Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020)

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Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan (2020) – J. Temple

It doesn’t take much to pull me backwards into the ocean of nostalgia, letting its waves wash over me as I escape the present.  Better still, when I’m able to update the past and situate it in the here and now (or at least more recently than then), as you can with a good music doco.  But it’s a guilty pleasure, since I feel internal pressure to live in the present, aware of current culture (or at least those culture-makers of my own generation). With regard to Shane MacGowan, singer-songwriter of The Pogues, who it turns out was 10 years older than me (he died in November 2023 and Nick Cave sang at his funeral), I first came across him more or less contemporaneously in the 1980s.  I bought the band’s 2^nd LP, “Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash” (1985) around that time and then quickly caught up by purchasing their first, “Red Roses for Me” (1984).  Having some Irish heritage (through my mother) didn’t hurt the attraction to this punk version of traditional music from the Emerald Isle -- and MacGowan’s blend of poetry, history, and confrontation was simpatico with the English Literature, Philosophy, and Psychology classes I was taking then. In 1988, my sister and I saw The Pogues in Boston for the “If I Should Fall from Grace with God” (3^rd LP) tour – it was the summer, hot in the nosebleed seats of the Orpheum Theatre, and the show was shaggy, replete with a cover of “Honky Tonk Women” featuring Joe Strummer on guitar.  Little did I know (until I watched this film) that this was part of the year-long worldwide tour that broke MacGowan.  Indeed, the film is (not unexpectedly) a cautionary tale, charting MacGowan’s downward trajectory (a result of alcohol, drugs, and hard touring) to the point where he is captured in the film’s many on camera interviews and conversations (with various friends such as Sinn Féin’s Gerry Adams and movie star Johnny Depp) in a very sorry state, full of bile and slurred bitterness (but also fond longing and some misguided hope for the future). Personally, after the 1988 show, I began to lose interest – the band’s next album did not seem as good and I eventually sold all of their records when I moved abroad. Little did I know then that MacGowan had lost his mojo. Director Julien Temple, with many music videos and docos under his belt, uses a variety of styles and techniques (including new animation, repurposed footage from old movies, video of The Pogues, interview in pubs, etc.) to tell MacGowan’s story from childhood to the pre-Pandemic present, with most of the runtime focused on the late ‘70s to early ‘90s.  Pivotal moments include: MacGowan’s early childhood in Tipperary before moving to London at age 6; his engagement with the punk scene after seeing the Sex Pistols and forming his own band, the Nipple Erectors; his light-bulb moment when he fused Irish tradition with punk rock; and then the 1988 tour that extinguished his flame or so the story goes.  There are a few decades after that but MacGowan, although heralded by his contemporaries and followers, seems burnt out, a shell of a man, an ex-junky soon confined to a wheelchair, and now dead. After the film, I listened to some of his best songs, many of them sentimental but poetic ballads (“A Pair of Brown Eyes”, “Dirty Old Town”, “A Rainy Night in Soho”, “Fairytale of New York”, “And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda”) and I fell briefly into a reverie.