Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan. (18.)
Directed by Julien Temple.
Featuring Shane MacGowan, Gerry Adams, Siobham MacGowan, Victoria Mary Clark, Bobby Gillespie, Nick Cave and Johnny Depp. Out in cinemas Dec 4th/ VOD Dec 7th.124 mins.
To your first question: No, he isn't dead yet. God only knows he doesn't look well these days, but then he never did. Today he resides in a wheelchair and his face has the ghostly white pallor of someone in a Roy Andersson film. Subtitles accompany his every utterance and usually his head rests on a shoulder while his wary eyes scan the face of his current interlocutor evaluating if this is someone he should bother remaining conscious for. He looks like he might be a heavily made-up Paul Whitehouse playing a particularly degenerate caricature of Stephen Hawking.
To your second question: yes the songwriter and former frontman of the Pogues does merit a two-hour documentary, though I had my doubts initially. I write as a fan: the various Pogues concerts I went to in the eighties were among the finest live music experiences of my life. I lost more than one pair of glasses to the front-of-stage melee they provoked and remember one all-day event in a tent in Finsbury Park being a gruelling and debauched occasion. They were a great band but even so, we are talking about a man's whose reputation rests largely on the work he did on their first three albums in the eighties.
MacGowan though is a man you don't meet every day and his is not just another tale of rock'n'roll excess: he started drinking at age six and for him, life on the road was just more of the same. The MacGowan story takes in nervous breakdowns, being institutionalised and a public schoolboy at Westminster, idolizing the IRA, time as a rent boy, a pioneering London punk and a heroin addict. With all that to get through Temple's film takes almost an hour to reach the formation of The Pogues.
It's a busy life and it's a busy film. Temple fills it with a rapid montage of Ralph Steadman animations, archive footage, film clips and home movies. Anchoring this Irish Rover is the man himself in a series of conversations with his wife, his biographer, Gerry Adams, Bobby Gillespie and the film's producer Johnny Depp. (Of all his conversational other halves, Shane seems most relaxed with Depp and most awkward with Adams.)
Some will argue that there is altogether a little too much going on but this has ambitions to be something way more than a look back at that musician you used to like. The film is as much about Irish identity, the struggles with the British over the last century and a half and the difficulties of life within the Paddiaspora as it is about a drunk bloke who was in a band and wrote some great songs.
Temple's film pulls its subject in two directions, both up and down. It's unflinching and unflattering; you are left in no doubt that MacGowan can be hard work and very unpleasant company. No matter how long you've known him, eggshell treading seems to be an inherent part of the relation. Against that the film tries to place his work in the great literary tradition of Ireland, with Joyce and Behan and O'Brien, as well as presenting it as part of the Republican cause. You may baulk at these aspirations, but if you go with it you will find something illuminating and thought provoking.
Temple would have first encountered Shane when he was a prominent face in the punk movement, a whirling instrument of mayhem at the front of the crowd at any notable gig and Temple was making films about the Sex Pistols for what would ultimately become The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. Over four decades later he's documented his journey from the man who got part of his ear bitten off by a girl at a Clash concert to an esteemed figure in Irish literature.
Directed by Julien Temple.
Featuring Shane MacGowan, Gerry Adams, Siobham MacGowan, Victoria Mary Clark, Bobby Gillespie, Nick Cave and Johnny Depp. Out in cinemas Dec 4th/ VOD Dec 7th.124 mins.
To your first question: No, he isn't dead yet. God only knows he doesn't look well these days, but then he never did. Today he resides in a wheelchair and his face has the ghostly white pallor of someone in a Roy Andersson film. Subtitles accompany his every utterance and usually his head rests on a shoulder while his wary eyes scan the face of his current interlocutor evaluating if this is someone he should bother remaining conscious for. He looks like he might be a heavily made-up Paul Whitehouse playing a particularly degenerate caricature of Stephen Hawking.
To your second question: yes the songwriter and former frontman of the Pogues does merit a two-hour documentary, though I had my doubts initially. I write as a fan: the various Pogues concerts I went to in the eighties were among the finest live music experiences of my life. I lost more than one pair of glasses to the front-of-stage melee they provoked and remember one all-day event in a tent in Finsbury Park being a gruelling and debauched occasion. They were a great band but even so, we are talking about a man's whose reputation rests largely on the work he did on their first three albums in the eighties.
MacGowan though is a man you don't meet every day and his is not just another tale of rock'n'roll excess: he started drinking at age six and for him, life on the road was just more of the same. The MacGowan story takes in nervous breakdowns, being institutionalised and a public schoolboy at Westminster, idolizing the IRA, time as a rent boy, a pioneering London punk and a heroin addict. With all that to get through Temple's film takes almost an hour to reach the formation of The Pogues.
It's a busy life and it's a busy film. Temple fills it with a rapid montage of Ralph Steadman animations, archive footage, film clips and home movies. Anchoring this Irish Rover is the man himself in a series of conversations with his wife, his biographer, Gerry Adams, Bobby Gillespie and the film's producer Johnny Depp. (Of all his conversational other halves, Shane seems most relaxed with Depp and most awkward with Adams.)
Some will argue that there is altogether a little too much going on but this has ambitions to be something way more than a look back at that musician you used to like. The film is as much about Irish identity, the struggles with the British over the last century and a half and the difficulties of life within the Paddiaspora as it is about a drunk bloke who was in a band and wrote some great songs.
Temple's film pulls its subject in two directions, both up and down. It's unflinching and unflattering; you are left in no doubt that MacGowan can be hard work and very unpleasant company. No matter how long you've known him, eggshell treading seems to be an inherent part of the relation. Against that the film tries to place his work in the great literary tradition of Ireland, with Joyce and Behan and O'Brien, as well as presenting it as part of the Republican cause. You may baulk at these aspirations, but if you go with it you will find something illuminating and thought provoking.
Temple would have first encountered Shane when he was a prominent face in the punk movement, a whirling instrument of mayhem at the front of the crowd at any notable gig and Temple was making films about the Sex Pistols for what would ultimately become The Great Rock'n'Roll Swindle. Over four decades later he's documented his journey from the man who got part of his ear bitten off by a girl at a Clash concert to an esteemed figure in Irish literature.
