Product Description

Hell-raiser Shane MacGowan's acclaimed and surprisingly lucid memoir This bibulous, drug-indulgent and anarchic rock legened was born on a small farm in Tipperary, won a scholarship to Westminster, was rapidly expelled, became a rent boy, then a central figure of punk and the hugely influential star of The Pogues. MacGowan's music, innovative and powerful, is as distinctive as his chaotic, breakdown-scarred, drug and alcohol-fuelled lifestyle. MacGowan has an enormous fan-base hungry for stories of his wild behaviour, but this is also a book that celebrates this unique and charming musician, and offers insight into his remarkable perspective on this world - and the next!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #35641 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-08
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

Review
'One of the freshest, most original biographies I've ever read... Buy the book, it's great.' Lynn Barber, The Observer 'All human life is here.' Q Magazine

Q
'A welter of colourful yarn and lecture based indiscriminately on deep knowledge and fathomless ignorance...'

Loaded
'Frank, funny and fascinating.'

Customer Reviews

Lend me ten pounds & I'll buy you a book!
There's been a few attempts to write the seminal 'Shane Macgowan' story, but all have fallen by the wayside, frustrated by the complications of a 'living' subject, too entangled in his own myth to allow objective scrutiny.
Here instead Shane spouts his own murky blatherings to his Mrs and the tape recorder picks it all up, including Victoria's blunt & sometimes annoying questions & Shanes self aggrandising bull. There are raucously funny moments though, Shane describing how he painted himself blue on tour in New Zealand after Maori ghosts had persauded him to redecorate his hotel room, or where he's trying to persaude Victoria that Brandy is a truck load more deadly than crack cocaine.
His memories of childhood Ireland are intense as well, and his sensitive and depthy knowledge of Irish literature reveal a very clever man, who really never recovered from the break up of his beloved Pogues, which is evident in the bitter way he talks about them.
If your looking for a biography in the classic sense, this isn't it but then Shane is not exactly the 'classic' rock star celebrity. You can feel the warmth and passion of the man though through the pages when one of his rants occasionally ignites into something special. If he's p***ing himself about Samuel Beckett wanting to play cricket for Ireland, or musing on whether he could yet be the first Irish Pope you acn't help but revere the guy. You just have to wade through a bit of drool and spittle to get to the good bits, and at paperback prices it's worth it.

Last word of a Deluded Genius
It's hard to give this book five stars but at the same time, impossible not to give it anything less. Shane is such a tragic-comic figure that our heart immediately goes out to him. Whether dispelling all around him as complete charlatans; bemoaning the state of the pop world without the benefit of the Pogues, or having a go at all most everyone who doesn't measure up to his definition of a 'great bloke'... our Shane always makes for highly entertaining, if some what inconsistent reading.

Here the great-man casts his blurry eyes over everything from the importance of Irish literature, the current political problems of the country, his musical influences (everyone from the Dubliners and the Chieftains to Nick Cave and Van Morrison) and of course his infamous past discrepancies. Of course, whether or not any of this is TRUE is uncertain. Shane spins yarns with all the poetic grace of his many literary heroes, but the inconstancy of his stories (as well as the historical inaccuracies) are at times shocking. Maybe we needed a more neutral interviewer as opposed to Shane's wife Victoria Clark, who often allows herself to be argued down by the drunken rocker, instead of clearing up the facts.

This can be a problem, but as I said earlier; this is such an entertaining read that I personally can forgive the lack of clarity and instead, allow myself to be taken along on MacGowan's often-hilarious journey into the past. I'm sure there will be a better book released in the near future that will give us the true background of MacGowan and his fellow Pogues, but for the time being, I'm quite happy to revisit with this... and I'm sure you will be too. I'm gonn'a give it a four.

Uncomfortable but compelling
They say that drunkenness brings out the truth of what you believe. It is this which makes this book so interesting Macgowan says what he thinks on a number of issues which are all relevant to the person he is. Some of them made me enormously angry and some I agreed with.
Don't read this book to try to like Shane Macgowan or to be enlightened on anything specific.
Read this book for a very interesting insight to the workings of the mind of a genius, a man with the courage, Dutch or otherwise, to say what he thinks and not are about the PR opportunity.
"when the world is too dark and I need the light inside of me..."