Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

by Tim Bradford

  Maud Gonne

  This was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine, Yeats’ lost love. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. In those days she was into karate and was a rumbustous hard-drinking wild woman with mad long hair. Now she had slimmed down to become a slinky hard-drinking wild woman with fashionable long hair, pierced bellybutton and celtic tattoo on the small of her back. She was a Gaelic footballer and also well-versed in ancient Irish history and modern Irish politics. Her grandmother’s family had been old republicans – the grandfather had been De Valera’s driver for a while and had also worked for John McBride, husband of Maud Gonne. I’d talked to her grandmother about all this just after Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins had been released. Being an old anti-Treatyist, Granny Mac wasn’t quite so rosy and sentimental about the likes of Boland and Collins as Jordan’s film. She had also met Maud Gonne. I won’t tell you exactly what she said, but you won’t read about it in the history books.

  Charlie Haughey

  There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss.

  The Divorce Referendum

  A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot, Irishness could be a marketing man’s creation, the vision that is Heritage Ireland, the fake Irish pubs.

  But there’s the cold-eyed heavily moral and religious Irishness, which has ruled more or less since the twenties. Some of that pious moralism must come from the impeccable double standards of the Victorian English, and has attached itself to a devout Catholicism. But, I’m reliably informed, the church and state thing is already well on the way out, or at least becoming just a part of the heady cultural mix. Travelling in the west a few years ago I found myself in a B&B which was stuffed full of religious icons, lifesize statues of Mary and Jesus scattered around, making the place seem as though it was full of people. In our room, along with a bleeding heart painting of Jesus and another giant statue of Our Lady, was a well-fingered German porn mag. You could have cut the juxtaposition with a knife.

  And yet younger folk probably don’t give two craps about all the old-style stuff. Irishness is no longer Collins and Dev, Willie MacBride and Yeats, but Boyzone, Roy and Robbie Keane, Bono and Sinéad O’Connor. Behan and Kavanagh? Zig and Zag!

  Bored with that one, we swapped coats, swigged down the last dregs of the Divorce Referendum, took a couple of pictures and headed off in search of more culture.

  Gate Theatre

  I tried to remember Jockser’s speech about the stars in Juno and the Paycock, but was already starting to lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Sarah showed me her tongue stud and talked about Gaelic Football. From what I understand, having a tongue stud (and other piercings) is now the rule for anyone who wants to join the official Gaelic Athletic Association (the GAA) and I had this image of all these old lads with nipple studs and Prince Alberts, along with their broken noses and false teeth.

  Sharon Shannon and Donal Lunny

  Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. None of the cosmologists currently writing today believe in the universe as a swirling bazaar governed by market forces. But if we see the universe as being like a business what were the conditions needed for it to exist? A gap, a need for a universe for a start. Until the idea of existence became real. But where did the funds come from? What bankrolled this fledgling business? Was it a loan? There was nothing. The question is, did it happen spontaneously like, say, the craze for rock ’n’ roll heart tattoos, or did it come from above, like Coke or Barbie?

  The Peace Process

  Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little.

  Ireland 1–Italy 0 World Cup ’94

  A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirts and littles ’taches, red faces, little slit eyes. A tall old man at the bar looked different. In a suit. Heard us talking.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  ‘I was born in Louth.’ I think I’m so clever. It’s true and makes some people think I might be Irish.

  ‘I presume that’s Louth in Lincolnshire.’

  A smart one. It turned out he had been stationed in Lincolnshire in the RAF. He started asking me questions and knew more about Lincolnshire than I did. I went to the bog. A fat bloke in a Man United second strip (the blue and white one – by the time this comes out that will probably be ten second strips ago) came in and said I’m lovely and would I like his limited edition plate then he says I’m not really lovely I’m a daft bastard. Back out in the pub he confronted the RAF lad in a mock fight and they put on English accents.

  My head was going, but me and the RAF lad (who by now could hardly stand) then got into a mad conversation which went something like this:

  RAF lad: Ah, you English fucker.

  Me: I’m not surprised by your reaction. Any conversation I have with certain friends in pubs about Irishness and Englishness eventually leads someone to expressing their distaste at eight hundred years of English rule in Ireland. In some ways it’s a tricky conversation for me, because I still haven’t really got a handle on what it means to be English. I mean, who are the English? What do they stand for? Some would say that’s obvious. The English are the British.

  RAF lad: You daft bastard.

  Me: Right – the English may have created the idea of Britishness for their own ends. After all, it suits the English power base if an Ulsterman, a Welshman and a Scot all claim allegiance to the British crown. This doesn’t mean that the English don’t exist, but they are perhaps more likely to admit to being British than anyone else in the ‘British’ Isles.

  RAF lad: British? Ha!

  Me: And there’s another thing. It really pisses off some of my friends when people say the ‘British’ Isles. Ireland isn’t in the British Isles. It’s a geographical term which has become a geopolitical term. And an outdated one at that. I read somewhere a suggestion that they be called the Celtic Isles. After all, as well as Ireland, Wales, Scotland and Cornwall, a large proportion of the people in England must be descended in some way from the Celts, or even further back is more likely.

  RAF lad: Ah you.

  Me: Yes, although I look like a mangy German or Scandinavian, my mother’s family are all short, dark-haired and sallow-skinned. Anyway, the culture of the so-called British countries is obviously non-Anglo-Saxon. But all this stuff about ancient races. What on earth is ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture? In the context and history of Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture represents a centralised blanding out of traditional folk culture as a way of damping down Celtic nationalism. Exactly the same thing happened in England. Over the centuries we seem to have lost so many of the things which make a culture rich – like music, dress, language, food. Much of the local traditions have been lost because of centralisation. In Ireland, Anglo-Saxon culture has generally meant Protestant culture. It wasn’t always like that. When Henry II invaded Ireland he wasn’t introducing Protestantism. But he wasn’t an Anglo-Saxon, he was a Norman.

  RAF lad (to Manchester United bloke): Hear this fellah.

  Me: So when did the Anglo-Saxons take over in Ireland? I mean, they invaded England in about the fifth and sixth centuries. Can it be true that it wasn’t until a thousand years later that Anglo-Saxon culture came to the fore. I’ve always felt that this Anglo-Saxon thing is a bit of a problem. The English are as much to blame as anyone because we like to see ourselves as Anglo-Saxon. But in reality when people talk about the Anglo-Saxon race they are referring to a total mix of Anglo-Saxon, Jute, Norman, Dane, Norwegian and Celtic, plus ‘Wessex’ Culture and the Beaker People. And now add some Afro-Caribbean, Asian, Turkish, Jewish. Englishness must always have threatened to take on multifarious forms. But up until now, Englishness has been confined to what the ruling elite choose to portray it as. Is there a general malaise afflicti
ng people in their thirties? Maybe we are the new lost generation like Kerouac and his mates, not knowing what the hell our core values are or where we want to go (for instance, like the two-headed god Janus we straddle the cultural divide of punk and dance music, but we sit in neither camp, with our balls being tickled by the new romantics). Politically we are the last of the passionate left wingers, left high and dry by the New Labour experiment, left to thrash about in a muddy sea of irony.

  I’d describe myself as English, but not in some pastoral, village-green sort of way. There are many forms of Englishness. You can take your pick. Mine is an expressive, multi-racial socialist humanist hedonism. Manifested by something like Glastonbury, Ken Livingstone, William Morris, John Cooper-Clarke. I’m a fucking hippy do-gooder.

  RAF lad: Well, yer a cunt at any rate.

  Dana

  Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly if I tried. Sarah was still going strong and laughing at my pathetic attempts to keep up. Music playing. Started to sway. This one was Dana – had to finish it.

  ‘James Joyce and we’ll be half-way there.’

  ‘No, we’ve already done the Martello Tower,’ she smiled.

  I started going on about the car, how I had to get back and start driving it around. That’s the last I remember for a while. We apparently got a cab home. Later, Sarah showed me some Gaelic football moves.

  … Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaargh mountains Yeats Maud Gonne Charlie Haughey Dana jockeys Gaelic football tongue studs music Guinness Dublin cars petrol money Celtic Tiger help falling aaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh and then I woke up …

  This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand year old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall, his was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss. A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot. Irishness lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little. A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirt and little tashes, red faces, little slit eyes. Couldn’t fit any more Guinness into my belly

  The Informal Urchin-gurrier Choir of Hill 16

  Gaelic Sports

  Gaelic football is very much like rugby except the players’ bodies are smaller, their legs are bigger and their hair curlier. Until these travels, my only experience of the sport had been from fading posters in pubs showing hard-looking blokes with big squashed noses and heavy shoulders staring at the camera in the way they would if someone was eyeing up their wife or their tractor. All I could tell about the tactics was that one of the big lads would get hold of the football, belt it upfield, a crowd of big lads would chase after it and jump up in the air trying to catch it. The biggest lad would achieve this, to a great roar from the crowd, then boot it between the posts for a point.

  Actually, the tactics and various styles of Gaelic football are far too numerous to mention here – sometimes, for instance, they will hand tap the ball to a teammate who then kicks it upfield to the big lad, roar from crowd, boot, point etc. Like Americans at baseball and gridiron, the Irish are world champions at all Gaelic sports. No-one else can touch them because no-one plays the stuff. So the All-Ireland champs could call themselves the World champs but, unlike their American cousins, the Irish are naturally more modest. In the last few years, however, this Gaelic monopoly has been challenged by a sleek, fast, tight-trousered new opponent in the shape of Australia. The method? The Gaelic Football-Australian Rules hybrid called Compromise Rules.

  The games started up in 1984 (and a mini series is played regularly now) as a means of addressing the obvious similarities between Gaelic Football and Australian Rules. The latter, a late-eighteenth-century invention, takes many of its elements from Gaelic Football. In GF you get three points for a goal – i.e. in the net – and one for kicking the ball between the posts – like a combination of football and rugby. Hand passing is allowed but the mainstay is kicking a round ball. No tackles are allowed but you can block. In AR it’s three between the main posts, one for the outer sticks. Tackles are allowed. Marks (free kicks) are made when you catch the ball cleanly. It’s an oval ball. Compromise Rules seems to be 80–90 per cent Gaelic Football.

  Sarah once took me to one of these compromise games at Croke Park, the cathedral of Gaelic sports. We walked from O’Connell Street then down Parnell Street in the north side, past flats and small seen-better-days terraced houses, kids sitting on steps with skinny dogs, little inflatable plastic footballs by their side. People were staggering around in the streets, shitfaced drunk and with huge grins on their faces. Most of the crowd I was following got in as students, although they looked as if they hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom for at least ten years. Inside I marvelled at the faces – thick-set, dark-browed, big noses, broken noses or wiry and ginger. Dublin shirts were prominent but there were also Galway, Clare, Ofally, Kilkenny and Waterford fans there too. It was a blustery afternoon and I was near the back left corner of Hill 16, the most celebrated terrace in Ireland.

  Gaelic footballers dress in normal sports gear. Aussie Rules players wear underpants and tight fitting disco vests. ‘It’s so no-one can grab them and pull them over,’ said an Australian doctor I talked to.

  ‘No, it’s so they can show off their muscles to the crowd, isn’t it?’

  ‘No, no, no, you’re wrong, it’s a very practical outfit for contact sports.’

  ‘Like picking up dockers in backstreet gay bars?’

  ‘Hey, don’t knock it.’

  Disappointingly for the crowd, the Aussie players weren’t wearing their trademark swimming trunks and skin-tight T-shirts but were in regular gear. The Irish players all had little bodies and big red legs – the Australians were all shapes and sizes, some stringbean, some squat, so
me normal, some athletic, some brawny – with a few surfer haircuts around.

  The game started at a madly fast pace. Everyone agreed it was exciting to watch. Ireland dominated and, when they went twenty points up, the feeling was that it was going to be a bit of an embarrassing final scoreline. Behind the canal end, which at the time of writing has been knocked down, I could see rows and rows of terraced houses and behind that the Dublin mountains. It was a beautiful urban scene. Many big sports stadiums are now being moved to out-of-town sites, but their constituency will always be the heart of the city.

  As the wind blew in our faces, the sounds of Irish voices came drifting down from the back of Hill 16. An informal Gurrier Choir, an ensemble made up of local grubby-faced urchins and midget wiseguys (though some of them might have been out-of-work jockeys) had perched itself high at the back of the stand and was responding to any Australian resistance in that part of the ground like a highly effective and ruthless military unit. Two portly Australian fans just a few rows further down had been spotted.

  ‘Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee the bush kangaroo. Skippeeeeee, skippeeeeeeeee Skippeeeee my friend and yours too.’

  One of the Aussies shouted ‘Come on Australia!’ Quick as a flash an urchin shouted out in a mangled Neighbours-style accent, ‘Cam on Awwstayyylyah … h aha ha ya fat Aussie bastard!’ As the Irish Tourist Board might say, one hundred, thousand welcomes.