Shane MacGowan, the singer-songwriter and frontman of Celtic punk band The Pogues, has died at the age of 65.
The news, announced on social media on Thursday by his wife Victoria Mary Clarke, comes just days after he was released from hospital following a long health battle.
“I don’t know how to say this so I am just going to say it,” Clarke began the emotional and loving tribute, alongside a black and white photo of MacGowan, famous for The Pogues’ Christmas song Fairytale of New York.
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“Shane who will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life and the most beautiful soul and beautiful angel and the sun and the moon and the start and end of everything that I hold dear has gone to be with Jesus and Mary and his beautiful mother Therese.
“I am blessed beyond words to have met him and to have loved him and to have been so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him and to have had so many years of life and love and joy and fun and laughter and so many adventures.
“There’s no way to describe the loss that I am feeling and the longing for just one more of his smiles that lit up my world.”
Clarke thanked the Fairytale of New York singer for his “presence in this world” and the joy he brought “to so many people with your heart and soul and your music”.
MacGowan’s family also released a formal statement on his passing, saying the singer died peacefully with his family by his side.
“It is with the deepest sorrow and heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our most beautiful, darling and dearly beloved Shane MacGowan,” his wife Victoria Clarke, his sister Siobhan and father Maurice said in the statement.
The musician had been hospitalised in Dublin for several months after being diagnosed with viral encephalitis in late 2022 – a rare and potentially life-threatening condition that causes the brain to swell following a virus.
British media reported MacGowan was in intensive care during his hospital stay.
It’s understood he was admitted to hospital in June amid his battle with viral encephalitis and had remained in inpatient care since.
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He was discharged on November 22, ahead of his upcoming birthday on Christmas Day.
Last week, Clarke, 57, thanked MacGowan’s former bandmates Peter Richard Spider Stacy and Terry Woods for visiting the singer.
The Pogues, who formed in London in 1982 and are best known for the 1988 hit Fairytale of New York, fused Irish traditional music and rock’n’roll into a unique, intoxicating blend, though MacGowan became as famous for his sozzled, slurred performances as for his powerful songwriting.
In 2012, music licensing body PPL announced Fairytale of New York was the most-played Christmas song of the century in the UK.
The track controversially beat out the Mariah Carey classic All I Want For Christmas Is You and Last Christmas by Wham!, which came in at number two and three on the list, respectively.
Born on Christmas Day 1957 in England to Irish parents, MacGowan spent his early years in rural Ireland before the family moved back to London.
Ireland remained the lifelong center of his imagination and his yearning. He grew up steeped in Irish music absorbed from family and neighbors, along with the sounds of rock, Motown, reggae and jazz.
He attended the elite Westminster School in London, from which he was expelled, and spent time in a psychiatric hospital after a breakdown in his teens.
MacGowan embraced the punk scene that exploded in Britain in the mid-1970s. He joined a band called the Nipple Erectors, performing under the name Shane O’Hooligan, before forming The Pogues alongside musicians including Jem Finer and Spider Stacey.
The Pogues — shortened from the original name Pogue Mahone, a rude Irish phrase — fused punk’s furious energy with traditional Irish melodies and instruments including banjo, tin whistle and accordion.
“It never occurred to me that you could play Irish music to a rock audience,” MacGowan recalled in A Drink with Shane MacGowan, a 2001 memoir co-authored with Clarke.
“Then it finally clicked. Start a London Irish band playing Irish music with a rock and roll beat. The original idea was just to rock up old ones but then I started writing.”
The band’s first album, Red Roses for Me, was released in 1984 and featured raucous versions of Irish folk songs alongside originals including Boys from the County Hell, Dark Streets of London and Streams of Whisky.
MacGowan wrote many of the songs on the next two albums, Rum, Sodomy and the Lash (1985) and If I Should Fall from Grace with God (1988), ranging from rollicking rousers like the latter album’s title track to ballads like A Pair of Brown Eyes and The Broad Majestic Shannon.
The band also released a 1986 EP, Poguetry in Motion, which contained two of MacGowan’s finest songs, A Rainy Night in Soho and The Body of an American. The latter featured prominently in early-2000s TV series The Wire, sung at the wakes of Baltimore police officers.
“I wanted to make pure music that could be from any time, to make time irrelevant, to make generations and decades irrelevant,” he recalled in his memoir.
The Pogues were briefly on top of the world, with sold-out tours and appearances on US television, but the band’s output and appearances grew more erratic, due in part to MacGowan’s struggles with alcohol and drugs. He was fired by the other band members in 1991.
He performed with a new band, Shane MacGowan and the Popes, before reuniting with The Pogues in 2001 for a series of concerts and tours.
MacGowan had years of health problems and used a wheelchair after breaking his pelvis a decade ago.
He was long famous for his broken, rotten teeth until receiving a full set of implants in 2015 from a dental surgeon who described the procedure as “the Everest of dentistry”.
MacGowan received a lifetime achievement award from Irish President Michael D. Higgins on his 60th birthday.
The occasion was marked with a celebratory concert at the National Concert Hall in Dublin with performers including Bono, Nick Cave, Sinead O’Connor and Johnny Depp.
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