Sid Vicious plus William Butler Yeats equals Shane MacGowan.
Matthew Hennessey, meanwhile, in the City Journal notes that you couldn’t kill Shane MacGowan with a stick.
They say God takes care of fools and drunks. If so, he’s been working overtime the last few decades taking care of Shane MacGowan. As the frontman and principal songwriter of the Irish rock band the Pogues, MacGowan is as famous for his lyrics and whiskey-timbered voice as for his unlikely longevity, despite a Homeric appetite for intoxicating substances, especially, but not limited to, alcohol. Though he cuts a shambolic figure, MacGowan is still upright at 56, a feat many view as a minor miracle. His rheumy eyes and distinctive throat-clearing cackle suggest not genius, necessarily, but late-stage dipsomania; there is nary a tooth left in his head. God or something like God must be taking care of MacGowan. He’s not been doing the job himself.
Hat tip to the News Junkie.
GoneWithTheWind
It made me sad. What a terrible way to live/destroy your life. I am 75 and around my early 60’s I lost a dozen or so friends and family to lung cancer from smoking. In my 75 years I have lost perhaps two dozen, maybe more, to drinking. Throw in a handful of friends from drugs. What a waste…
I know their friends and family, I know the pain the sadness and in one case the suicide caused by these three life draining scourges. All preventable, all that pain and suffering most of it borne by the living that they leave behind.
Some years back a friend’s wife called me to tell me my friend was on his deathbed in the hospital. Lung cancer, which had spread to his brain and made it impossible for him to walk. That’s how they found it! She was crying, telling me about the pain he was in and he just wanted to die…
My uncle, when I was a young man, killed in an accident while driving drunk. Another uncle much later passed out or slipped while drunk in the driveway and froze to death before he was found.
So many more stories I won’t bore you with.
I can’t watch that video and get any joy from the music all I get is great sadness for those who succumb to these great scourges of life…
Sean Ferrell
You aren’t really Irish, are you?
JDZ
Nope.
Nori
“If I should fall from grace with god
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I’m buried ‘neath the sod
But the angels won’t receive me
Let me go boys
Let me go boys
Let me go down in the mud
Where the rivers all run dry“
Shane,like Keith Richards,seems to have a guardian angel that nurtures him.
The Lord works in mysterious ways.
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