Spider Stacy of the Pogues remembers Shane MacGowan
The Mojo pages hosted a text by Spider Stacy, in which the musician of Pogues pays tribute to his bandmate Shane MacGowan passed away at the age of 65 last November due to pneumonia. The singer, tin whistle player and co-founder of the Pogues described Shane as a “hero”, a “towering figure” and a “genius”.
“It’s a strange place to find myself writing about my friend who died, my friend without whom my life would have been completely different,” Peter Richard ‘Spider’ Stacy wrote in the forward of the piece. In his article he described Shane as a “towering figure, a genius who could recount the hopes and fears, the sad and stained glory of the human condition in such extraordinary forms”.
Stacy recalled first meeting MacGowan at a Ramones concert at the Roundhouse in 1977, before meeting him again the following year in a squatter community in Bloomsbury, London. At the time, Stacy was performing with the Millwall Chainsaws, what he calls a “rudimentary punk trio”, for whom MacGowan sometimes filled in as a guitarist in rehearsals.
From there, “the first seeds of The Pogues were sown” and the friendship between the two “grew deeper”. He recalled having an early gig at Richard Strange’s (writer, actor and founder of Doctors of Madness) Cabaret Futura, which led to “an intense period in which Shane and I, night after night, drinking colossal quantities of cider, listened intently to the songs of the Irish revolution”. “At the time the concert itself was kind of a farce, but an idea was taking shape,” he added.
“What started with Shane has turned into something unlike anything we could have imagined. At one point – he continues – towards the end of our first tour, I told Shane that I thought we were the best band in the world. He snorted. “Of course we fucking are!”
Stacy concluded the piece by writing, “Heroes live forever.”