Great-hearted as she is, Our Lady won’t mind sharing the Feast of her Immaculate Conception with the funeral of Shane MacGowan. The unrepeatable Pogues frontman and lyricist for the ages died last Thursday aged 65 – too soon, but not at all bad in the circumstances – with the last rites read at his bedside.
His family chose the funeral date in recognition of MacGowan’s devotion to the Virgin Mary; the Mass will be in St Mary of the Rosary Church in Nenagh, Co. Tipperary, his mother’s county where he holidayed during his implausible south-east England childhood (schooling at a Tonbridge Wells prep and Westminster, briefly). Quasi-mystical Munster geography belonged in MacGowan’s lyric landscape with the dives, bookies, docksides and building sites of Soho and Boston, and those seedy realities of the diaspora took on mythic qualities in their turn. “The Sickbed of Cuchulainn” careers through 1930s Europe, crashes through the door of a North London pub and ends in the cemetery 15 minutes’ drive from Nenagh: “Then they’ll take you to Cloughprior and shove you in the ground / But you’ll stick your head back out and shout ‘We’ll have another round!’” His writing is not all Tuesday newsletter fare.
MacGowan’s faith was in the wrong order, part of a self-written Irishness with holy medals, pious statues and the Angelus on the radio providing the cultural capital for feats of drink- and drug-riddled poetry. He called himself “a free-thinking religious fanatic”. The Church might bury him, but it can’t complacently claim him. The funeral will follow a horse-drawn procession around the capital, of the sort Ireland once accorded to bishops or republicans martyrs but would today only grant to a musician – though I can’t imagine that Dublin 4 can be all that easy with his uncouth religiosity and sentimentality either.
Take “The Old Main Drag”, a song about a man arriving in London who finds that he has become a homeless prostitute almost before he had time to lose hope. Recorded in 1985, it is still a shocking song – we might claim it’s the grim contemporary language that makes us squirm, but that language expresses the humanity of individuals we don’t, frankly, want to think about. Better to give voice to these people with bigoted words than inoffensively ignore them. Even while trying to avoid facile Church connections, I can’t help but think of the trans sex workers in Italy who are now semi-regular guests of the Pope. Meeting people and treating them as human beings is what counts, whatever language or dogma you may be accused of peddling.
“There but for the grace of God go I,” was MacGowan’s mantra, sentimental as you like. And by that grace on Friday we’ll pray for this messiest of poets even as we remember an immaculate doctrine.
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