Butler's Cinema Scene

Shane MacGowan

“CROCK OF GOLD” My rating: B

124 minutes | No MPAA rating

Even in an arena given to personal excess, Shane MacGowan has few peers.

MacGowan, who achieved fame in the ’80s as the singer of the Irish folk/punk band The Pogues, is regarded by not a few fellow musicians as one of the century’s great songwriters.

That achievement is almost eclipsed by his legendary self-destructive behavior.

Julien Temple’s new biographic documentary  “Crock of Gold”  finds MacGowan confined to a wheelchair (he suffered a broken pelvis some years back) but fundamentally unchanged.

He was never handsome — in early performance footage he presents as a bug-eyed human rat with a mouth like a pioneer graveyard — and now, at age 62, MacGowan seems perennially perched at the edge of a grave, with a whispy gray beard, a slack jaw and eyes that seem to be staring blearily off into infinity. He looks exactly like a stroke victim. (On the plus side, he picked up dental implants along the way; now when he grimaces it’s not nearly so scary.)

Temple chose to interview his subject in a series of barrooms, a decision fraught with peril. MacGowan went off the sauce a few years ago but here seems always to have a glass or bottle close at hand. In any case, he seems more or less on his best behavior, meaning that while he bitterly resents answering questions (he much prefers a casual conversation), he is mostly even keeled.

At some point Temple  had the bright idea of filming MacGowan as  he interacts with well-known admirers like actor Johnny Depp (a producer of the doc) and former Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams. Under these circumstances MacGowan opens up.

“Crock…” begins at the beginning, with MaGowan’s birth on Christmas Day in 1957. He was, he modestly claims, “chosen as a little boy to save Irish music.”

His first home was a Tipperary rental where people got their water from a street spigot and “pissed out the front door.” He and his parents then moved to the farm run by his Uncle John (“Uncle John never said much…He only ever said ‘Fuck’.”)

Young Shane was allowed to pretty much run amok.  He was adored by his Aunt Monica, who plied him with booze and cigarettes (he was an alcoholic by age 5) and taught him his catechism.

Indeed, MacGowan’s love/hate relationship with religion could be a movie unto itself.  Until age 11 he was determined to become a priest (“The Roman Catholic Mass is one of the most beautiful experiences a human being can be subjected to”) and today, after numerous lapses (a big one, at age 12, came after reading Marx and Trotsky), he still wears a large cross on a chain around his neck.

Shane McGowran with the Pogues

At age 6 the MacGowans moved to Britain where they found both work and a good deal of anti-Irish sentiment. Young Shane won a scholarship to a good school, only to be tossed for dealing drugs.

He discovered rock and roll. His first obsession was Creedence Clearwater Revival, but the great awakening came with the deliberately ugly anarchy of the Sex Pistols. MacGowan became a celebrity for having a chunk of his ear bit off during a Clash concert; he quickly became a poster boy for the punk scene.

And then came the Pogues. As a co-founder, singer and songwriter, MacGowan had a knack for penning heartbreaking songs in the Irish  traditional, only to turn them inside out during performance with his whiskey snarl and often frantic pacing. The other Pogues shared his taste for excess (“We’re better when we’re sober…but it’s not as much fun”) but even they eventually found MacGowan too much to take.

Nevertheless, “Crock of Gold” is crammed with snippets of the band in performance.  One only needs to hear a few bars of classics like “Dirty Old Town,” “Streams of Whisky,” “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn” or (especially) “Fairytale of New York” to come to the conclusion that whatever else may be said about him, Shane MacGowan has the soul of a poet.

The doc spends almost no time with MacGowan’s former bandmates, but quite a bit with his parents and his sister, who at one point had him arrested for heroin possession and committed him to an asylum.

In addition to the archival material Temple has shot all sorts of gorgeous new footage in the Irish countryside. And to help tell the tale he’s commissioned animated sequences in the visual styles of William Blake, R. Crumb and Ralph Steadman, among others.

What are we to make of Shane MacGowan?  He’s still surly, still violently opposed to the commercialization of his music, still convinced that he was chosen to forge a new path for his countrymen.

“I did what I did for Ireland,” he says.  He seems to believe it, so I will as well.

| Robert W. Butler