Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

by Tim Bradford

  The next day I woke up and thought of hooking up with the Johnsons of Enniskillen. The idea of frolicking with the dolphin (as well as the pretty youngest Johnson from Enniskillen in a skintight diving suit) was certainly attractive and would no doubt be extremely therapeutic. But not as attractive and therapeutic as going back to sleep again for a few hours. It was raining anyway.

  Later on in the day I got talking in the kitchen to a skinny Scandinavian woman called Carem (or something like that) who was also staying in the hostel. I told her I was going out for a walk and she asked would I mind if she came along, because her friends were drinking in a pub and she didn’t know Dingle that well. We went out of town past the craft village then got down off the road and followed the shoreline. As we went around a little headland, two dogs suddenly appeared and ran alongside us. One was a proud, sleek, black labrador, the other a stumbling, hairy, dirty little mutt. They had decided to adopt us so we gave them names and personalities. I thought the labrador was called Rex, a Trinity college graduate and antiques dealer. Carem said that the other dog was Shaggy, a part-time poet. Perhaps, I said, he was thrown out of University College Dublin in his second year. Probably, she said. The rain started to come in from Dingle Bay, blurring away the hills in the background. Rex and Shaggy bounced along over the pebbles in front of us and we talked away to them, waiting occasionally while they jumped up the grassy dunes to the back of the thin beach, to check out and bark at the slow feeding cattle.

  Rex: Woof woof.

  Shaggy: Rufff. Rufff.

  Rex: Aha, gentle reader, ahah. Travels in Irishry. That sounds promising – it suggests that nationhood could be a state of mind. But the phrase seems to me typical of much that is in this book. It sounds good but it’s shallow and meaningless. Basically he could’ve just sat on his arse and made it all up.

  Shaggy: Ah, give him a break. He’s really a cartoonist, you know. There’s loads of nice little drawings in the text.

  Rex: You see, he admits he’s not really a writer. It would be absurd for people to buy this book. But I understand the publisher’s theory behind it. And it’s quite audacious. Basically his name is Bradford so it’s quite likely that he’s going to find his stuff right next to Bill Bryson …

  Shaggy: Who’s Bill Bryson?

  Rex: Shut up. Poor unsuspecting grannies, maiden aunts and kindly pipe-smoking uncles who don’t understand rap music or the Internet will enter the shop hoping to buy the latest gagfest by the corpulent and successful American writer and by mistake will end up purchasing this bizarre tome.

  Shaggy: Ha ha, look, though, it’s got a cartoon of us in it.

  Rex: Has it? Oh yes, ha ha.

  Carem and I walked in virtual silence, apart from the odd aside when we’d comment on the action in a ‘dog voice’ and have the dogs making up names for us. We got a bit soaked. Carem said she had to get back because she and her friends were heading off later that day.

  Rex: This formal messing – I hate it when people try and do that Joyce thing and be stylistically wacky.

  Shaggy: Have you ever read Joyce? It seems to me that a lot of people bang on about him but as soon as you ask them what they’ve read they go all quiet.

  Rex: Er, um, I saw the film of Ulysses starring George Peppard.

  Shaggy: That was Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans. Funnily enough although a lot of Kerouac’s stuff is about travel, did you know that he never actually drove a car himself?

  Rex: Look – some more cows to bother!

  Shaggy: Rufff. Rufff.

  Rex: Woof woof.

  We headed back, as the rain battered down harder. As we got to a little row of houses on the headland a woman’s voice called out ‘Sheba! Jenny!’ The dogs started barking again.

  Rex: Woof woof woof.

  Shaggy: Ruff. Rufff.

  They ran towards a house and across the lawn. Then stopped and looked back at us.

  Sheba: Woof.

  Jenny: Ruff. Ruff.

  It felt a bit sad. The end of the little afternoon world we had created. How about, I said, if Sheba is a belly dancer from North London and Jenny teaches post-feminist linguistics at the University of East Anglia in Norwich? Carem was too cold and wet to join in. Back in Dingle, I intended to check out the Internet café and pick up some e-mail, so we said our goodbyes outside the hostel. I noticed a little red mark above her eye. On closer inspection, the mark was moving. I realised Shaggy/Jenny had given Carem a present. A bloodsucking little tic had lodged itself on her eyelid. An interesting fashion accessory, I thought. She didn’t agree.

  At the ’net café I searched on a Dingle-based site to see if there was anything of interest going on. There was a crystal workshop coming up, and a Check Your Allergies session at one of the health food shops, or a poetry workshop with the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy. Unfortunately it wasn’t on for another few weeks.

  Back in London in 1994 I had actually taken a poetry class with Michael Donaghy, somewhere around squawky, acquisitive Sloane Square. The class was the expected mixture of sensitive young men, fragile middle-class housewives, people just out of therapy, people just in therapy, a dour Scottish person and an African lad. I had never really studied much poetry, either at school or university. If you do a yoga or fitness or painting or sculpture class you’ll be taught by someone who knows the ropes, all right, but that’s about it. But Donaghy was a real poet, having won the esteemed Whitbread poetry prize and the Geoffrey Faber memorial prize for Shibboleth, his first volume of poems. What was he doing teaching a bunch of deadheads and no-hopers like us? He mixed a certain punky gravitas with Irish-boyish enthusiasm and soon I was dipping in and out of poetry anthologies and finding poets that I actually liked – Patrick Kavanagh, Tom Paulin, Don Paterson. I finally managed to track down one of Donaghy’s books, Errata, his second collection, a mixture of anecdote, Irish music and the classics set in New York and Chicago.

  At that time – as ever – I had too much time on my hands and one of my ongoing ‘projects’ was an imaginary Pogues-like punk-folk band of which I was the Shane MacGowan-like figurehead – leader, songwriter, singer, charismatic front man. It’s good fun when there’s no-one else there to burst your bubble. I named this fictional combo Malignant Flanagan, after a line from one of Donaghy’s poems, ‘The Classics’.

  I have still to get my head around Irish Americana. In 1990 I stayed in Boston for four days and didn’t meet one person who claimed to be an American. This might have had something to do with the fact that I stayed in a house with four Irishwomen. I’d worked with one of them for a few months at the Financial Times and we left at the same time. She to take a job as a nurse in Boston and me to just piss away all my savings in a three-month-long round-Europe trip. I took her number, as I often do when I leave somewhere and expect that, as I often do, I will never see someone again.

  But I made the effort, thanks in part to a bloke called Charlie, a friend of a friend who gave me a free first class ticket on Air India to Kennedy Airport. Admittedly I wasn’t his first choice of travelling companion but all the sensible people he knew were in gainful employment. I was, like an actor, resting between jobs (in fact I was still recovering from the three-month European booze fest). In Brookline it was trams, Irish pubs, spritzer and Guinness, darts, more Guinness. I met a bloke whose grandfather had come over in the 1930s and he had an outrageous Irish accent, seemed to be saying all the begorrahs and bejaysus stuff like a Hollywood version of Irishness. On the last night, at a St Patrick’s day concert it was like Kilburn, tears and singsongs. Is it in the genes, this deep nationality, I thought?

  ‘You’ve had an hour,’ said the speccy Internet Bloke. ‘Do you want more time? It’s just that there’s other people waiting.’

  I picked up various bits of mail then headed out into the real world of rain and hangovers again. I had a quietish time that night at a little session, then walked slowly back to the hostel, past the harbour where Ryan’s Daughter had been filmed. The clouds h
ad cleared and the spray of stars made the sky seem more white than black. I recalled one of Donaghy’s poems, ‘O’Ryan’s Belt’, and also picked out what I thought was Mars. Tomorrow would be real night skies, real music, real Irish Americans searching for their roots. Tomorrow was Doolin.

  * * *

  1 I found it a few months later in the Travel Bookshop off Portobello Road, but haven’t got round to reading it yet.

  Is Irish Music Any Good?

  Doolin, Co. Clare

  Scattered across the bleak hills of west Clare, Doolin is not your picturebook west-coast Irish village (unless the book in question is Places Which, From a Distance, Look Like Someone Has Kicked a Pile of Empty Milk Cartons Across the Scenery). Modern bungalows, with isolated sections of ranch-style fencing attached to unfinished Mediterranean porticoes, are constantly bursting out of the natural landscape, eager to join with other equally disastrous results of easy planning laws on the other side of the valley. Where do the people get their inspiration from? If Texas Homecare moved to Doolin and really lived up to their name – i.e. served up DIY kits of ranches – they would clean up.

  Built on a series of small hills around a little valley (the River Aille runs through the village), Doolin has a round tower at one end and the ruined keep of a Norman castle at the other. You could sling a rope between the two and do tightrope walks for charity (‘Hey, Sean, I can see your house from here,’ etc.). If you can get out of the idea that an attractive village should be based on the twee English model – church, thatched cottages, village green, androgynous vicar on bicycle – you’ll enjoy Doolin. And even if, a few hundred years ago, the people in this area had actually had the money to build decent houses, we – that’s the British, us, the bad guys – would probably have burned them down anyway just for the hell of it.

  But apart from what it actually looks like, it’s quite an attractive place. Doolin itself, or Fisherstreet as part of it is sometimes referred to by pedantic locals with red ears and long sideburns (you know who you are), is basically just a main street, with a pub at each end and a pub in the middle. It’s the scene of one of the world’s greatest pub walks. Start at O’Connor’s at the south of the village near the harbour. Turn left and walk past the tourist shops and over the little bridge, then follow the road as it straightens out towards the north. Walk for a mile. Stop at McGann’s. Have a pint. Then exit the pub and carry on walking north for about fifty yards until you reach McDermott’s. Buy another pint and sit down. Wonderful.

  There isn’t enough space here to detail the pub politics amongst the locals, but if I briefly mention that so-and-so fell out with whatsisname so they can’t go in that pub because the sister had been dumped by the son of the landlord whose brother went out with the cousin of my sister’s friend’s great grandmother in 1883, you’ll get the idea. But the result is that most of them only frequent one boozer at any one time. And this will change over the years as some imagined slight forces them into the arms (and pints) of their former enemies. There’s also a post office/general store, a chip shop (which does excellent curry sauce for the discerning post-beer palate), a couple of restaurants, a few B&Bs and a hostel. On the outskirts of the village is the ubiquitous art and craft shop (‘Experience the west of Ireland by buying one of our chunky woollen sweaters which will make you look like an overweight university lecturer. Guaranteed.’).

  Although Doolin is rather unprepossessing at first, it is in the west. And the west is where they all head: middle-aged Italians with impeccably casual clothes, expensive sunglasses and beautiful children. Pony-tailed German youths in assertive glasses and Bob Marley T-shirts. Scandinavians in dungarees who sit in the musicians’ seats and make a shared glass of Guinness last about four hours. English crusties searching for the Mother Goddess and cheaper beer and a new lead for their dog (‘SIT, Uther Pendragon!’). They are all looking for something. We are all looking for something. What?

  It’s because the west of Ireland is a mystical, mythical place. Since ancient times, people have looked in that direction for magic sanctuaries. Think of Tír na nÓg, Camelot, Swansea. But unlike many quasi-spiritual, isolated ancient sites, Doolin has no surface mystery. It’s not covered in stone circles. No legendary battle took place here. No hero came here to die. Even statues of Our Lady refrain from crying blood or going walkabout in Doolin’s main street. But there’s the possibility that here the landscape and the people might still be connected in some way to the strange spirituality of the old Celtic legends – such as the hamster of Nachal and Shami Slammer, the Goldfish of Clever Things. At least that’s what some of the more hopeful New Age tourists have been led to believe. And if you were a local and clever you’d nod sagely and keep on selling them the nice swirly pendants, pots and pictures.

  Doolin apparently lies on a convergence of ley lines, which may explain the energy and frisson in the atmosphere. This seems to be the explanation for many old places in Britain and Ireland where there’s any sort of life and activity and creativity. It may sound boringly rational, but my rather simple theory is that the remarkable fizz in the air of Doolin is more a result of a surfeit of Poitín (the illegally distilled demon drink), the lack of quality accommodation for discerning ABC1 tourists and, most importantly, the competitive atmosphere in the music scene. Because that’s what you’ll go to Doolin for – the sessions.

  One of the things I love about Ireland, apart from fantastic-looking, passionate, wild-haired women who can drink and arm-wrestle all night then fix your car in the morning, is the poetic, ale-fuelled music. It says to me ‘mystic-joy-in-the-utter-melancholy-of life’. It also says ‘whack fol de daddio’ too, but only when I put on the wrong track. The epiphany of Irish music is that moment when ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ by the Pogues comes on the jukebox at ten to eleven in a smoky North London pub and people stare down at their pints in wistful contemplation (though, to be fair, they’re often staring at their pints just so that no-one can accuse them of staring at their pint, and thus demand satisfaction ‘outside’). And when you’re staggering through the subway, past people begging for loose change, expecting to be confronted by the usual Eurobusker singing, ‘Lert me tek yoo bah thee ’and an’ led yu thro ze strets ov lerndun’, and you suddenly hear this beautiful bazouki playing and for some reason you can never understand, you just want to dance like that preening idiot in Riverdance (you know, the one with the blond quiff and the vaselined chest who went off in a huff because his name was only fifteen feet high on the posters and he’d categorically stated they had to be fifteen feet and four inches). But it’s especially about those times when you are sitting in a pub in Doolin and a little old bloke with a red leathery face gets up and, in a high-pitched, wheezy voice, sings some ancient ballad about sea, existential angst and death (and he looks so rough it seems as though it’s the last thing he’ll ever sing). And you stare into nothingness – that bit just to the left of the bar – and wonder if your life is, perhaps, just a little bit shallow.

  I first stayed in Doolin in 1992 (and have been back several times since) and the first place I was directed to was the pub in the centre of the village – McGann’s – where I was amazed to have a free run at the bar. This was because everyone else was simply mesmerised by the wonderful solo turns popping up around the small back room. It was all great music, apart, that is, from the nightmarish Kate-Bush-like trilling of a German goth, which went on for about fifteen verses. She was probably making it up as she went along because she knew that after this disaster she’d never get another chance and the people were too polite to terminate her ‘turn’. Still, she seemed happy enough. She was pissed off her face, mind.1

  As well as our group, half Irish, half cynical English, there were, as usual, a couple of Scandinavians sitting in the musicians’ places in the corner of the pub, smiling goofily out at the rest of the clientèle, oblivious to the fact that we were all glaring at them. They were soon ushered out of the way and the sessions began. Guitar, banjo, bodhrán and whistle
. We sat silently sipping and listened intently as it wound itself into an energetic (swirly Celtic?) circle of melodies and motifs. Next to me was a strange unshaven fellow drinking mineral water, tapping his foot maniacally. Rumour has it he ‘killed his father with a hammer’, and had been banned from drinking in the pub after getting too rowdy one night. Rather than go somewhere else and neck ale to his heart’s content, he regularly turned up at McGann’s and bought only soft drinks. I took the advice of the resting banjo player and ignored him. Though I’m sure it was all bollocks and that he’d had had an affair with the workmate of the sister of the barman’s Swedish friend’s babysitter …

  Eventually the pipes, played by a long-haired gypsy-looking guy in dungarees did a solo spot. I thought he looked like a slightly less runty version of ‘Come-on-Eileen’-era Kevin Rowland, but the women were mesmerised. He wasn’t that good looking, really. Meanwhile the fiddle player smiled down at their table full of brimming pints of Guinness. Then all the other musicians came back and the session went into foot-stomping overdrive – purists might call it a reel, I suppose. Or a jig. Sort of thing. Listen to these reels and it all seems so simple. Sixteen-bar motif, repeated, then another sixteen-bar motif, repeated. And it just goes on and on.

  I get jealous in these moments. It’s then that I wish I could play an instrument properly. But thanks to an accident with a door and a next-door neighbour when I was two, during which I lost the top off my little finger, left hand, I have struggled with the virtuoso passages and scales needed for session work. Many people have pointed out that the great jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt managed with only two fingers on his left hand, and went on to reinvent the genre. This somewhat undermines my position. Funnily enough, my mother’s main concern was that I’d never be able to play rugby. She was dead right on that score, to be fair to her.2