Shane MacGowan is 50 years old on Christmas Day. That's 50 YEARS OLD. Dear God, he made it. MacGowan has singularly failed to fulfil his side of an unwritten contract that required him to keel over in a sodden heap sometime in the early 1990s and never get up again, which has disappointed the kind of people who desire a neat ending when it comes to their doomed rock stars. Instead, he has aged the way that most people age when they have a chronic drink problem and a lack of vanity: badly, visibly, with a abrupt downturn in the quality of his work but with a certain proud, unapologetic defiance.
This isn't really playing the game. MacGowan wears his insecurities and addictions all over his waxen face, which is perhaps why he presents such an obvious target for opprobrium, scorn, mirth and hypocritical moralising. It's also why I still have a lot of time for him. For my money, someone like Robbie Williams seems a far more deeply troubled individual, desperately yo-yo-ing between rehab and the gym, so uptight, so consumed by a corrosive mix of egoism and self-loathing. MacGowan, on the other hand, at least seems to know who and what he is. Naturally, his half-century represents another opportunity to tut-tut over his unfulfilled potential; his wasteful habits; the lack of any decent music - or any music at all - over the past few years; his willingness to engage in the Pogues annual pissed-up Yuletide pantomime. This all misses the point. In much the same way that critics wrung their hands over Peter Cook, lamenting his swift burn-out and musing what he could have been, people who claim that MacGowan has never fulfilled his potential are wrong. MacGowan has achieved his aims admirably, he just did it very quickly and with deceptive ease. He wanted to write himself into the canon of drunken Irish genius-poets and to a greater extent, with songs like 'Body Of An American', 'The Old Main Drag', 'A Rainy Night In Soho', 'A Pair Of Brown Eyes', 'The Broad Majestic Shannon' and - yes - 'Fairytale Of New York', he succeeded. He wanted to re-infuse Irish traditional music with fire and fury for future generations, and he did that, too. Since about 1989 there has been nowhere left him for to go - so he went down the pub. Who are we to say that he shouldn't just stay there? The last great Pogues album came out two decades ago. Even his short lived creative resurgence with the Popes is - it shocked me a little to discover - 10 years gone. I doubt we shall hear anything of any substance from him in the future but that doesn't detract one iota from his achievements. So, if you have a moment between the Queen's speech and Doctor Who, it would be fit and proper to raise a pint of martini to the old boy. And shed no tears.
