Shane MacGowan’s, lead singer of the Pogues, produced art throughout his rollercoaster musical career. Here, his wife Victoria Clarke has added context to the captions with anecdotes and insight into the history behind the art
Main image: Shane MacGowan aged 19, as editor of punk rock magazine Bondage in his office at London. Photograph: Sydney O’Meara/Getty Images
Sun 23 Oct 2022 05.03 EDT Last modified on Mon 29 Jan 2024 09.49 EST
The Potato Men + Women
When Shane was sick as a child, his mother would give him potatoes to carve into people. Shane liked to turn the potatoes into IRA men and women. The cottage in Tipperary had been a ‘safe house’ for IRA members who were on the run during the civil war and Shane’s imagination was fired by the stories and songs that he heard about the battles with the British ‘Black and Tans’ in the neighbourhood and daring revolutionaries such as Dan Breen and Michael Collins.
Shane started travelling to Thailand regularly in the late 1980s after being introduced to the country by ‘Big Charlie’, the Pogues’ road manager. The initial attraction was the atmosphere, the ready smiles of the people, the beauty of the Buddha statues and the availability of drugs as well as the hallucinogenic ‘Mekong whiskey’ and Singha beer. Shane spent a great deal of time in late-night bars where he played pool with prostitutes and watched Thai boxing matches, often getting to know the boxers.
On a tour of New Zealand, having taken a lot of very strong speed, Shane became quite obsessed with squids and octopuses. While drawing Squid Pro Quo with pastels, Shane created a shape by ripping up the paper to make a sort of figure with legs, and being an admirer of Kandinsky, he chose to sign it ‘Wassily Kandinsky’.
The Pogues started touring America in the late 80s, and Shane spent a lot of time hanging out at the Chelsea Hotel and meeting writers, artists, actors and filmmakers. New York had a romantic appeal as a place where people came to try their luck on Broadway and where people fell from grace and lived desolate, broken lives on the streets. The city was also a place to score drugs, and Shane liked to wander the streets late at night looking for crack and heroin.
The initial attraction [of Thailand] was the atmosphere … but also the ready availability of drugs like opium, ‘China White’, valium and weed as well as the hallucinogenic ‘Mekong Whiskey’ and Singha beer.
Acid proved to be a trigger for intense artistic expression, both musically and visually. He often took acid on tour and he would always carry paints and pastels as well as felt pens to experiment with. This image reflects his obsession with squids and octopuses.
Shane started taking a lot of acid in the 80s, and for a time he was consuming more than 100 tabs a day. Victoria says: ‘During one trip in a council flat in Kentish Town, Shane believed he had entered my womb, while I in turn believed Shane had turned into a parrot.’ Much of the work he drew around this time is full of religious and esoteric symbols, which appeared during the trips. It was around this time that the very trippy ‘Lady Victoria’ was created.
Shane spent a lot of time drawing and painting album covers and potential album and single sleeves, not just for the Pogues and the Popes. Most of the album ideas went through many iterations, including the ‘Hell’s Ditch’ series, most of which were drawn in Thailand, where the music was written. This particular design also features the ‘Bim’ character from his Bim and Dim cartoon series. The Pogues ‘Hell’s Ditch’ album art was not one of his. Later that year, he was sacked from the band after falling out of a bullet train in Tokyo.
The Pogues first met U2 in the 80s when they were invited to support them, and Shane and Victoria always enjoyed philosophical and theosophical discussions with Bono, who became a lifelong friend, and who performed at Shane’s 60th birthday concert. Bono can be a serious guy who likes to search for meaning. But he is also a great man for a party. Victoria and Shane moved into his Martello Tower in Dublin in the early 1990s just after Shane had been sacked from the Pogues and spent many a night drinking Guinness with the Big B.
Shane spent his 18th birthday in a mental hospital, after having been diagnosed with ‘acute situational anxiety’ and incarcerated for six months. He had been trying to medicate himself for anxiety but had had a nervous breakdown. The hospital convinced him he was sane, but he says he came out of it seething with anger. The first band he saw after being released was the Sex Pistols. Shane became friends with Sid Vicious who nicknamed him ‘Bondage’ because of Shane’s self-produced Bondage fanzine.
