When Shane MacGowan died in 2023 at the age of 65, the response to his passing was profound, particularly in Ireland. In Dublin, a horse-drawn carriage conveyed his coffin past thousands of mourners lining the city’s streets. His funeral mass, held in County Tipperary, felt like both a state event and a boisterous send-off, as presidents and politicians, film stars and rock ’n’ rollers filled the pews of St. Mary of the Rosary Church to remember one of the country’s defining songwriters and storytellers.
The depth of feeling for MacGowan and his pre-eminent place in the Irish consciousness was impressive considering that he hadn’t released an album in more than a quarter century. MacGowan’s recorded output was relatively small: a smattering of tracks from his punk-era outfit the Nips, five epochal LPs with the Pogues and another pair of studio albums with his latter-day combo the Popes. But the sheer coruscating power of his work — deeply felt love songs and picaresque narratives like “Fairytale of New York,” “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and “The Old Main Drag” — would have an outsized impact in Ireland and beyond.
“I don’t know if anyone’s going to be listening to my music in a hundred years,” said Bruce Springsteen in a recent interview. “But I do know people are going to be listening to Shane MacGowan’s songs.” Springsteen added that “there was something timeless and indelible about what he created.”
Springsteen is one of some 40 artists who contribute to a new album, “20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan.” The double-disc set brings together some of MacGowan’s high-profile admirers (U2, Tom Waits) and musical peers (Primal Scream, the Jesus and Mary Chain), as well as multiple generations of Irish acts (Bob Geldof, Glen Hansard, who recorded before his own death in July), interpreting songs from across his career.
Work on the project began shortly after MacGowan’s death, with his widow, Victoria Mary Clarke, coordinating the effort. While touring Ireland in the spring of 2024, Springsteen had begun performing the Pogues’ ballad “A Rainy Night in Soho” in tribute. “I thought Bruce’s version was really beautiful,” Clarke said in an interview. “He almost crooned it like Frank Sinatra, which was interesting, because Shane had written that song with Sinatra in mind. It was his dream to have Frank sing it. Getting Bruce to do it would be the next best thing.”
In addition to Springsteen, Clarke enlisted a wide array of artists: old MacGowan pals including the folk singers Tom Creagh and Lisa O’Neill; fellow travelers like Steve Earle and Johnny Depp; far-flung acolytes like Dropkick Murphys and the Japanese group Pinch of Snuff; and Irish cultural figures including the pop star Hozier and the Oscar-winning actress Jessie Buckley. As Hozier writes in the album’s liner notes, the enduring appeal of MacGowan’s work is that it’s filled with “astounding joyfulness and grief.”
“Hearing all these artists recording Shane songs, it felt very personal, very intimate and quite emotional,” Clarke said. “Every time I got a new track from someone, I could sense there was a lot of love going into these recordings.”
Long before MacGowan would become, as Waits hailed him, “a Bard’s bard,” he was absorbing the influences that would define his songs. Born in Kent, England, to Irish parents, MacGowan would spend his summers in Tipperary’s Carney Commons, where he heard music and stories from his mother’s family, his imagination fueled by tales of Irish myth and revolution. Guided by his father’s elevated literary tastes — James Joyce and James Stephens, Graham Greene and Aldous Huxley — MacGowan also found inspiration in comic books and American films, as well as the nightly news recounting the upheavals at the end of the 1960s.
“When he was quite young, Shane became very interested in the Vietnam War and the Black Panthers,” said Richard Balls, author of the definitive MacGowan biography “A Furious Devotion.” “Shane was fascinated by the relationship between violence and politics.” The first song MacGowan would write, “Instrument of Death,” was about the My Lai massacre. “Fighting oppression would become a theme that cropped up over and over in his work.”
A troubled teen — MacGowan spent time in a psychiatric institution, a byproduct of his lifelong battles with drink and drugs — he would become one of the faces of the burgeoning London punk scene in the mid-70s and formed his first band, the Nips.
But MacGowan would find true purpose in his ancestral music. In 1982, he and a group of London musicians — including Spider Stacy, Jem Finer and James Fearnley — founded the Pogues, fusing traditional Celtic instrumentation with punk energy. Formed amid the tense atmosphere of the Troubles and a series of I.R.A. bombings in the United Kingdom, the Pogues’ rebel music initially faced heavy resistance — but MacGowan’s mission was clear. “Shane wanted to bring Irish music to the world,” Clarke said, “in the same way that Bob Marley brought reggae to the world.”
The bulk of the material on “20th Century Paddy” draws from MacGowan’s creative peak with the Pogues: A spirited U2 find the unbridled romantic joy at the heart of “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah”; Waits offers a haunting, guttural reading of “Summer in Siam”; and Earle reimagines the hurtling prayer “If I Should Fall From Grace With God,” slowing it dramatically in order to, as he put it, “examine, syllable by syllable, one of the greatest songs ever written.”
But it is “The Broad Majestic Shannon,” rendered as a stark piano ballad by Liam Ó Maonlaí of Hothouse Flowers, that might be MacGowan’s most quintessential composition — intrinsically Irish in its subject matter, but universal in its appeal.
“It’s a song about exile and you could see how that resonates very strongly with Irish people,” said Stacy of the Pogues. “But I think it actually resonates with anyone who’s ever experienced any kind of loss, any kind of separation. It’s full of a yearning for something that’s gone, but still exists somewhere, somehow. The ability to convey that feeling was a kind of magic. That was the genius of Shane.”
MacGowan would ultimately succeed in bringing Irish music to a global audience. The Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York” — a scuzzy character study and anthem of the Irish diaspora, featuring the late Kirsty MacColl — has improbably become a Christmas classic (the new version is rendered by Hozier and Buckley).
“Shane was fascinated by the idea of human imperfection,” said Clarke of “Fairytale.” “He loved the idea of people being totally flawed and also having the capacity to be beautiful.”
MacGowan’s spirit can also be felt in a new generation of Irish folk acts who contribute to “20th Century Paddy,” including the chart-topping band Kingfishr, who offer a mournful take on “The Sunny Side of the Street,” and the rising combo Madra Salach, who deliver a rousing “Turkish Song of the Damned.”
MacGowan left the Pogues in 1991 and his own recorded output would become increasingly sporadic; his final full-length album came with the Popes’ 1997 LP “The Crock of Gold.” He spent the last decades of his life dealing with worsening addiction and health issues. The songs, however, kept coming. “He was hearing music in his head all the time,” said Clarke. “He almost had to drink and take pills to damp down the constant chatter of words and music.”
More of MacGowan’s material may yet see the light of day. Clarke said that an album recorded with the Irish band Cronin during his final years “will definitely come out,” and that she hopes to find artists to complete music for the reams of unpublished lyrics that MacGowan left behind.
“Shane was, fascinatingly, both a tragic and triumphant talent,” Springsteen said. “But the triumph is there in the words and the songs, and that’s what’s going to endure.”
