A Drink with Shane MacGowan
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3.0 • 1 Rating
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- €5.99
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- €5.99
Publisher Description
Funny, honest, brilliant and opinionated, A Drink with Shane MacGowan is the highly-acclaimed memoir of a true music icon.
'One of the freshest, most original biographies I've ever read' - Lynne Barber, Observer
'His candour, coupled with an acerbic wit, makes him an ideal guide through an unmistakably colourful life' - Time Out
Shane MacGowan was an intensely talented songwriter whose band, The Pogues, merged punk with Irish folk music to create a sound uniquely their own. An anarchic hellraiser with the soul of a poet, he is forever associated with Christmas after the chart-topping success of 'Fairytale of New York', his duet with Kirsty McColl.
He grew up 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 - until his bandmates got so fed up of his behaviour they kicked him out for a time. MacGowan's music, innovative and powerful, is as distinctive as his chaotic, breakdown-scarred, drug and alcohol-fuelled lifestyle.
Written with his girlfriend (and later wife) Victoria Mary Clarke, A Drink With Shane MacGowan is a joyful celebration of a charming musician with a remarkable perspective on the world.
'An enormously vivid and descriptive picture of his life and dramatic times' - Irish Times
'This endearing memoir . . . is Irish rock distilled' - Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Let this be a forewarning to all self-respecting pop pinups and rock stars pondering penning an autobiography or memoir: do not, as former Pogues singer and lyricist MacGowan and his writer-wife Clarke did, use a question-and-answer format. This collaboration, the couple's first, is an especially unfortunate publishing fatality because MacGowan's life is such a juicy subject, and its exaggerated, grandiosely booze- and drug-littered escapades and cameos by Sid Vicious, Johnny Rotten and Elvis Costello are worthy of a second look. After drinking his first stout at the tender age of five with the milkman, MacGowan went on to play a major role in London's punk scene in the mid- and late 1970s. Later, he founded the Irish band The Pogues, which merged Irish folk styles with rock and roll. (MacGowan has also recorded with the Popes and on his own.) However, the book's Q&A format blends these and other adventures with inane revelations ("I've been a lover and a hater of beetroot all my life"), petty spats, ridiculous questions ("Tell me more about Matt Dillon") and contrived, self-flattering stage directions ("Victoria, radiant as ever, in pale green silk which becomes her consumes a plate of chips, hungrily"). 16 b&w photos not seen by PW.
