Crock of Gold - A few rounds with Shane MacGowan (MA, 124 minutes) 4 stars
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It was Christmas Eve babe, in the drunk tank.
An old man said to me, won't see another one."
The Pogues' Fairytale of New York is one of the more unexpected Christmas songs, but its popularity endures. Having just rewatched it on YouTube I'm astounded to see it has racked up over 75 million views.
Pogues songwriter and lead singer Shane MacGowan was born on Christmas Day, and so the timing for the release of this doco about MacGowan's life by friend and champion music filmmaker Julien Temple is apt.
Springing up in the wake of the British punk wave, The Pogues used traditional Irish instruments and MacGowan's politically charged writing. They were noted for their live performances and began to find wide commercial success with Fairytale. MacGowan's drinking and unreliability were too much for his bandmates, who booted him. He would record with his own band Shane MacGowan and The Popes for a decade, and The Pogues would play a lengthy world tour with their original lineup some years later, when they'd all grown up and calmed down a little.
The Shane MacGowan that Julien Temple focuses his camera on is a little the worse for wear after decades of alcohol and drug abuse and possibly other unaddressed health issues. He doesn't necessarily want to be interviewed or be the subject of a film, and so Temple throws a few of MacGowan's pals in with him to chat, including the Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, and Johnny Depp also appears throughout, drinking around the interview table with him. Depp serves as producer on the film, and does his job disarming the reluctant interviewee. It works: he does drop his guard a number of times and at one point, after a surprisingly honest recollection about some of his early fund-raising practices, seems to remember the camera is upon him.
In fact, listening to the older version of MacGowan speak throughout this film, possibly palsied and needing to be subtitled throughout, you wonder if it isn't the Pogue himself that Depp is channelling when playing Captain Jack Sparrow with his swallowed words and affected speech.
As many of MacGowan's recollections are recycled archival audio interviews from his younger self, Temple overlays them with some fun animation.
The film is about MacGowan, man and myth, and while his beautiful music appears throughout, it is very much about the shaping of his life and its playing out. The Pogues don't come into the story until the hour mark.
The stories of his early years in Tipperary, sinking pots of porter with the best of them at age six, unpacking the joys of Irish swearing, becoming fascinated with his dead ancestors and brainwashed into religion, are a joy. His carefree youth would make hard the next part of his life, an Irish lad in a series of British schools. "No Dogs No Blacks No Irish" was an accepted sign for a business to post in the London of his youth. It wasn't until the nightclubs and punk scene of his London teen years that he would find something resembling happiness. Music would be his saviour and downfall, and the film's second hour charts the decades from Nips to Pogues to Popes and what comes after. No interviews from his Pogues bandmates, maybe tellingly, but his family feature throughout.
There are revelations throughout, as MacGowan, both young and old versions, is fiercely intelligent and shares his fascination with Irish history. Julien Temple has been giving us the listening audience the visual cues to interpret our pop culture since the punk era, directing everybody and everything from Sid Vicious's My Way to Dexy's Midnight Runners' Come on Eileen.
As a director of features, he is responsible for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Absolute Beginners, and in recent years a series of documentaries profiling the musicians he was growing up and learning his trade with, including Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.
His is a fascinating take on a troubled and brilliant artist.