Here’s a journey around my brother. It may be a trip that’s a little more curvy than straight – which is fine because so is Shane.

He was born on Christmas Day 1957 in Pembury, Kent. The nurses in the hospital were busy celebrating and my mum didn’t get a lot of attention as Christmas Eve turned into one long night, so she wasn’t enamoured with the hospital. But he did get to have his picture on the nursery wall as the Christmas baby. My father’s sister lived in Kent and Shane was taken to her house and put in a drawer as our also newly born cousin, Nicholas, was visiting with his parents from Dublin and taking up the cot.

I came along five years later. There were just the two of us, born to our mother, Therese, a beauty and award-winning Feis Ceoil singer and father, Maurice, a sharp Dublin wit. When we were young, at our mother’s house in Tipperary, Shane used to shove my face in cowpats. On the other hand he once saved me from a horrible death by raising the alarm when I was being chased by a cock-turkey. Uncle John took out his gun and shot it and we had it for dinner. When the rosary was called at 6 every evening we used to hide together behind the crumbling stone wall and he and Uncle Jim used to swing me into bed at night. When we travelled back to Tipp from England we’d cover ourselves in the back of the car with a blanket and write and draw for hours.

Shane didn’t like school, he didn’t fit in. Although, an avid reader, he was very good at English. So good in fact he won a Daily Mirror literary prize when he was 13 and a scholarship to Westminister. Which he really didn’t like. Although there were parts he enjoyed. Like being appointed Minister for Torture when he and his friends formed a Cabinet. Nevertheless when he was caught with his fellows enjoying a companionable smoke outside school gates and was asked impolitely to leave, he complied quickly with the request. He was about 15. He went to Art College for a while but that didn’t really work out either.

He was 18 when punk broke. For him it was heaven-sent. He’d always been into music. In fact he was a devotee. Since he was 12 he’d built a vast record collection – the Beatles, Stones, Pink Floyd, Black Sabbath, Buffalo Springfield, Cream. When Jimi Hendrix died he lay on his bed facing the wall without moving for one day and one night. Always he could be found in his room, nodding his head manically to a napalm bomb of music while greedily devouring his NME, Melody Maker or Sounds magazines. The early 70s found him donning my mum’s pink jacket and applying make-up for his jaunts out. Then one summer’s evening in 1976 I took a picture of him in this Bolanesque garb, proudly clutching an Iggy Pop album. Two days later he had hacked off his regulation hippy hair and dyed it ghost-white. My mum screamed.

And so a face on the London music scene, Shane O’Hooligan, was born. A stalwart at the Sex Pistols gigs and all the early Punk haunts like the Roxy, the 100 club and Marquee, he was the fervid author of a fanzine called Bondage – giving the Jam their first review and first made the cover of Sounds when Jane from the Modettes famously bit off his ear. His ear was actually still in situ but the cover had him sprawled over collapsing tables like a crucified bat, blood oozing from his lobe.

Thus the brother’s familiar, cherished face was heralded a face of the New Wave and the stage was set. Along with his then girlfriend, Punk Queen, Shanne Bradley (who cavorted with the likes of Captain Sensible, Glen Matlock and Johnny Rotten’s crew and had been an early champion of the Sex Pistols, booking them to play her art college) he formed the Nipple Erectors (later the Nips) playing their first gig at the Roxy in 1977.

Over three heady years they spat, spewed and crooned an eclectic mix of punk, 60s garage and pop, producing four singles in all, the first three being rockabilly classic ‘King of the Bop’, 60s garage tune ‘All the Time in the World’ and pop anthem ‘Gabrielle’ all on Stan Brennan’s SOHO records. Shane and Shanne were the mainstays of the band, ripping through an impressive cast of characters including drummers Jon Moss (later Culture Club) and John Hasler (ex-Madness) and by the time big fan, Paul Weller, produced their last single ‘Happy Song’ in 1980, James Fearnley (to become accordionist with the Pogues) had joined the line-up as guitarist. Openers for The Clash and The Jam before, their last gig was supporting The Jam at The Music Machine, December 1980 and they released a live album, ‘Only the End of the Beginning’ on their break up.

Shane was working at Stan Brennana’s Rocks Off record store just off Oxford St. at the time, living on a staple diet of fried egg (lots of pepper) sandwiches on brown bread. Restless musically, he was sniffing around for something new and felt a hankering to get back to his roots. His mate, Spider, was playing with ‘The Millwall Chainsaws’ and it was this group, with the addition of friend, Jem Finer (banjo), that was to lose some bodies, gain some bodies and morph into ‘The New Republicans’ in turn morphing into the fragile early line-up of the Pogues then known as Pogue Mahone.

Their first gig was on 4th Oct. 1982 at the Pindar of Wakefield where Shane worked collecting glasses and booking bands and their early rehearsals ramshackle affairs in the Kings X flat of their friend, a pioneer in snakeskin earrings, who kept his stash in Shane’s bath. Memories of this time are dotted by the crashing, banging and chaos of those first rehearsals in the tiny, cramped back-room and marching with an animated Shane from Rocks Off Records up the road to the Black Horse pub where meetings on strategy for world domination with band champion Stan Brennan, Spider and crew would inevitably be interrupted by a spew of opposing views from Shane and Spider as they spluttered, ranted, raved, sniggered and sent beer glasses jumping from thumped tables while they fiercely debated anything ranging from Russian or Chinese politics to the exact geographical position of Vietnam. Just enjoying the first tastings of success, Boy George, in full regalia, used to frequent the pub and Shane and co. would take a break to sneer and snort as he snorted derisively back.

From the underbelly of London, the Pogues rose like a flame. Transported from watching the band amongst a cosy crew in underground, illegal drinking joints with fellow ‘Punk-a-Billy’ bands like the Shillelagh Sisters and the Boothill Foot Tappers, to frantically drawing Pogue Mahone posters for heaving, sweaty, now iconic venues like the Hope & Anchor, Islington and Bull and Gate, Kentish Town, I witnessed the stomping, manic, ever growing crowds hoist them from obscurity and send them hurtling onto hallowed stages like the Dominion in Tottenham Court Road where the ecstatic audience invaded the stage. This steadfast live following, along with a support tour with The Clash in 1984 brought the band to the attention of Stiff Records and they released their first album, ‘Red Roses For Me’ (Prod. Stan Brennan) as The Pogues in October that year.

Elvis Costello or “Uncle Brian” as the band would chortle was next to pick up the baton, taking them on tour and producing their second, critically-acclaimed, commercially successful and deemed revolutionary album, Rum, Sodomy & the Lash. Now managed by Frank Murray (once manager of Kirsty MacColl and tour-manager for Thin Lizzy) the band were working out of their Camden Town, Hill 16 office. From there I penned their Fanzine, ‘The Ordnahone Missala’, watching agog the heady heights reached by the release of their legendary 1987 single, ‘Fairytale of New York.’

The seeds of Fairytale were sown in the bar of Dublin’s Blooms Hotel sometime after Elvis Costello bet Shane he couldn’t write a Christmas song and Shane grudgingly conceded that instead of killing Spider to garner publicity the band should try to write a Yuletide hit. This momentous decision found us in a frosty Tipp two years later, precariously balancing a wire clothes-hanger on an obstinate, crackling transistor radio, frantically trying to hear the resulting songs chart position and in turn saw the band embark on a gruelling, year-long worldwide tour of their 1988 album, ‘If I Should Fall From Grace With God.’ Despite the success of that album and the two that followed, ‘Peace and Love’ (1989) and ‘Hell’s Ditch’ (1990), continued sell-out tours and kudos heaped on the band by press and fans alike, the toll the hectic lifestyle was taking was obvious and in 1991 Shane and the band parted ways.

Flying solo, in 1992, Shane lent his gritty growl to the first of many collaborations, recording Louis Armstrong’s ‘Wonderful World’ with Nick Cave, the EP featuring achingly mellow and moving renditions of eachother’s songs, ‘Lucy’ and ‘Rainy Night in Soho’. In 1997 he appeared alongside Lou Reed and a host of rock’n’roll greats like David Bowie, Elton John, Joan Armatrading and Bono on Reed’s ‘Perfect Day’ for Children in Need, a UK no.1, selling over a million copies. In his own inimitable style, he guested on a number of diverse projects, from lead vocals on a track from Jesus & the Mary Chain’s ‘Stoned & Dethroned’ to recording W.B. Yeats’ ‘An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’ in honour of the poet. Defying all odds, he has sung in French on a Serge Gainsbourg tribute album, seen his speaking voice musically interpreted for the innovative Gerry Diver Speech Project and found himself an unlikely champion for Nike, when the sports giant used his version of ‘My Way’ for their 1996 advertising campaign.

With his new band, The Popes, he released 1994 album, ‘The Snake,’ which as well as stunning the critics with its blend of “Kick Ass Rock n Roll” (NME) and powerful songwriting “which impresses with a fierce new intensity” (Q Magazine), featured actor-turned-guest-guitarist, Johnny Depp on ‘That Woman’s Got Me Drinking,’ Johnny also appearing with Shane on TOTP and directing the song’s video in which he starred as a disgruntled, drunken lover and Shane a disapproving bartender. The album also featured duets with Sinead O’Connor on ‘Haunted’ and Maire Brennan (Clannad) on ‘You’re The One’ which oozed from the silver screen as the theme song for the 1995 film, ‘Circle of Friends.’

The Popes’ second album, ‘Crock of Gold’, released in 1997 (featuring the gruff, brutally romantic, ‘Lonesome Highway’ was to be their last with Shane at the helm as after 10 years apart, in 2001, Shane rejoined his band of brothers, The Pogues, to embark on a string of sell-out tours and festivals across America, Japan, Australia and Europe which continue to this day.

In September 2012, The Pogues celebrated their 30th anniversary with concerts captured on film and recorded by Universal at the famous Paris Olympia. For two heady nights the theatre heaved with ecstatic, stomping, chanting fans as the band delivered a musical missile. Both the crowd and band were on fire. Just like the early days.

For me, watching the band take to the stage like a line-up of avenging Godfathers, as sharp and classic as their slick, black suits, before unleashing souls as abandoned and fevered as a pack of wild cats, my mind keeps wandering back to the newt-sized Kings X den where Shane would mockingly recline on his paper thin mattress on the floor, raising a solo, diseased champagne glass bubbling with gut-rot beer to Spider, the two of them often breaking into an ill-judged game of gaelic football, wrecking whatever small dignity was left to the pitiful box of a room, before scrambling around for coins to hang around some late night St. Pancras greasy café.

And I smile.

Siobhan MacGowan
www.siobhanmacgowan.com