We speak to long time friend of Shane MacGowan, Pogues frontman, John McLaughlin on their relationship.
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00:00John, you put together a show for the love of Shane McGowan
00:03and that was a kind of rendition of songs
00:08but also it was a telling of tales
00:11from your time spent with Shane.
00:15Tell me a bit about how you met him
00:16and yeah, how that kind of inspired the show.
00:21Well, it was back in the day, so it was 2001
00:24when I first met him,
00:25that I was a Shane and Pogues fan from Dot.
00:29I think that we moved on from punk rock
00:31because I was a big punk rock fan,
00:33The Clash, The Pistols and all that
00:34and when that was all going,
00:37it was like Shane was the saviour of that,
00:39the Pogues were, and they kind of,
00:41I think they kind of embodied both things
00:43that I grew up with,
00:44Irish traditional music and kind of punk rock.
00:47So he just seemed to merge both those things.
00:49So we found a new hero in Shane McGowan.
00:52So I always loved Shane
00:53and then of course I'm a big Celtic fan
00:55so we were making a record
00:57to celebrate the Lisbon Lions
00:59and I managed to get a whole bunch of famous people
01:01on the record, Rod Stewart, Billy Connolly,
01:04Noel Gallagher, the fun-loving criminals
01:07echoing the band.
01:07So I had all these people but I wanted Shane
01:09so I was reaching out, reaching out
01:10and eventually he got back and said,
01:12yeah, I'll do it.
01:14He's a Celtic fan as well.
01:15So at last I get to meet him,
01:17so he comes up in 2001
01:20and I have to go,
01:22well first of all, he doesn't turn up for two days
01:24which I was told by his publicist
01:26would be a thing.
01:27Say, well, tell him it's Monday
01:28and you might get him on Saturday.
01:30I was like, okay, good, right?
01:32So that's exactly what happened.
01:34I go to meet him at the airport
01:35and bless him, he comes out
01:37and he's got a lit fag
01:38and he's swaying about like an MFI wardrobe
01:40and I thought, there's Shane McGowan, my man.
01:43And yeah, so off we go,
01:45we go to Celtic Park
01:47and we're at the middle of the park
01:48and he's singing his band.
01:51I was like, it was amazing.
01:52It was incredible, 62,000 people there.
01:54And we just became great friends since then.
01:57He stayed the rest of that week.
01:59You recorded a bit as well, didn't you?
02:01Because he did a track,
02:02As Long As I Belong to Glasgow.
02:03As Long As I Belong to Glasgow, yeah.
02:05So we'd done that together.
02:06That was the night we lost,
02:08I was going to say lost weekend,
02:09it was a lost week.
02:11I sang that song with him a couple of times
02:14in the taxi
02:15and we both didn't really know the words
02:18but it's a good tune, you know?
02:20Great tune.
02:21He didn't know the words when he wrote it,
02:23I don't think.
02:24Of course he worked with Shane as well,
02:25so you get where I'm coming from with that.
02:28But that relationship he had with Glasgow
02:31is fascinating
02:32and he did spend a lot of time here.
02:34Some of the most important gigs they did as a band
02:37were at the Barrowlands.
02:39I did feel that sense of connection
02:41to the music scene here overall, right?
02:44100%, huge, huge love for Glasgow
02:47and it's in his books,
02:49it's well documented
02:50that Glasgow is probably his other place
02:53that he loved to be, you know?
02:54I think he also got that
02:57he was appreciated here
02:58maybe more than other places
03:01and not in a kind of pop star kind of way
03:03because you knew him and I knew him,
03:04that was not his thing.
03:05You know, he didn't care about money,
03:07he had no concept of time
03:08and he certainly had no ego for all the other stuff
03:11but I think there was a general,
03:13just something special about the Glasgow people
03:15and their relationship with him and vice versa.
03:19So he totally loved it.
03:20So when we were starting to write these songs,
03:22we'd write a song about Glasgow
03:24and also as well as like,
03:25Kaiser Sozak or something,
03:26I was telling him about,
03:28he wanted to know all about where I grew up
03:29and all that, it was Milton
03:31and he wanted to know the name of the gangs,
03:33it was the Tongs and the Apostle Fleto and all this
03:35and then when we're battering away this,
03:37he just, boom, all these words go into the,
03:40the Times and the Tongs,
03:41the lassies that are gone still live on
03:42in my fond memory and all this.
03:44It was almost like all the information was going in
03:47and it just comes out in one chunk
03:50and thankfully, the time I got into a studio,
03:53we'd still got it, you know, in some form to record it.