A Curious Career

by Lynn Barber

  Where is Victoria now? ‘Off ligging with U2 in London,’ he says. She is Irish but prefers living in London – he prefers Dublin or Tipperary. He was meant to go to the U2 concert but couldn’t face travelling to England. Travel must be a serious problem for him – Victoria in the book mentions the hours or even days spent in airports waiting to find a flight willing to take him. Once when he was booked to join Bob Dylan in the States, four flights came and went without him.

  And yet Victoria is obviously devoted – she calls him ‘Sweet Pea’ throughout the book. They have been together fifteen years, so why haven’t they married? ‘Because we never had enough celebrities in the same place at the same time.’ (This gnomic utterance is later explained by Victoria – they plan to sell their wedding to Hello! or OK! magazine.) ‘But we’re getting married this year. Hopefully.’ And will they start a family? ‘I think when we grow up we should [he is forty-three, she thirty-five] – it’s something we’ve discussed. But probably I’m dropping myself in the shit even talking about it.’

  His mother told him never to have children till he was rich. He was rich, he made millions with the Pogues, but he says now he’s spent it all. ‘If you hug money, you clog up the cash flow, know what I mean?’ He says he’s not destitute – he still gets enough from song-writing royalties to keep him in booze and fags – but he missed out on the rock-star mansions. All he owns is a flat in Gospel Oak which he shares with Victoria, and the old family farm in Tipperary which has no running water. His current group, the Popes, has never achieved success by Pogues standards. Supposing he never makes another record, will he have enough to live on? ‘Well,’ he sputters, ‘I could always open supermarkets!’

  The wit is quick and comes like a wake-up call to me, reminding me of Bono’s remark, ‘Shane is more together than people imagine.’ (Bono obviously respects him, because he lent him his Martello Tower to live in for a year after the Pogues split up.) Shane’s speech may be slurred, his movements uncoordinated, he sometimes gets stuck on saying, ‘Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Know what I mean?’ till you want to scream – but he is not ‘out of it’. On the contrary, he seems to be controlling this interview much better than me. When he doesn’t want to answer a question, he ignores it, or mumbles into his G & T. But every time he mentions an Irish name, he spells it out carefully, complete with accents, into my tape recorder. Moreover, unlike me, he remembers everything he says. This was brought sharply home a couple of hours into our conversation when the barman called him over to take a phone call. It was from Victoria and he came back saying, ‘You’ve got to take out that line about her climbing over her grandmother to get to a celebrity. She didn’t think it was funny. So take it out, or I’ll fucking sue you, right?’ (Later, in London, I persuaded Victoria to let me keep it in – she says it’s OK because her grandmother is dead – but fancy him remembering.)

  Shane sees it as his duty to educate me in Irish history, so I’m in for a lot of lecturing about Brian Ború, the Black and Tans, Michael Collins, Partition, ‘Ireland is a woman’, the craic, the whole tear-stained Emerald Isle package. And yet if you step outside Bloom’s Hotel, you can see that Dublin today is just about the glossiest, yuppiest place in Europe – it has such full employment it actually has to import workers. Hasn’t Shane noticed?

  Evidently not. ‘I live in the past. It doesn’t feel like 2001 to me.’ In any case, his Ireland is an entirely personal construct of songs and myths and stories his relatives told him in infancy, i.e. an Ireland that was probably extinct by the time he was born, if it ever even existed. He has lived in England since he was six – he won a scholarship to Westminster, for heaven’s sake! (Admittedly only for a year, but still . . .) There are people who knew him in his teens who say he didn’t have an Irish accent then. But, on the other hand, all his song-writing inspiration comes from Ireland and he achieved his ‘crusade’ with the Pogues to make Irish music hip and popular, to build Irish self-esteem. In fact, he was one of the founders of the current Irish cultural renaissance – it is just unfortunate that he looks more like a relic of the old pre-boom Ireland of hopeless old pissheads doing zilch.

  Shane’s father ‘likes a drink’, his uncles, aunts, cousins ditto. Shane claims that, when he was a small child in Tipperary, they gave him two Guinnesses a night as his bedtime drink and later, when he was eight, an uncle introduced him to Powers Whiskey. He says he never really drew a sober breath after the age of fourteen. ‘In our family it was like, if the kid likes a drink, let him have a drink – because all the kids who weren’t allowed to have a drink turned into raging alcoholics.’ Mmm, yes, Shane – and . . .? Even he notices some logical flaw in his argument because he starts sputtering, ‘We’d never even heard of alcoholism. We’d have thought it was some kind of weird religion. Our household was an open house where no one was refused, there was a continuous ceilidh going on, people would come from miles around for a drink, twenty-four hours, there’s always one or two people awake.’

  This was his mother’s family’s house in Tipperary, where he lived till he was six, while his parents worked in England. He says in the book, ‘My life was a happy dream when I was a little boy.’ But when he came to live with his parents in London, the picture grows darker and there are glimpses in the book of a deeply dysfunctional family – father out boozing every night, mother lying in bed with arthritis or depression, pilled out of her head, Shane trying to look after his little sister Siobhan. In the book he talks about his mother having a nervous breakdown but now he retracts that and says, ‘I was just projecting, you know. I was depressed.’

  When he was seventeen, he had a major breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six months. ‘I was drinking a lot and I’d been put on a heavy prescription of tranquillisers by the GP. This was a big thing in the ’70s – there’s thousands of people in mental hospitals who were made zombies by downers. Anyway, they got me off the gear, the drugs that had put me there, and I started drinking again – but then they wouldn’t let me drink, which is where the trouble started. It was called Acute Situational Anxiety – which basically meant I didn’t like being in London. Perpetual panic – I panic in London.’

  Does he panic about performing? ‘No, that isn’t the panic at all. My family were, are, all singers, performers. No, just sitting in a goddamn bloody flat in bloody London, that’s a panic situation. Basically, I’ve been holding my breath half my fucking life. I can only relax when I’m in Ireland or one or two other places – Thailand, Spain, Japan and certain parts of America. I actually feel physically sick when I think of London.’

  And yet, Victoria told me later he seemed happy enough living in London till Christmas, but then he went to Dublin for a Popes concert and never came back. He now claims to live in Tipperary, in the old family farmhouse with the sign on the door saying ‘Trespassers will be shot’. His parents live in a new house down the road. He describes them as ‘very young at heart, intelligent, warm, loving sociopaths’. (Everyone else describes them as ‘characters’.) But actually he seems to have been living in Bloom’s Hotel, Dublin, since January.

  What it seems to boil down to is that he feels happy and sociable and safe drinking in Ireland, and depressed and lonely and paranoid drinking in London. But what about not drinking – is that ever a possibility? Yes, he says, ‘I don’t have to drink.’ Victoria took him to the Priory last autumn for a dry-out and he says it worked. But, er, what are all these glasses on the table? ‘This isn’t drinking. We’re just having a couple of drinks, you know?’ Right. How long did he stay sober after the Priory? ‘As long as it took to get to the nearest bar.’ So is that his pattern – to dry out, then start drinking again? ‘I don’t have a pattern. I can’t remember from one day to the next.’

  At one point I said something about his attraction to drink and drugs, and he was suddenly beadily alert. ‘What! I’m a drinker. I drink. But drugs, you said – I don’t take drugs.’ What? Never? ‘So long ago I can’t remember.’ He sh
ould read Victoria’s book, then, because it’s full of drugs – uppers and downers and acid and cocaine. He once said that by the time the Pogues ended in 1991 he was taking 50 tabs of acid a day – ‘You get used to it, you can function on it.’

  But it has obviously become a touchy subject since November 1999, when Sinéad O’Connor shopped him to the police for taking heroin. She told the Sun she went round to his flat and found him practically in a coma on the floor and called the police because ‘I love Shane and it makes me angry to see him destroy himself.’ He says he was sitting peacefully on the sofa watching a Sam Peckinpah video. Whatever – no police charges were brought. So was he ever on heroin? ‘What – addicted to heroin?’ Well, on heroin? ‘I’ve tried it a long time ago.’ The only drugs he will admit to taking now are prescription tranquillisers – ‘If the doctor prescribes them, I take them, and sometimes quite a heavy dose, for stress. But at least I go to a doctor, know what I mean?’

  Midway through the evening, a man comes into the bar, sees Shane, and rushes over. Shane lurches to his feet and hugs him for a good five minutes. He is Gerry O’Boyle, former owner of Filthy MacNasty’s bar in Islington, and they ‘go back a long way’. Gerry rustles up a few more G & Ts but, I notice, drinks water. He stays with us for the rest of the evening, and Shane seems happy to have him. Later, when I am drunk as a skunk, Gerry serves the useful purpose of changing the tape when necessary.

  At some point they decide to teach me how to say a rosary and both whip out their rosaries and an amazing array of medals and scapulas and plastic folders saying ‘I am a Catholic. If I am dying, please call a priest.’ Shane says he would certainly want a priest if he were dying. One reason why he likes St John of God – a Dublin drying-out home he sometimes uses – is that it’s run by nuns, and priests come round to hear your confession. ‘I haven’t been to mass for a long time. But I pray every day, every night. I pray all the time. I pray whenever I’m struck by fear and worry, and I pray in gratitude when the release is given to me, you know?’

  As a Catholic, doesn’t he feel bad about not having children? ‘I’ve got children!’ How many? ‘I don’t know. I only know about one. He’s a young man. He lives in Scotland. He knows where to get hold of me. I saw him once, when he was three. He knows I’m his father. Years ago, me and Lesley agreed that any time he wanted to come and see me he could come and see me and I’d take him out for a drink, get him whatever he wants. But she married a good man, and he seems to be satisfied with him as his father.’

  Later in the evening Shane and Gerry announce that they have decided they can trust me, so they will cut me in on the bank robbery they are doing tomorrow. They are driving to a country town, about an hour out of Dublin, and they need a getaway driver. ‘She’d be a fucking brilliant driver!’ Shane opines. ‘She’d be a good driver, yes,’ Gerry agrees. ‘Well, I don’t know. I stop at zebra crossings. I’m rather a slow driver,’ I warn them. Both nod eagerly. ‘See, if you were a fast driver, it would be very obvious. A slow getaway driver is good!’

  The evening reels on. Shane sings, ‘Woman come in the name of love,’ and ends with the plea, ‘Can I not convince you to come out with us and rob a bank?’ I tell him my husband wouldn’t like it and he accepts that – obeying your husband is good. But, he suggests with great delicacy, perhaps my husband will die before me and then I can come out and rob a bank? I promise to think about it.

  Gerry reminds Shane periodically that there’s a party at the Clarence they should go to. ‘You come!’ Shane orders. ‘I haven’t got anything to wear,’ I whimper – rather a feeble excuse in view of Shane’s suit. ‘Come as you are,’ he says magnanimously. So several hours or aeons later, we stagger into the glossy streets of Temple Bar round to the Clarence, which luckily is only a few yards. Apparently le tout Dublin is there – Candace Bushnell and Marianne Faithfull and two Corrs! But my vision isn’t too great by this stage and in a sudden flash of clarity I realise I must go to bed or I will die. I totter over to Shane and say, ‘Gorra go,’ and somehow the big friend from his hotel room appears at my elbow and steers me gently back to the hotel.

  In the morning, badly hungover, I wander downstairs about nine to ask the receptionist what time I can decently phone Shane to say goodbye. ‘Ask him,’ she says cheerily. ‘He’s in the bar.’ Omigod, he is – sitting at the bar with four or five G & Ts in front of him, chatting to the barman. The barman looks near death but Shane looks much as usual. ‘Where were you?’ he says quite sharply. ‘You missed a good night.’ Apparently he and his friends went from the party to a club to another party and another club, where he sang a few songs. Then they came back to talk. But now everyone else has gone to bed, and he is quite eager to start chatting all over again. But sorry, Shane, I just can’t face it and anyway I have to catch a plane. I tell him it was a joy to meet him and he lurches to his feet and says with great formality, ‘The pleasure’s all mine.’ What a well-brought-up boy!

  Back in London, I immediately ring Victoria Clarke, agog to see what Shane’s girlfriend can be like. She says she would love to meet but she’s going to some place in Kennington for a five-day residential fast. Next day, however, she rings to say she is having a sauna at her health club in Hampstead and I can join her there. I drive there thinking – sauna, health club, fast – and this is Shane’s girlfriend? My jaw actually drops when I meet her – she is peachy-skinned and milkmaid-wholesome, as fresh and glowing as a yogurt ad. How can she bear to marry an alky who by his own admission never takes a bath?

  But she doesn’t see Shane like that: she thinks he is beautiful. She first met him twenty years ago when she was fifteen and ‘I thought he was gorgeous. At first I didn’t like him as a person – I always fancied him, but thought he was really arrogant. I know he’s not conventionally handsome but he is beautiful.’ And yes, she confirms, they are getting married as soon as they can get someone to pay. ‘I hear Hello! pay up to 500 grand! You’ve got to get lots of celebrities to come, though, for that.’

  Gosh, what can I say? I just sit there gawping at her. But hasn’t she noticed this, er, problem with Shane? Yes, she says calmly, she knows about alcoholism. She’s been to AA and Al-Anon (she prefers AA, found Al-Anon ‘very gloomy’). She thinks Shane could stop drinking if he wanted to – in fact, she says he drinks much less at home than when he’s on show – part of his problem is social anxiety, which he covers up with booze. ‘But I would hate it if someone said to me, “You’ve got to stop drinking.” I love wine.’

  In any case, she sympathises with addiction because she suffers it herself – she has a mild addiction to food and a major addiction to fame, and has had therapy for both. But now she plans to cure her fame addiction by hiring herself a publicist – she thinks probably Matthew Freud – to make her famous so she can get it out of her system. ‘Because it’s one of those things, like with heroin – you’ve got to try it before you can decide that you’re going to give it up.’

  But doesn’t this fame obsession make her relationship with Shane a bit suspect? Doesn’t he worry that she might leave him for someone more famous? ‘I’ve already done that. [Apparently she had an affair with Van Morrison.] We’ve been through it, we’ve had the affairs, we’ve had the break-ups, we’ve had the nervous breakdowns. But with me it didn’t last – the connection was never strong enough with anyone else – so it must be that I actually genuinely like him more than anyone else. And also we did meet before he was famous.’

  Shane told me sweetly, ‘I would never pretend to understand Victoria – or if I did understand her, I probably wouldn’t love her, you know?’ I do know. He is so lucky to have the love of a good woman, but at least he knows it – he writes in the foreword to her book, ‘God bless the day I found her, and I feel like the luckiest fucker alive.’ I hope they get married; I hope they live happily ever after. A few days later I bumped into Sir Bob Geldof at a party and asked him whether he thought Hello! would pay for their wedding. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ll pay for
it if Hello! won’t – I just want to see it happen!’ Me too – perhaps we should start a Victoria and Shane Wedding Appeal.

  *

  I felt, when I left Shane that morning in Dublin, that he could not live much longer – in fact he’s still flourishing and finally married to the wonderful Victoria. But my meeting with him is weirdly connected in my memory with my husband’s death in 2003. David was only fifty-nine; he looked about forty; there was absolutely nothing visibly wrong with him. But he’d had a slight prostate condition which meant he had to have regular blood tests and in late 2002 one of these tests revealed that he had myelofibrosis, a degenerative disease of the bone marrow. The doctors said that he had ‘only two good years’ (they didn’t specify how many bad ones) unless he had a bone marrow transplant, and the sooner the better. There was then a very nail-biting period when they were testing his brothers to see which one should be the donor, in the course of which David casually revealed that he didn’t believe they were his brothers anyway – he thought his mother had had a wartime fling. But luckily they were, and David went into UCH to have the transplant in July. He was still perfectly fit – we’d been to a wedding in Northern Ireland the weekend before and danced the night away. And a month later he was dead. His kidneys failed in the course of the chemo so he was on dialysis and then he suffered a bleed to the brain that killed him overnight. He was meant to be coming home the next week.

  It was such a shock I was effectively insane for several months. At first I was passive, glued to my armchair, obsessively going over the details of David’s last few weeks in hospital. That was relatively standard widow behaviour, I think. But after a while this was replaced by a really florid madness, a peculiar I-can-do-anything triumphalism that seemed to be based on the idea: I’ll show him I can manage without him! I made long to-do lists and – this was the unusual bit – actually did them. I had the house redecorated and rehung pictures, I sold old furniture and bought new, I replanned the front garden and built a fence, I learned to cook. I was a hideous mad tornado of energy, rather like Mrs Thatcher – off with the old, on with the new, can’t hang about, why put off till tomorrow what you can do today, etc etc. I even contemplated moving house – thank God I didn’t – because everyone told me that’s what widows were meant to do. ‘You don’t want to sit there, being reminded of David at every turn.’ Actually that’s precisely what I did want to do, and the idea that you could forget someone you were married to for over thirty years, or would want to, simply by moving house is completely absurd. But anyway I obediently went round estate agents and looked at flats in Docklands (in Docklands!) and thought I could embark on a whole new life. It was only when an estate agent exhorted me to stand on a chair and lean right out of the window so that I could see the ‘river view’ that some vestige of sanity returned, and I went home to my cats Samson and Delilah and assured them, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not moving anywhere.’