Shane Skull

A Christmas Fairy Tale

Hello my friends - and an almost Happy New Year.

I hope it’s a glorious, outstanding, indecently lovely one! And to wish it in is a lived story of mine, a true Odyssey that took place at the beginning of this very month, though it seems a year all of its own. A wave from Dartmoor, and business as usual from next week. This is a fairy tale not of New York, but Dublin and Tipperary and Limerick. There’s audio at the bottom of the page if you’d like to hear me read it.

As I erupt from the airport I’m bashed by a freezing churn of weather. I’m here in Dublin for the funeral of Mr Shane MacGowan (of The Pogues). My hat is liberated from my head by strange winds. Immediately a Skoda rocks up, jauntily driven by the man Glen Hansard. I retrieve the hat and jump in beside him. Glen has a hound literally squatted in his lap as he navigates several lanes of perilous traffic with The Pogues at full, tumbling whack on the stereo. There’s a high, whip-whistle of a sound emanating from the roof of the car, and I realise from now on this car IS the SKULL of Shane MacGowan, the sound the whistle between his teeth. And that’s his old teeth. His irregular graveyard gnashers, his terrible yellowed picks, long before the final, gleaming set the dentists gave him. 

We Boys of the Skull bellow along to Shane in the stereo:

At the sickbed of Cúchulainn we'll kneel and say a prayer
But the ghosts are rattling at the door and the devil's in the chair, whoa!

The Legendary Gnashers

We are not alone. Brendan Behan drives with us, Sinead O’Connor drives with us, Patrick Kavanagh drives with us, Evan Boland drives with us, Luke Kelly drives with us, all of us in the mad-skull of Shane-Skull, pootling and hootling the ghosted lanes as Glen somehow, miraculously conducts a phone interview with a journalist, steers the motor, chats to his mate the storyteller, pets the hound (who is a kissy, licky one I must say). 

‘Giz Us A Kiss’

We come through the mist to a big old house. Past the gatehouse where Marianne Faithful lived. Buckets of rain are fuming the air deliciously pungent, and the scratchy, wintering trees on all sides make everything like a fairy tale. I’m walked down a corridor, past the small room where the ghost of a girl lives and the next room that holds the brass bed of W.B. Yeats. This second room will be my digs, and providing the phantom doesn’t glide through the wall too frequently all will be well. This is a liminal hang, filled with history and characters. We drink strong tea from big mugs and stay warm. We hoof into roast chicken and leek and potatoes and feel like kings, just for a little while.

Adventure Beckons!

That night we need to find an accordion for The Pogues, so we venture to the home of grand traveller singer Tommy Doron. Tommy has a great repository of songs that can be conjured at any moment. His many children are adorable, lively, welcoming. Tommy locks me in with a calm gaze, and asks where I come from. He then hefts into a song he thinks I should hear, even learn. My pen wallops across the page as best I can as he sings. 

Two Doron Men

Later the three of us - Tommy, Glen and myself - will step out into the bluster of an Irish winter night to fortify ourselves with a little porter. Chance would have it we find a music session. It’s a nice room, low ceiling, lotsa wood furnishings. Glen is a well-known man on the island, so there’s an amiable ripple when we walk in, and a steady flow of greetings. 

Though most of the singers are amplified, Tommy croons un-amplified and unadorned from the back of the room. Sheer oldness announces itself through Tommy when he sings, his people come through him when he sings, even the cormorant herself leans forward when he sings. Unshowy, there is the pang that you may be hearing the last of something when he opens his mouth. I will return to the songs of Tommy Doron many times.

Such is the evening, we completely forget to collect the accordion.

Next morning there’s a rush for suits and ties as we head to the funeral and the drive to Tipperary. As the car shrieks and moans and death-rattles, I talk Dylan Thomas with Maire Saaritsa, a poet and Glen’s wife, as toddler Christy sleeps. At a garage we bump into Irish music legend Finbar Furey standing in the forecourt, dapper and charismatic with his fixer. He grabs my arm and tells me the story of introducing ‘jazz cigarettes’ to Ronnie Drew from the Dubliners - “Geez Finbar, if you’d got this to me earlier in life I never would have to have become an alcoholic!” We grab as much chocolate and sandwiches as we can muster. We suspect there won’t be a buffet. 

On arrival the town is crawling with police and luminous jackets. Glen strides with Christy in his arms, quietly directing and encouraging the assembled musicians. There’s big questions at stake: Will Nick Cave make it on the London flight? Will Bob Dylan’s eulogy arrive before four o’clock? Well one out of two’s not bad. 

I hear a quiet voice asking if he can sit in the pew next to me, it’s Gerry Adams. There’s a moment in the service where we turn and give the traditional welcome of peace be with you. If you know a bit about the history of Ireland and Britain over the last fifty years and Gerry’s role within it, you’ll understand the moment. Later I move back a row as a great surge of family members arrive with the coffin. 

We are here to recognise the arch-poet, the ragged, beauteous totem of Mr. MacGowan. We to hoist the pirate flag, chomp the fly-agaric, rumble the sod with our boots till all the Bronze Age heroes of this island leap again from the soil, hair limed into spikes, white gold on their wrists, hounds at their knees - even the kissy, licky kind. There’s TREMENDOUS good feeling in the church, about a thousand of us inside and many more out. Because of the example Victoria, Shane’s wife, has set, there’s a feeling of raw gratitude and love for Shane, not sombre stiffness. I’ve rarely seen anyone so graceful and free in such a moment, and her nature loosens everyone else up accordingly. She brings joy.

Kevin Rowland from Dexy’s Midnight Runners has slipped into the row behind, and Bobby Gillespie from Primal Scream is clapping his hands like he’s presiding over a Big Tent Revival. Nick Cave bounds in through a side door, tanned and completely-up-for-it, plays Rainy Night in Soho and we all feel a bit sniffly and also, weirdly, madly terrifically happy. Everybody is loving everyone else at this moment, strangers are holding hands, troubles of the heart are banished, at least for the eternity of the song. The luminous has arrived. By the time Glen and Lisa O’Neill sing Fairytale of New York and Victoria and Shane’s sister Siobhan waltz out to dance around the coffin, I wouldn’t be the only one weeping like a child. It was one of the great moments. God was in the house. 

Later, what you could call The Wake is suitably savage. A fierce thing of mad dancing, a mosh-pit of feeling and lasts a good shift into the next morning. I sit still and meet all sorts of people. BP Fallon sits on the porch talking quietly, Dave Robinson co-founder of Stiff Records and Irish music legend wanders over and mistakes me for someone else - haven’t seen you since London days – he grins then settles further into his Crombie and goes to find Spider Stacy from the Pogues, who’s worked up a sweat on the dance floor. 

I sit in the swirl of pints of vodka and various mood-propellants, and chat to a sixty year old lady from Gort who just jumped into a car at the end of her shift and blagged her way in. Her dog was dying and she needed a change of scene, eyes suddenly glittering with tears. General misfits and rock’n’rollers heave around to the pummelling sounds of Shane’s last working band. It’s properly loud, and I shelter like a geriatric behind the speakers, fingers in ears, and observe the mayhem. I’m struggling with sheer exhaustion by now. Lisa O’Neill apprehends me towards the end of the never-ending evening, and gets me back to my cottage, her dulcimer player driving, herself balancing a fine whiskey in a cut-glass.

Next afternoon, we drive to Limerick for the cremation. Oh the Shane-Skull it rattles, pukes and wheezes as we drive directly into a copper orb in a sullen grey sky. Set the controls for the heart of the sun! shout the Floyd. Glen sings the old ballad Carrickfergus and I howl along at the chorus. What happened at the Crematorium must remain private for those that where there. 

I can say that at the high moment of the ceremony Liam O’Maonlai sung in Gaelic, sung like I’ve never heard him sing before. It was a kind of shamanising he was doing, a crack opening between worlds. Later he will leave supper and swim out into the darkness of the Shannon river. Seamus the pipe man and Collum the fiddle man accompany him, a drum is played. Johnny Depp’s boot pounds the floor and quietly - gently - Shane’s coffin disappears from our earthly sight.

Bury me at sea where no murdered ghosts can haunt me, if I rock upon the waves, no corpse can lie upon me.

In the bothies and high lonesome hills, on the chalky beaches and in raggedy little cottages, creatures seen and unseen toast our poet Shane. Angels of the fields walk with him now, his body ablaze with health again, and a soul at peace.

We drive back late to the old house where the ghost girl is waiting quietly in the next room. 

Shane isn’t a ghost, he’s an ancestor now.

We all sleep in the next day. 

The kissy, licky hound is walked in the afternoon light, bold Christy toddles round the Christmas tree, we drink wine and remember to be kind to each other. 

Life continues. People leave, people arrive. We love them as much as we are able.

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