Shane MacGowan Wants a Lot More of Life
The New York Times
At 64, the famously surly former frontman of the Pogues has slowed down some, but his hunger for an artistic life is still insatiable.
While promoting his 2020 documentary “Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan,” the British director Julien Temple frequently spoke of the many difficulties his subject presented during filming, as MacGowan — the famously hard-drinking and irascible former frontman of the Anglo-Irish folk-punk band the Pogues — engaged in conversation with, among others, the actor Johnny Depp and the former Sinn Fein president Gerry Adams.
During the making of the film, which is now streaming on Hulu and video on demand, MacGowan sometimes wouldn’t show up where he was supposed to, and when he did, it could take hours to get a few minutes of usable material from the uncooperative musician. “He made it as though you were setting up cameras in the Siberian night,” Temple recalled in a recent interview, “and hoping that after a couple of months the snow leopard might trigger the camera.”
In early December, that metaphorical big cat found himself facing a laptop webcam, talking to a trepidatious journalist. It marked the first time that MacGowan had used videoconferencing software. “I’m very old-fashioned in a lot of ways,” said the singer, who was born in England to Irish parents and turned 64 on Christmas Day. He was streaming from the Dublin flat he shares with his wife, the Irish writer and artist Victoria Mary Clarke.
