later, as frontman for his own band, the Popes. The repertoire for both bands was a mix of traditional folk songs and MacGowan’s originals, which reflected his equal loves of Irish literature and tin whistles.
Blessed with a crock of gold to choose from, Clarke pared the track list down to three LPs’ worth of music, with songs from every point of MacGowan’s career performed by a roster of artists who appreciate MacGowan’s musical perspective. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s Jim Reid recalls the surprise of first hearing MacGowan’s blend of influences: “To me, it sounded like punk music,” he says. “Once you’d heard it, you’d think, ‘Why hadn’t that happened sooner?’”
The contributors include musicians MacGowan admired, like Bruce Springsteen, Tom Waits, and U2; bands he considered peers, including the Mary Chain and Primal Scream; and younger artists, including the Libertines and Hozier, for whom he was a role model. His old band, the Pogues, recorded a Nips cover for the comp. Clarke also received contributions from Kingfishr and Amble, Irish groups now making their first impact, and from artists with no clear connection to MacGowan, including Japan’s Pinch of Snuff.
“I think he would enjoy the fuss,” Clarke says. “He was very much a paradox as a person because he loved the idea of equality — he was a socialist — but he also really enjoyed being famous and being singled out as a genius.”
Perhaps the compilation’s clearest example of MacGowan’s genius is “The Body of an American,” which he wrote for the Pogues’ 1985 breakthrough album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash. The lyrics begin as an elegy for “Big Jim Dwyer,” a dead American who wanted to be buried in Ireland, “where his father’s laid.” A minute in, however, it turns into a boozy Irish wake as the real Irishmen who were supposed to bury him drank his whisky and sarcastically toasted a saying of his, “I’m a freeborn man of the USA.” It’s a mini novel in a pop song that runs just under five minutes.
On 20th Century Paddy, Dropkick Murphys bring an added layer to “The Body of an American,” since the Boston punk band has covered it for years, and its members are themselves Irish Americans — “freeborn men of the USA.” “I love how that song touches on American history and the Irish American experience to a degree,” the Dropkicks’ frontman, Ken Casey, says. “We wanted to do the cover as on the nose as you could and pay respects in that way.”
Casey reveres MacGowan because the Pogues had such an outsize influence on his life. “Growing up as a punk kid in Boston in the Eighties, it was like this band [the Pogues] was made in a laboratory for me,” he says. “They were taking the music that was somewhat forced down my throat as a younger child and flipping it on its head and making me realize it’s cool.”
Casey attended several Pogues shows as a fan before he had the chance to befriend and sing with MacGowan. He witnessed what he calls the “beautiful chaos” around the singer firsthand when Dropkick Murphys toured with the reunited Pogues during a run of Christmas shows at Irish and U.K. arenas in 2005. “You wouldn’t know where Shane is, and the band would be waiting to go on, and it would seem so dysfunctional and so chaotic, and then they’d walk onto that stage and it would come together seamlessly every night,” he says. “It’s nice to meet your idols and they end up being good shits.”
Clarke could see how well-loved MacGowan was by the way artists said yes almost immediately to take part in the tribute album. Springsteen, she says, said “absolutely yes” right away. When MacGowan died, Casey remembers Springsteen phoning him up (“He had a few Guinnesses in him,” Casey says) to reminisce about MacGowan. Springsteen recorded “A Rainy Night in Soho” for 20th Century Paddy.
MacGowan and Bruce Springsteen, 2023
Victoria Mary Clarke*
Another happy surprise for Clarke was how U2 squeezed time into the sessions for their new album to cut the Pogues’ infectiously upbeat “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah.” ”I don’t think the band realized quite how much Shane liked them and their music because he wouldn’t say it to their faces,” she says, “but he secretly listened to their music a lot.”
Among the contributions Clarke thinks would have made MacGowan smile are Primal Scream’s Byrds-y version of the Pogues’ “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and Tom Creagh’s performance of the Popes’ “Paddy Public Enemy No. 1.” Creagh is not a musician at all but was a close friend of MacGowan’s, so it’s meaningful. She also thinks he’d love the Jesus and Mary Chain’s contribution, since it has a unique history: MacGowan wrote “I’ll Be Your Handbag” for the Scottish group in the Nineties, but they never got around to recording it. He beat them to it, recording the song for The Snake, his first album with the Popes; now, the Mary Chain have contributed their version to the tribute.
“The demo was Shane with an acoustic guitar singing into a ghetto blaster,” Reid recalls. “It didn’t sound like much at the time, because I’m not sure that he was even sober when he was doing it. Maybe that was the reason why it kept getting shelved.” MacGowan did end up recording “God Help Me” with the Mary Chain for their Stoned & Dethroned album, a session Reid calls “a whole thing” since MacGowan wasn’t sober.
“We didn’t know him that well,” Reid says. “Apart from him singing on a Mary Chain record, we’d bump into him at a gig or something like that in London and just get a wee bit wasted together. The way everybody thinks of Shane is the way he was. He got drunk a lot, he took drugs a lot, and that was his thing. It was our thing as well to a degree, but he just liked to get wasted.”
Reid adds that MacGowan’s extracurricular activities shouldn’t comprise his legacy. “That’s actually the least important thing about Shane,” he says. “Shane just wrote great songs, he made great music, and he was an unpredictable character, and you don’t get those in music often enough.”
Clarke says Nick Cave was the only artist who ultimately declined to take part, despite agreeing at first. In addition to performing at MacGowan’s funeral, Cave had previously recorded a duet of “What a Wonderful World” with MacGowan. “He did initially say yes,” she reports, “and then he changed his mind and said that he’d decided he didn’t like tribute albums and he didn’t want to be on one, and when he dies, he wants to make sure there’s no tribute album.” (Cave didn’t reply to a request for comment.)
Most impressive to Clarke was how easily the track list came together, with very few artists’ favorite songs overlapping, though a couple tussled over who would do “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “The Broad Majestic Shannon.” She thought everyone would be duking it out to record “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ biggest hit, about spending Christmas in the drunk tank. “I think people were frightened by it,” she says. “They thought they would be judged, as everybody does get judged. But Hozier was up for it, and he did a really good job with Jessie Buckley.”
Meanwhile, the Murder Capital, the Dublin-based post-punk band, asked to cover a song Clarke hadn’t even been considering: “The Song With No Name,” a lilting ballad on The Snake. MacGowan had written the song as an apology for taking Clarke for granted. “I was brutal, I was ignorant/I was cruel, I was brash,” he sang over strummed acoustic instruments and a tin whistle, “I never gave a damn about the beauty that I smashed.” He took the melody from an old Irish folk song, “The Homes of Donegal.”
“To me, that’s a very personal song,” Clarke says. “Shane wrote it about a breakup that we had. And so I [asked the Murder Capital], ‘Why are you moved by this song?’ And they were like, ‘We feel the emotion behind it.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, wow,’ because it felt like it was written specifically for me. I couldn’t see how it could mean anything to anyone else.”
“Its lyrical content is really what drew us to it: It’s unbelievably raw,” the Murder Capital’s James McGovern tells Rolling Stone. “It’s what a song has the power to be, but often writers don’t go there.… It’s a reckoning with one’s shadow, and acknowledgment of love as the singular matter in life, when survival is taken care of course.”
Their rendition strips all of the traditional instrumentation and finds McGovern singing MacGowan’s lyrics over atmospheric noise, feedback, a few chimes, and strummed guitar, reducing the song to its bare essence. Wolf Alice’s Ellie Rowsell contributed some backing vocals, giving the recording a haunted quality. “Shane knew how to think in every direction and expressed it so poignantly; it just poured out of him,” McGovern says. “I think of him sometimes when I’m writing, and I’m reminded to always say the thing that exposes me, no matter the fear behind it.”
Clarke is pleased that the compilation’s 36 songs assemble a mosaic of MacGowan’s writing across different moods and periods. “All different aspects of his writing are represented,” she says. “There’s so many different moods, and he was under the influence of different drugs at different times and writing different things. The ‘Summer in Siam’ period was very much chilled out on heroin in Thailand. And then you’ve got your ‘Dark Streets of London,’ which was just booze in London early on in the Eighties.”
Waits’ rendition of “Summer in Siam” is one of Clarke’s favorites. “It feels like a Waits song,” she says. On the original recording, MacGowan sing-growls, “All I really know is that I truly am,” a line that sounds perfect coming from Waits, who has been praising MacGowan’s songwriting gifts in interviews since the Nineties. The song originally appeared on the Pogues’ 1990 album, Hell’s Ditch. Its simple lyrics praise summer in the Southeast Asian kingdom that changed names to Thailand in 1939 and its “moon full of rainbows.”
Asked why he wanted to contribute, Waits answered with a prose poem that perfectly evokes MacGowan’s legacy:
With words and music, if the words are saying too much, the melody is buried or drowned … too much bread and not enough butter…. Shane knew language is music.… The voice is music…. The instruments are music…. and also … the instruments are language…. The voice is language…. Music is language
His voice can sing about a well, and I’ll be sure to fall into it … and sing about a factory wall, and I’m weary leaning and warily wooing that girl taking a drag off my smoke, and he can sing about a battle, and my head will be bloody and bandaged at the end of the song.…
His songs come from the earth, the wind, the birds, and the bees, the gone and forgotten but for their songs.