Faggots in Gravy
On Friday, I read with some sadness of the news of the death of Shane MacGowan of the Irish punk rock band, The Pogues. Despite having written a novel based on punk rock - Vicious (https://www.michaelforester.co.uk/books/vicious) - I was never actually a punk rocker myself. But I did take a considerable interest in what lay behind the intensity of emotion that drove so many young people of my generation to push safety pins through their cheeks, carve their hair into styles last seen on native North Americans in the nineteenth century and to dress in black plastic bin liners. That was in the 1970s, when some of the better-known icons such as Sid Vicious were drawn to extremes of suicide and, (though it was never proven in court), possibly murder.
The only explanation I was ever able to come up with as to why, is the likelihood that such behaviour was driven by hopelessness arising from a sense of powerlessness. When you are born into poverty, relative or absolute, when your failure in formal education pushes you to the margins of ridicule and exclusion, when the prospect of finding meaningful, adequately remunerated employment are non-existent, then you find ways of expressing your anger and frustration, however odd or offensive it appears to the well fed, well-healed, well-satisfied conformists that look on in bemusement.
The behaviour of the few strikes a chord with the dissatisfactions of the many and pretty soon you have a movement, a bandwagon onto which the money-makers will always jump. A concert where musicians smash their instruments, spit on the audience and scream f*** you at anyone in site? Sure, we can give you that. Buy your, tickets, pay your dues. Come and enjoy hating everyone and everything that you blame for an evening in the company of hordes of your fellow frustrated. Then return home to whatever home might be – a middle-class parental halls-adjoining semi-d, an ill-maintained council house on a deprived estate, or a cardboard box in a shop doorway. Nothing has changed. Tomorrow you will get up to face the same future you fall sleep with tonight. But for a few hours you have felt better.
By the 1980s, the energy of punk had to some extent been channelled and mixed with older musical traditions practised by arguably more gifted musicians. One of the results was the emergence of punk folk and one of its high priests, Shane MacGowan, fixed into the formaldehyde of memory by Fairytale For New York. Indisputably tuneful and lyrical, it sustains and encapsulates the hopeless cynicism of original punk:
Christmas Day in the drunk tank makes me think of you, babe. Because I got on a lucky one that came in at 18 to 1, that’s an omen that next year is definitely going to be better for both of us. Those dreams we hid for fear of them being dashed, we can share them, mingle them, until together we realise them. So we kissed in the corner and danced through the night – until, our shared dream faded and the ‘you’ I found myself with was no longer handsome or pretty. Now I see you as an old slut on junk, a scumbag, a maggot, and I pray God this is our last Christmas together. You let me down. And yet I still can’t leave you because I can’t make it on my own. So here we remain, lost in the cycle of hopelessness and cynicism born of disappointment, too broken inside and outside to muster the will to change. And through it all, those bells are still ringing out for Christmas Day.
Much later, in 2000, Kirsty MacColl, Shane MacGowan‘s co-singer on Fairytale For New York, died tragically, saving her teenage son in a diving accident in Mexico. Shane MacGowan battled alcohol addiction all his life, stemming, it is said, from being given Guinness to drink at the age of 5 to help him sleep. That was followed by a life spent professionally and personally in drinking establishments. Is it a tad ironic that before dying on the 30th of November he had accepted the administration of last rites?
Sleep soundly, Shane.And when you next wake, keep hitting those keys. You might finally make it to number one this year, if we can live with your use Word f***** but somehow I really don’t think you’ll give a f***.