and I know that I am dying, and I wish I could beg

I find myself oddly uncomfortable with some of the fulsome tributes to Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, who died a couple of weeks ago. Not because he wasn't an exceptionally gifted songwriter and lyricist, nor because the Pogues didn't make some great albums, but because most of the tributes and obituaries either tiptoe around the elephant in the room or paradoxically embrace it.

We're into mildly contrarian HOT TAKE territory here, again, I suppose, so to go full devil's advocate I offer you the following opinion: MacGowan was a brilliant but troubled man - born, it should be noted, in Kent and sent to various quite posh fee-paying schools including Holmewood House and (briefly) Westminster before deciding to really embrace his ancestral Irishness - whose group, the Pogues, produced two unequivocally great albums, their second and third, 1985's Rum, Sodomy & The Lash and 1988's If I Should Fall From Grace With God. After that the quality dropped off markedly and after MacGowan's sacking by the rest of the band (for generally erratic and unreliable behaviour) in 1991 he produced nothing of any note creatively for the rest of his life, endured increasingly poor health including being confined to a wheelchair after an accident in 2015 and eventually died after bouts of viral encephalitis and pneumonia. 

The elephant in the room I referred to above is of course MacGowan's legendary drink and drug intake. I don't have any particular insight into the details but it's public knowledge that he had a heroin habit for some years; outside of that it seems to have been mainly The Drink. As has been noted a few times before, Irish culture in particular has a bit of a problem with The Drink and the associated romanticised notions of wild-eyed poetic types carousing till the small hours and having hilarious adventures with Paddy McGinty's horse et tediously cetera, ignoring the more prosaic tooth-rotting, soft-cocked, trouser-shitting realities of such behaviour. Is it possible to say that MacGowan's meaningful recording career would have encompassed more than a couple of albums if he hadn't degenerated into a mumbling toothless chair-bound alcoholic? No, but it might have stood a better chance, and the various obituaries that celebrate the drink intake as if it were some sort of essential adjunct to the creative process seem to be making some unwarranted and potentially dangerous assumptions. It's really the same question as could have been asked after Christopher Hitchens' demise some years back: would moderating the booze intake have made them worse at their job? Could it, in fact, have made them better? Even during MacGowan's lifetime, the series of journalists lining up to interview him, ignore his crippling cognitive decline and project some sort of poetic fantasy onto the blank canvas of the monosyllabic answers and incomprehensible cackling they actually got on tape was, eh, I dunno: unhelpful, let's say. 

There's a fine line to be trodden here, and I recognise the danger of getting into the whole "I like a drink, you are a bon viveur, he is an alcoholic" thing, or, to put it another way, it ill behooves someone (like me) very partial to a beverage to be pontificating too snootily about someone else's intake. But I would tentatively suggest it's about contrast: there's no better pint than the one you have at the end of a long strenuous mountain hike on a hot day, for instance. Cut out the contrast so that the drink bit is all you do and you lose a significant part of the point of the whole thing; then again that's what makes hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics hopeless uncontrollable alcoholics, I suppose. There is also an element in the various tributes of heeeeeeyyy whaddaya gonna do, he's Irish, which is of course a bit racist.

There is another elephant lurking about here, and it's this: when you read about some 63-stone teenager whose daily intake of grub comprises a gallon of Ben & Jerry's and forty-two pizzas, you have to ask: look, we've gone well past the stage where they could be walking down the pizza shop themselves to get hold of this stuff, and yes, conceivably they could be phoning out for it (although someone's still got to get up and answer the door), but generally there is an enabler in the mix somewhere. In the case of morbidly obese teenagers it's generally a parent, in MacGowan's case it was pretty clearly his long-time girlfriend and latterly wife Victoria Mary Clarke, who you might charitably describe as endearingly scatty and unconventional, or less charitably as simply bonkers. Either way she was clearly devoted to MacGowan in a probably counter-productive way.

And then, finally, there's Fairytale Of New York. A fine song, no doubt (co-written by MacGowan and fellow Pogue Jem Finer) but somewhat overdone these days, and the melodic motif that features in the song and repeatedly in the lengthy outro is surely partly nicked from John Denver's Annie's Song. And despite all the "lying there almost dead on that drip in that bed" stuff there is just a suspicion of some romanticising of the whole drunken bum thing. That said, it's still better than Mistletoe And Wine, which I'll wager was written and recorded entirely sober, except of course for a certain amount of intoxication induced by OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST. Makes you think, dunnit.