Editorial: Shane MacGowan’s finest works bore the mark of rare genius

Shane MacGowan once advised: “Cram as much pleasure as you can into life, and rail against the pain that you have to suffer as a result.”

Millions of admirers across the globe are mourning his passing at the age of 65.

Like all great talents, he knew what it was like to touch the stars. However, it was his empathy with those trapped in the bedsits and flats of the ghettos that marked him apart.

Without sentimentality, but with consummate sensitivity, he tapped the oceans of longing and emptiness that flooded the soul of the exile.

His lyrics may have landed strongest with Irish people in London.

To hear “I could have been someone”, and respond with “well so could anyone”, was to experience the perfect fusion of artist and audience.

With that song, traditional Christmas music would no longer be a feast of schmaltz and cheesiness.

Along with Frosty the Snowman, or Last Christmas by Wham!, room would now also have to be made at the table for drunks and down-and-outs.

His gifts as a songwriter were under-appreciated by many who believed his career would flame-out in the manner of Brendan Behan.

They believed he would go out in a blaze of destructive glory with so much left to give.

And yet, he gave so much.

Through battles with his demons, he left us some of the best ballads and lyrics of his time.

The late Sinead O’Connor also had her struggles. The two artists collaborated poignantly and beautifully on Haunted.

MacGowan wrote of a real world where heartbreak and pain were raw materials always readily to hand. He could wield a lyric with the delicacy of a cotton bud, or the violence of a truncheon.

In A Pair of Brown Eyes, he captured the futility and wanton waste of life in war:

“In blood and death ’neath a screaming sky

I lay down on the ground

And the arms and legs of other men

Were scattered all around.”

He resurrected a back-catalogue of traditional Irish ballads by hurling a few lightning bolts from the core of a depthless punk soul.

True to the troubadour, he wore his genius lightly. Few knew how the gap-toothed hell-raiser was once a scholarship boy at Westminster School. He never tried to glamorise the struggle of battling addiction.

US comedian George Carlin once said: “Just ’cause you got the monkey off your back doesn’t mean the circus has left town.”

Doubtless, the circus will go on, but it will be doing so without one of its greatest ring masters.