In Sunshine and Shadows
"May the wind that blows from haunted graves never bring you misery." - Lullaby of London
Renowned and radiant frontman of the Pogues, Shane MacGowan maintained the chaos of the craic for 65 years. Regrettably, Shane died on Thursday. He will not be forgotten.
As an Irish-Catholic kid from New York, the rhythmic strains of tin whistles, uilleann pipes, fiddles, bodhrán drums, accordions, and concertinas quivered from Dad’s Cutlass Ciera speakers and Mamó National Panasonic cassette recorder throughout my childhood. Those ballads and rebel songs chiseled something deep into my soul, and so did the music of the Pogues, which I first heard in my early 20s in a bar after a rugby match.
Shane's most iconic musical plea, "Fairytale of New York" (1988), is a gorgeously woeful duet with that tour de force, the late great Kirsty MacColl. It's the definitive MacGowan short story, beginning in the bleak setting one might expect – a drunk tank. The song collars the crumbling magnificence of an emigrant New York Christmas gone awry. I first heard it belted out of a jukebox on a flawless autumn Saturday in a Danbury, Connecticut barroom. My clean buzz melded perfectly with the late afternoon greasy window amber light. Above the din of the clinking pints, my teammate Billy the Winger, Shane, and Kirsty piped on. And then the chorus landed:
The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing, "Galway Bay"
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas Day
Everyone but me knew the words. At that moment a window opened to something new. The Pogues energized and recharged the old songs I knew as a boy and recast them into something ripe and seasoned. I was hooked.
The two great vocalists weaved a twine rope of lyrical despair; all booze, bile, and long regrets. At their final drunken pass, they lay it all on the table.
Shane: I could have been someone.
Kristy: Well, so could anyone. You took my dreams from me when I first found you.
Shane: I kept them with me, babe, I put them with my own. Can't make it all alone, I've built my dreams around you.
Then and now, it is one of the most transcending moments in pop music. These lost souls triumph over misery and, in my ending, live happily ever after...for a while anyway.
In December of 2000, Kirsty MacColl died tragically in Cozumel, Mexico.
On Thursday, they were together again.
My coda to Shane MacGowan is a faint echo of a bitter-sweet memory of my father, an actual member of the NYPD choir, and his reaction to a toothless drunk belting out a version of 'Danny Boy' in a long-forgotten documentary, Danny Boy: in Sunshine or in Shadow (1997). Dad, always early and sober for Sunday Mass, never owned a pair of Doc Martens, hated punks, and never came across the music of The Pogues, but was profoundly moved by Shane's rendition of the ballad, enough to rave to me about it in a way that I still recall it. (I tracked down the clip decades later through the magic and beauty of YouTube.)
The last lines of “Danny Boy” reverberate and connect with the last lines of “Fairytale of New York” in that fatalistic Irish way:
For you will bend and tell me that you love me,
And I shall sleep in peace until you come to me!
Shane, a true artist, interprets “Danny Boy” as a victory of love over death. His memory and, above all, his music will accomplish precisely that.
Thanks so much!