My Three Decades of Insanely WILD Nights With Shane MacGowan

I thought Shane MacGowan was indestructible and would outlive us all, so it was a shock when I found out he had died. My memories of him seem outsize, and shimmer with warmth and tenderness. The first time I laid eyes on Shane, a punky, bat-eared snarler with a mouth full of broken teeth and skin as pale as a vampire’s, half-singing, half-shouting “If I Should Fall from Grace with God,” was on the video screen at Poseurs, an indie club in Washington D.C. He certainly didn’t look like the rock stars I saw and idolized on MTV.

Ten months later, in the fall of 1988, soon after finishing university and returning to London, I met him through a mutual friend, Paul Ronan, an Irish music promoter who’d given my then-boyfriend Steve Ludwin his first gig. Shane, like a gale-force wind, blew into our living room and crashed on the sofa. When he woke up the next day, I offered him coffee. “Cooo-ffee?” he sputtered, with a fag hanging from his lips, “Haven’t you got any booze?” “Isn’t it a bit too early?” I’d asked. “Nah, I drink all day, every day,” he said with his wheezy, cackling laugh. Clearly, it was drink that got him out of bed in the afternoons.

Days later he returned like a stray cat with his girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke. He was fascinated that we had vivariums with deadly rattlesnakes and copperheads in the front room. Steve was obsessed with snakes. Standing in our sun-washed living room on an unseasonably warm October afternoon, Shane, in black sunglasses and head-to-toe in black with rosary beads strung around his neck, was in a state, glowing with sweat and drooling. Victoria, with her big green eyes, was in tears, hiding behind the fringe of her long dark hair. They’d obviously had a row earlier. We went out for a boozy lunch that lasted until midnight. By the end of the night, we were surrounded by empty glasses—mostly Shane’s—and were the only ones left in the restaurant.

I wasn’t interested in Shane or his group The Pogues, but I found Victoria quietly intriguing. That was the start of a deep, enduring friendship that’s lasted pretty much our whole adult lives. Victoria started writing for my indie-music mag Lime Lizard and we grew close very quickly. So close that one of her insanely jealous friends had the equivalent of a voodoo doll of me in her kitchen, a cork-board pinned with cut-out tabloid headlines: “BRIT STABBED, BRIT MURDERED, BRIT DEAD IN PLANE CRASH.”

Over time I developed a love and appreciation for Shane too and for his otherness and mad genius. At first I couldn’t understand why Victoria, clever and beautiful, was with Shane, an unwashed drunk who walked around with missing teeth and food stains on his clothes. But I soon found out he was incredibly funny and had his chaotic charms, hurtling from one drama to the next. I wasn’t a Pogues fan until I actually started listening to Shane’s wistful and tender lyrics, so packed full of stories and hard-living, hard-drinking characters, with all the misty, mournful romanticism of Keats and Shelley. “A bit of sex, a bit of drinking, a bit of drugs… a bit of real life,” as Shane liked to say. You could almost feel the hurt and heartache, smell the fags, taste the whiskey. At his spellbinding 60th birthday celebration concert in Dublin, seeing Shane in his wheelchair, singing “Summer in Siam” in his cigarette-scorched voice, with Nick Cave, brought tears to my eyes.

After losing my magazine to a music-industry conman, I decided to write a biography of my favorite band, Nirvana, and asked Victoria to write it with me because I thought it would be fun. Before long, we had a book deal with Hyperion for Flower Sniffin’, Kitty Pettin’, Baby Kissin’ Corporate Rock Whores and were on the road with the band and eventually sharing a $600-a-month apartment in a spooky Spanish-gothic building off Hollywood Boulevard. Johnny Depp and Crispin Glover lived next door at the Fontenoy, but the neighborhood was gritty and rough, “heroin central” as we affectionately called it. Most days Shane would call Victoria from Filthy McNasty’s pub in North London and fall asleep or forget about the call while ordering drinks and tying up our phone for hours.

Mostly Victoria and I worked from sun-up to sundown, living like fugitives since Kurt and Courtney lived up the hill. Things had taken a dark turn after I’d spoken to Vanity Fair writer Lynn Hirschberg, who’d written an explosive story about Courtney. Kurt, feeling betrayed, rang, leaving threats on the answering machine to “throw out a few thousand dollars to have [us] snuffed.” Courtney in turn left a week’s worth of angry messages threatening “to use every dollar and bit of power to fuck [us] up.” She accused us of being jealous, calling Victoria “a tired groupie who went out with Shane, a drunken retard with a quarter of a liver left and two teeth in his head.” Sometime in October 1992, Nirvana’s management circulated a fax to the media, dismissing the death threats as “a bunch of lies” and us as groupies sleeping our way across America to get interviews. Entertainment Weekly ran the transcripts of the voicemails and the story got picked by the LA Times, New York Times and the British and Irish papers. Courtney caught up with us too during a rare night out at our local dive bar and beat up Victoria.

Shortly after we returned to London, battered and bruised, Victoria stayed at mine. She needed the peace after Shane turned their flat into a drug den and cut up all the furniture, her clothes, and shoes, while practicing with his new samurai sword. The summer of 1994, when Victoria came back from New York after starring in Shane’s music video for “The Woman’s Got Me Drinking,” directed by Johnny Depp, she was deeply depressed. Around that time, she was having a fling with Van Morrison while she was separated from Shane. Late one night, feeling down about the relationship, Victoria got me out of bed and wanted to go to The Globe on Portobello Road. I remember being a bit miffed and telling her that shagging that fat little troll would make anyone depressed.

Toward the end of the 1990s, having split up with Shane for a short while, Victoria moved into a flat across the road from me in Chalk Farm. I was working at Condé Nast and living with my musician boyfriend Ben Fox Smith and our seven cats, and saw Victoria most nights and weekends. While they were living apart, Shane was dabbling in heroin. Sinead O’Connor shopped him to the police for snorting smack because she didn’t want to see him destroy himself. She told the Sun that she found him collapsed on the floor at home. Shane was furious, saying he was sitting peacefully on the sofa, watching a Sam Peckinpah movie. That, at least, ended his habit.

I’ve shared a friendship with Shane and Victoria that has spanned more than 35 years. I’ve lived through many of their highs and lows, the tragedies and sorrows that swirled around them. Throughout it all, I’ve never seen a couple who loved each other as selflessly and madly, and for 37 years. I felt a tearful pride as I watched them exchanging wedding vows at the tiny ceremony at Copenhagen City Hall. As Shane wrote in the foreword to Victoria’s brilliant book A Drink With Shane MacGowan, “God bless the day I found her, and I feel like the luckiest fucker alive.”

Beyond the wildness and belligerence, there was a gentle, erudite side to Shane that most people rarely saw. I had spent many nights with Shane and Victoria in dark restaurants or smoky pubs or their modest Islington flat above a shop, which was stacked floor to ceiling with books, records, DVDs, curios from their travels, empty bottles and overflowing ashtrays. We talked about the Beatles, Bowie, Dylan and gloomy writers like Dostoyevsky, Synge and Sartre. Shane educated me about the Black and Tans and Irish history and politics. There was always red wine, lots of gin and drugs, and a galaxy of people floating around him. For someone who rarely drinks, I felt alternately enthralled and exhausted, but always entertained.

One night at the Scala, a musty all-night movie theater in King’s Cross, we went to see a David Lynch triple bill. Shane was wasted and passed out through most of the films, until he staggered up and started relieving himself in the aisle thinking it was a urinal. Everyone started laughing. We were in hysterics and couldn’t stop. Another time, Victoria and I and my friend Nessa O’Brien, who came down from Dublin, were staying in Bono’s Martello tower in Bray. Shane unexpectedly showed up. Waking up in the middle of night, wanting a drink, he came down the stairs of the lighthouse naked and bashed his head on the low archway. He turned on the lights, forgetting that Nessa and I were sleeping in the living room, startled and tried to cover himself with a book. The next night he gave us a repeat performance. Our stay was cut short after Shane kept walking around in the top-floor glass bedroom flashing the neighbors.

One of the things I loved most about Shane, apart from his rebellious spirit and taste in literature, was his authenticity. He lived the way he wanted to live and existed outside the rockstar cocoon. He had no interest in acquiring mansions, fancy cars and all the showy status symbols of materialism. Sure he made millions, but he blew it all and had fun doing it. He was incredibly kind and wished all his friends well. I look back with great gratitude at the unexpected support for my book Strays, a true story about a lost cat and a homeless man, which Shane called “On the Road with cats.” He was generous and had great empathy for little animals and the downtrodden. I’ve watched him hand over £300 (around $450 at the time) to a homeless guy sitting outside our local movie theater, at a time when he was pretty broke.

Earlier that same night Shane and Victoria had dragged me out to dinner and a late-night film—Bertolucci’s Little Buddha, which lasted an eternity and Shane snored all the way through it. Then afterwards, completely off his head, he tried to cut his finger off in my kitchen. When we got back to my house around the corner from the cinema, one of my boyfriend’s obnoxious friends got into Shane’s face and accused him of being a public-school boy and a fraud. He waved her away and accidentally slapped her. Shane was quite upset about it. “I’m sorry… I’m sorry,” he kept saying. “I’ve never hit a woman before. Whaddya want me to do? You want me to cut off my finger?” He went into the kitchen and grabbed a knife. Victoria and I were screaming and took the knife away from him. Earlier over dinner, Shane was in a foul mood and took a dig at me, saying, “Bet you’re glad Kurt Cobain is dead.” I was actually heartbroken. My cat Tad had died five months earlier and Kurt Cobain dying that weekend compounded my sadness. I started crying and Victoria shouted at Shane and he apologized with a childlike sweetness. He could be mean just for the hell of it, but was it hard to stay mad at him because he usually said something funny. I even forgave him when he spiked my coffee with Valium and I crashed out in some strange guy’s bed. The poor guy, one of his Dublin mates, thought Shane had killed me.

One of my last memories of Shane was when I visited him in hospital in Marylebone while he and Victoria were filming his documentary Crock of Gold. He was in good spirits and asked me to bring him a bottle of Gordon’s gin. Returning the next day with Victoria and a family-sized bottle of gin, I noticed a staggering collection of gin had materialized around his bed. When more visitors arrived, Victoria and I went out for dinner, and I kissed him goodbye. Forever.

Only now that Shane is gone, I realize what extraordinary times that I was fortunate to share with this absolute legend, the poet laureate of booze, beauty, lowlife and rebellion. Fittingly, he had the most joyful and rousing rock ’n’ roll send-off and left half of Ireland in mourning. Farewell, my old friend, and thank you for the good times.