Shane MacGowan and Victoria Mary Clarke: ‘We shagged everywhere in the early days — we had a voracious sexual appetite. It probably was helped by the drugs and the drink’

Even though it’s MacGowan’s art, neither the show (which has been extended at London’s Andipa gallery until today), nor the book — a weighty and beautifully produced coffee table monograph titled The Eternal Buzz and The Crock of Gold — would have happened were it not for Clarke. It was she who encouraged him to make his art available for others to view and she edited down more than 3,000 pieces of MacGowan’s creations into the 250 works reproduced in the book.

“I sensed that Shane really has talent and that there was something special in the work,” she says. Clarke paints herself — and canvases of her creations, predominantly featuring vivid, happy angels — vie for space on the walls alongside MacGowan’s unframed art. “But I had to get the opinion of an art expert.”

She sent some of the work to one of the UK’s leading visual art critics, Waldemar Januszczak. He loved the work. “I was so apprehensive when I saw his name in the inbox, but when I opened it and read what he said, I cried. Shane did too.” MacGowan nods in agreement.

Januszczak wrote the foreword to the book. He clearly thinks MacGowan has immense talent as an artist and points out that the quality of his visual work sets him apart from other great musicians, such as Lou Reed and Bob Dylan, who also fancied that they had something special with a paint brush in hand.

MacGowan agrees with Januszczak’s scathing appraisal of Dylan’s visual art. “That cover of Self Portrait,” he says of Dylan’s 1970 album. “It’s s**t.” Clarke protests. “I like it!” MacGowan isn’t for turning. “Nah,” he says, but he’s not looking for an argument.

There has been quite a response to the London exhibition — the opening launch attracted Kate Moss and Bob Geldof — and a spokesperson from the gallery, which specialises in the art of street painter Banksy, says more than half the works exhibited have already been purchased. “Kate Moss bought ‘Grace’,” she says, “and Fontaines DC bought ‘Bono Drinking Guinness’.”

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Incidentally, the book will be for sale at a special Irish launch on November 8 at Richard Corrigan’s new Ballsbridge restaurant, The Park Café.

It is great news for both MacGowan and Clarke who, it’s fair to say, have been through some rough times of late. As most of his fans will know, MacGowan’s life changed for the worse in late 2015 when he had a fall at a recording studio. Although he was in a lot of pain, he didn’t think much more of it. The drinking helped to dull the ache. The following morning, though, he woke in agony. The cause was soon discovered in hospital — he had broken his pelvis.

Since then, he has been confined to a wheelchair. He relies on Clarke and a team of nurses to help move him about. It’s exceptionally debilitating. The couple had to move home, too. They had been living in a house, but he couldn’t manage the stairs. Now they’re in a ground-floor apartment in a gated community. Moving about is easier here and, Clarke notes, the neighbours are lovely.

MacGowan says he is hopeful that he can “walk and run and hit a hurling ball against the wall” again. Clarke says his injury has impaired their quality of life. There’s no doubt about it. In many respects, she was his carer before the fall; now the work load has intensified and multiplied.

Even routine things, like being able to share a bed together, is in the past. He has to sleep in a special hospital bed in the living room. With so much of his art depicting their sex life, it must be an especially bitter blow for both.

“Oh, we shagged everywhere in the early days,” Clarke says, happily. “We’d shag on airplanes and toilets and in nightclubs. We’d shag in other people’s living rooms and in front of them. Everywhere and anywhere.”

In his glowing critical appraisal, Januszczak marvels at the number of MacGowan pictures that feature a woman — Clarke — in the throes of orgasm. She laughs heartily. “Well, that was us! We had a voracious sexual appetite. It probably was helped by the drugs and the drink.”

When Clarke speaks frankly and cheerily about the carnal connection the pair had before, MacGowan says nothing, but the corners of his mouth creep up in a smile of remembrance. It’s something he does a lot when she speaks, especially when her words recall the past, to a shared time when MacGowan’s gifts as a songwriter were making themselves fiercely felt. Although it might appear as though he is not listening, he is clearly hanging on to her every word.

They met by chance in a pub near Golders Green in London. They have a playful disagreement about how rough, or otherwise, the area was in 1982. MacGowan seems convinced it was a tough part of town; Clarke is adamant that it wasn’t.

“I was in the pub with my friend,” she says. “I was 16” — MacGowan is nine years older — “and Shane and Spider [Pogues bandmate, Peter ‘Spider’ Stacy] walk in. I’d never seen anything like them. And the attitude. Shane came over to us and said something like, ‘It’s my friend’s birthday — buy him a drink.’ I told him to f**k off, but I was really intrigued by him. His whole look, you know.”

She smiles at the memory. “They were dressed in long coats, like they were coming from a funeral, just like they were on the cover of that first album.”

Their debut album, Red Roses for Me, was released in 1984 and marked the arrival of a visceral band who fused punk and traditional Irish music in a way that no one else had done. Critically acclaimed it may have been, but it was the next Pogues album, Rum Sodomy & the Lash, that would be hailed as their masterpiece. A wild, barnstorming ball of energy, it is, arguably, still the greatest Celtic rock album ever made.

MacGowan professes to have little memory of recording it, but when I ask what it was like to work with Elvis Costello, who produced the album, his mood darkens. He says Costello may have been credited as producer, but he insists it was the mixers and engineers who did the lion’s share of the technical work.

In a recent interview with a British newspaper, he elaborated further on his apparent dislike of Costello. Costello and Pogues member Cait O’Riordan started a relationship during the sessions for Rum Sodomy & the Lash and he feels it messed with the band’s equilibrium. “She had to leave the group to marry Costello, which really pissed me off,” he told the newspaper. “I liked his very early stuff, but by then he was putting out s**t.”

MacGowan’s reputation as a first-rate songwriter was secured by the end of the 1980s. No matter what one might think of The Pogues, or the circus that surrounded the band and its one-of-a-kind frontman, only someone with a stone heart or cloth ears can deny the brilliance of songs like A Rainy Night in Soho or Fairytale of New York.

The latter has long become a Christmas perennial, the most-played Yuletide song on Irish and British radio this millennium. MacGowan scowls when I enquire if he ever tires of its ubiquity, before quipping that he rarely listens to his old songs anymore. The royalties ensure he can live securely for the rest of his days.

He is far from idle, though. Besides the visual art, he has been working on a new musical project with a pair of brothers, Jonathon and Michael Cronin. Originally from Leeds, the pair are now located in Mullingar. MacGowan has sung with them, on and off, for the past seven years. They have performed live with MacGowan too, most notably at Electric Picnic. “There will be an album next year,” he says. “Shane sings on all the songs,” Clarke adds.

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Shane MacGowan’s visual artworks ‘Thai Teenybopper’, ‘Lady Victoria’ and ‘New York City Sky’ photographed by Tony Gavin

It will be his first album since 1997’s The Crock of Gold, which he released with The Popes, the band he formed after the demise of The Pogues. Although his old band got back together subsequently, it was for live performances only. This writer saw them on stage at the Olympia shortly afterwards, but the old magic seemed to have gone. But then, maybe I got MacGowan on an off-night.

If his drinking helped fuel his creativity while he was a young man, there’s no doubt that it greatly hampered his ability to write songs from about the age of 40. Many will consider that to have been a great pity, but neither MacGowan nor Clarke want anyone’s sympathy.

I interviewed both many years ago in a Dublin pub. MacGowan was more animated then, and he was knocking back pints and chasers at quite a clip. Now, he takes the odd sip of wine. There’s a bottle of vodka on the trolley next to him, but it remains unopened. Clarke says he doesn’t drink nearly as much as he did, but notes that the pain and discomfort is greater for him as a result.

To the outsider, Clarke’s lot is a tough one. She has had to ‘mind’ MacGowan for years, and his current immobility means stuff they would have taken for granted before, like a walk to a pub or restaurant in nearby Donnybrook, can’t be done. Spontaneity goes out the window. She shrugs. “I love him. You make the best of the situation.”

The pair got married in Copenhagen in 2018. “I think a lot of people get married too soon,” she says, “but we know each other inside out. We’ve been through it all together and it just felt like the right thing to do. I think when some people get married early, it’s about lust, infatuation. The relationship hasn’t been properly road-tested.”

The Danish capital was chosen in the hope that the paparazzi wouldn’t turn up en masse. “Oh, they were there all right,” Clarke says, ruefully. Some of the snappers were there for Johnny Depp, who has been friends with MacGowan and Clarke for years. “Shane will be singing on his new album,” she says. At their wedding reception, Depp sang Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.

There’s a famed drawing on one wall that catches the eye. It’s from Bono and dedicated to MacGowan and Clarke. He too has a distinct style — his just published memoir features several of his line drawings.

“Bono is just the kindest man,” Clarke says. “Who?” MacGowan asks. “Oh, yeah,” he grins affectionately. “Sir Bono.”

Clarke recalls a time, “in the 1990s”, when she was struggling to write and having difficulty finding the suitable headspace. Bono offered them use of the Martello tower he then owned. MacGowan chuckles as he recalls a fondness for full-frontal flashing when Dart-loads of passengers would go by. “The guards came to us quite a bit,” Clarke says. “We were a bit wild.”

Bono asked them to leave, but he didn’t see them short. “He put us up in his hotel,” Clarke says, referring to the plush Clarence Hotel in Temple Bar that Bono and the Edge own. She knuckled down to the writing and in 2001, her biography, A Drink With Shane MacGowan, was published to considerable acclaim. She has written a number of books since then. More recently, she has started to write songs again. She says she wrote a song in the 1980s that MacGowan liked “but the rest of The Pogues didn’t want it”.

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Victoria Mary Clarke with some of her art. Picture: Frank McGrath

She says she is keen to fulfil some of her own dreams in the future and is hoping her own paintings will be exhibited one day. But for now, the focus is on her husband and a lifetime of his art.

“I’m just so proud of him,” Clarke says. MacGowan, sunglasses still on, smiles softly.

The limited-edition book, ‘The Eternal Buzz and The Crock of Gold’, available at shanemacgowan.com