Siobhan MacGowan: My mind is full still with the magical mayhem of my brother Shane’s life

It has been only days since my brother’s funeral. Those words are hard to write. For anybody, seeing their loved one’s name adjoined to the word funeral is devastating. I’m sure it is hard for anyone, too, to read the finite period of living years displayed beneath that name. It’s literally so final. The life has been completed. It is over. But you cannot, do not, believe it. For the nature of love is that it is never over. And that love stays alive, beating powerfully and vibrant in your breast.

That is why for me, perhaps for others, to see the beloved’s name followed by “rest in peace” is bewildering; for, in my case, my mind is full of Shane’s humorous cursing, scornful sniggering, apologetic grin, eyes as often wide with wonder and appreciation as they were shrewd. It is full still with the magical mayhem of his life. His every joy and sorrow; his passions and fighting spirit. And although, in hospital, his body was weak, Shane’s spirit remained strong, only slipping from us hours before he took his last breaths. And I will be ever thankful that those last breaths were peaceful.

His first breaths were taken 66 years ago this Christmas day in Pembury, Kent. As the Christmas baby, his photograph was mounted on the hospital’s wall and printed in the local paper, as if a harbinger of the fame to come. I arrived five years later and, until Shane was 13, the family home lay just outside Tunbridge Wells to where our Tipperary-born mother Therese and Dubliner father Maurice had emigrated, following in the footsteps of our father’s sister.

[ Diarmaid Ferriter: Shane MacGowan captured what it was to struggle on the margins of a place that didn’t want you ]

That family home was full of fun. Here, Dad, Shane and I played the Racing Game, cards lined up on the very sixties carpet beside the very sixties green, gas fire. Whoever turned the highest-ranking card sent their “horse”, a coin, hurtling to the finish, to ear-piercing screeches, the most piercing always Shane’s, a talent he would later employ to spine-tingling effect in his songs.

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Racing seemed to be a theme as, one Christmas, Shane was gifted a set of two shiny Scalextric cars and a track, but Dad and I commandeered it, much to Shane’s displeasure. His scowl as Dad and I gleefully grabbed the controls, shouting on the speeding cars, did not exude Christmas spirit. That Christmas, as every Christmas, Shane took charge of the fairy lights for the tree. Some may be surprised that Shane liked order, and methodically he arranged the lights on the branches, flicking away his annoying little sister and her glittery baubles. The Easter feast would see us painting the shells of hard-boiled eggs, and through all seasons we watched Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and Doctor Who, rolling our toy Daleks across the floor, crying “exterminate!”, Shane proclaiming it with some gusto.

Both avid readers, we also wrote and drew constantly. In my eulogy at his funeral Mass, I recalled my six-year-old self drawing a tree, colouring the bark blue and about to paint the leaves pink. Glancing over, the 11-year-old Shane kindly counselled me that the bark should be brown, the leaves green, before stopping as if struck by a revelation: “Oh, no,” he declared. “It’s okay, you’re a surrealist.”

It was obvious, then, that my brother was advanced beyond his years, illustrated too by his devouring of the literature our parents shared with him, Dad favouring Irish authors such as Joyce, Beckett and Behan, Mum preferring authors such as Graham Greene, Hardy and Dickens. Shane had absorbed the Irish literary greats by the time he reached the age of 12. Our first family pet was a white cat which Shane named Mulligan after Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. On our regular music nights, Dad played traditional Irish records; the Dubliners was our favourite, and Shane and I would belt out rebel songs while Mum, a multiple award-winning Feis Ceoil singer, performed ballads. Even as very young children we were sure of our roots.

Identity is not a postcode. It is a sense of self that courses through your blood, the blood of your mother, your father, your ancestors. It is in the history of your family, your collective memory and traditions. It is in the songs your mother sings you, the stories your father reads to you. It is a stirring in your heart. The otherness you feel when distanced in another country. And Shane understood this more than most. We both felt it during our schooldays and during the IRA campaigns in England when the ire directed at us left us in no doubt of that otherness. But long before encountering such hostility, Shane’s passion for Ireland was pronounced.

That passion was never more palpable than when in Tipperary at our mother’s childhood home. In that cottage, heaving with great-aunts and uncles, he listened to their stories, sang with them songs, sat by the fire as Aunty Ellen swung the concertina. It was a holy place that threw unholy hooleys, and a neighbour often said of it: “There’d be sparks flying from the floor.” Here by the vast hearth over which they still cooked, we would kneel around the long kitchen table to say the Rosary, the same table they often stood my tiny brother on to sing a song, Shane often calling these his first gigs. For the entirety of his life it remained his emotional and spiritual home. During the holidays, after I had returned to the UK with our parents, Shane would stay on, Dad and I collecting him at summer’s end from the bus, the scent of the fire, and his cap, still on him.

I witnessed the manic crowds at those ramshackle early gigs, and as support for Elvis Costello at the Brixton Academy where I first heard the crowd chanting Shane’s name.

Back in England, he wrote of Irish rural life in the school magazine and, at 13, won the Daily Mirror children’s literary prize for his short story To Mac, A Bus about Irish meths-drinking social outcasts, a recurrent theme in his later songwriting. At 11, he attended his first gig, Mott the Hoople, and lay on his bed facing the wall the day Jimi Hendrix died. His literary and musical obsessions were firmly rooted by the time we moved to London when he was 13.

Our family were now living in the still-under-construction Barbican housing complex; Shane’s room was replete with a psychedelic green light, Hendrix, Zeppelin and Rolling Stones posters and bundles of the infamous Oz magazine and music journals NME, Sounds and Melody Maker.

He had a huge vinyl collection. His own favourite Christmas record, which he played constantly, was Happy Xmas (War Is Over) by John Lennon and Yoko Ono, on green vinyl. This was the early 1970s, when drug experimentation was not only cool but practically compulsory for any serious music fan. And so began a lifelong fascination with drugs, which became a dependence. In this, as with alcohol, he emulated not only his musical, but literary heroes such as James Clarence Mangan, William S Burroughs and Brendan Behan.

We had moved to a flat near Oxford Street when punk exploded, a huge milestone for Shane. The energy of anarchy spoke to him and, newly out of rehab, the punk anti-hippy, anti-drug ethos revived him. With his long hair now spiky and bleached white, a face on the punk scene, Shane O’Hooligan, was born. In his fanzine, Bondage, he wrote The Jam’s first review, soon forming his band The Nips, but it was when he fused his punk energy with his passion for Irish music that his purpose became clear.

In Pogue Mahone’s infancy Shane worked at Rocks Off records off Oxford Street, Mum buying him burgundy V-neck jumpers to wear under his suit jacket, Spider Stacy learning the tin whistle, playing it to her over the phone for her approval. I witnessed the manic crowds at those ramshackle early gigs somehow hoist the band from tiny venues on to the prestigious stages of the London Dominion where the audience invaded the stage, and as support for Elvis Costello at the Brixton Academy where I first heard the crowd chanting Shane’s name.

And so the journey began. The Pogues’ first two albums Red Roses for Me and Rum, Sodomy and the Lash were critically acclaimed but it would be the Christmas single off their third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God, that would see them catapulted into the mainstream.

That Christmas, 1987, in Tipperary, Shane and I gathered with our parents and other relatives around a transistor radio complete with an aerial-boosting coat hanger, to hear the UK charts countdown; like the Racing Game before, shouting the record on to the winning post. It came in at number two. But it was number one in Ireland. And that was what mattered to Shane. Never could we have foreseen the anthem it would become. No more than I could ever have foreseen that 36 years later I would waltz to that song, before the altar, at my brother’s funeral.

I had been dreading hearing his songs at the service, fearing their poignancy would make my pain unbearable. But I had not reckoned on the power of love to soar through the pain. Like one of Shane’s songs, the mourners danced wildly, tears on their cheeks, spirit and heart refusing to be defeated by death.

Because love is never defeated by death. It is an energy that cannot be destroyed.

I danced that day for my beautiful brother – for our song together will never be over.