Zoom-in Online

Editor's Note: This blog was contributed by Innes Reekie, who was one of the very first people to lend me a hand when I turned up in London at the beginning of 2005 with nothing but a camera.

As you may have read in the other ZIO blogs of this series (Irish Soul and Pogues Live in NYC), Innes was given the assignment to travel with Shane MacGowan, lead singer of The Pogues, to his Irish hometown and conduct an interview along the way. Because a formal interview never took place, his article never saw the light of day... until now.

If you missed Part 1, you can read it HERE.

And now the story continues....

Part 2

Having spent around half my lifetime imbibing and ingesting booze and substances respectively, I felt quite rightly more qualified for this one than some lily-livered wannabe who'll wallpaper any given surface with the contents of his stomach at the very thought of ten consecutive JD & cokes. Then again, for something of this magnitude, a bit of preparation and artificial stamina wouldn't go amiss.  So, with a week's worth of wine and whisky abuse behind me, I leapt on the southbound 125 with several wraps of Colombia's finest and an unflinching desire to drink the buffet-car dry. Several hours later, on arriving at Kings Cross, I'd achieved my aim where whisky was concerned anyhow; I then set about negotiating a route to Victoria which didn't involve either extreme of the Northern Line.

Hooking up with Loaded lensman, Shakey, at Victoria, we boarded the Gatwick Express and with a slight degree of trepidation, agreed there was no turning back now. On arriving at Gatwick, we discovered we were flying with a new Irish flight operator which, in time, added substance to the old adage that the Irish, no disrespect intended, have their own, sometimes unfathomable, ways of doing things.

We first bumped into Victoria Clarke, Shane's girlfriend of ten years, at the check-in, and were informed that Shane had seemingly wandered off somewhere. Eventually, he showed up and, even in my advanced state of inebriation, he looked somewhat worse for wear, not quite with it, to put it mildly. It was only later I discovered he'd been at a close mate's funeral the previous day and had been up drinking all night, so it was hardly surprising he wasn't in the most garrulous of moods. Nonetheless, he was keen to retire to the bar as we had more than an hour to kill before boarding.

A couple of treble martini and lemonades down the hatch, and he began to open up a bit. At least enough to inform me I'd probably be alright over there cos I was a Celt, but Shakey was on thin ice on account of him being a Brit, and then he laughed that infamous MacGowan laugh, the one that kind of wheezily goes Krshhhh through the gap in his teeth and sounds like water running down a drain. Then out of the blue he turns to Victoria and announces, 'You gotta go and get me some underwear,' to which she responds, 'and you gotta go and pick up your prescription,' then in perfect synchronicity they up and go their separate ways, leaving us to our own devices.

Victoria returns first, remarking that the flight's been delayed by fifteen minutes and the screen now shows 20.10 as departure time. Shane returns, so it's time to get another one in and then we're off, or so we thought. Shane has trouble locating his boarding pass, so I pick up his holdall and carry it through security towards departures.

He finally catches me up and casually remarks, 'If I knew you were gonna carry me bag through, I woulda put me coke in it instead of stuffin' it in me shoe,' causing me to look at his overstuffed loafers which give him the look of a man suffering from mild elephantiasis of the foot. Before I can give the implications any further thought, I spot Shakey and Victoria walking back in our direction with expressions which couldn't exactly be described as 'tickled pink'.

'The flight's gone,' says Shakey confirming my worst suspicions

'How can it have gone, it's just gone five to eight,' I say, stupidly thinking that stating the obvious is gonna change anything.

'We'd better go down the airline information desk and see what the score is,' he says calmly, like a flight-missing veteran.

The four of us roll up to the desk in a state of obvious agitation, but to no avail. We're quickly battered into resignation by a carefully rehearsed monologue in perverse bureauocratic logic which goes something like this:

'I'm dreadfully sorry, but that was the last flight to Shannon tonight, you'll have to come back at 10.30 tomorrow morning.'

'But the TV monitors said that the flight left at 20.10.'

'Yes, but your boarding pass tells you the correct flight information and departure time, which was 19.55.'

'Yeah, but surely you refer to the screen for the latest up to date information, like delays for example.'

'I'm sorry, there's nothing I can do until tomorrow morning.'

'So why does the screen give the wrong time?'

'That's the time the flight used to depart at, and although we've asked the BAA to change this, they have still to get around to doing so.'

'Right, you admit you're in the wrong. So we can have the same flights reinstated free of charge for tomorrow?'

'You'll have to take the matter up with the BAA. There's absolutely nothing I can do for you tonight.'

Talk about going around in fucking circles. My hangover was threatening to start a lot fucking earlier than I could conceivably have imagined. We decided to cut our losses and caught a cab to Soho. At least there, I could postpone the inevitable comedown for a while.

We managed to secure a table at a swish Italian joint in Soho, and soon the wine was flowing like there was no tomorrow, although there most certainly was, as I was about to find out to my cost. Shane had loosened up considerably by now and was speaking about the trauma of the previous day's funeral. It transpired that it was Charlie MacLennan who had died, a long-standing member of The Pogues' road crew. At the age of forty four, he'd died in his sleep of a heart-attack, although subsequent reports in the national newspapers stated traces of alcohol, heroin, cocaine and cannabis were found in his bloodstream following an evening celebrating his birthday. Shane claimed he'd put most of his hard-living days behind him, but this obviously hadn't been one of them. He was the third out of six original crew members to have died in recent years. It's one thing to say, 'Well it goes with the territory,' but nonetheless it must be a sobering thought and surely caused Shane to question his own mortality.

'Yeah my heart's stopped beating twice now, but Victoria's always been around to revive me,' he says almost matter-of-factly.

My 'But what if she wasn't there, should it happen again?' elicits nothing more than a c'est la vie type shrug, which in this case should, strictly speaking, be c'est la mort. Any attempt to discuss drink and drugs finds Shane utilising his defense mechanism, which, basically translated, means he'll just stare straight back at you with a kind of stupefied expression that effectively says more than merely saying, 'Do you really expect me to answer that?'

He obviously harbours a deep mistrust of journalists, and perhaps quite rightly so. For too long now, they've expected him to jump through the hoops of hedonistic excess for their benefit, to justify their fascination with his penchant for self-destruction, rather than his God-given gift as one of the finest songwriters of his generation. But perhaps therein lies the fascination; that someone apparently so broken, so destructive and full of self-loathing can continue to create the occasional work of almost incomparable beauty and compassion.

I decide to lay the interviewing aside for a while and within minutes of making this decision, we're discussing the methadone tablets Shane picked up at the chemist. Suitably bolstered by the copious amounts of booze we've already thrown down our necks, both Shakey and myself get on a 'C'mon then Shane, let's try them' sort of trip. It's precisely at this point, when Shane shouts across the table 'How much smack d'ya usually take then!' that there appears to be a lull in every conversation across the entire restaurant.

For, oh at least a moment, we feel about as conspicuous as a surplus knob at tarts' tea-party, but only until the table behind us becomes the focus of the assembled diners. 'There's Harvey Keitel,' Shane says with a mixture of awe and amazement, 'It's fuckin' Harvey Keitel!'

Shit, poor Harvey, who's obviously over for The London Film Festival, had apparently just nipped in for a quiet bowl of pasta, and within minutes he's got a pissed-up Scottish jerk telling him the moustache is a bad move, and a manic looking London/Irish bloke with no teeth trying to engage him in conversation of an other sort.

Harvey obviously had no idea who Shane was, but still he chose to adopt a very polite but bemused expression. On the other hand, the young couple accompanying him (film festival PRs I reckon) couldn't have made their feelings more apparent if they'd tried; they glowered down their noses at us as if we were something unpleasant they'd just trodden in. It was probably a good idea to just let them be and get back to our own table.

Things became decidedly hazy from then on in. I vaguely remember going downstairs to the gents with a half-ounce bag of coke and Shane shouting manically after me, 'There's a hole in the bag, watch out for the hole!' but the voice seemed to come from a long way off. Sure enough there was indeed a hole, and in fact it came in useful to help direct me back to my table after I had finished.

I wasn't really thinking straight at that point. I further disgraced myself by mistaking a girl for Cher and joining her table for longer than was polite, and rounded up the evening at a neighbouring table by falling asleep on another girl's chest. Shane bought three bottles of wine for a nightcap, then we all headed off our separate ways, agreeing to rendezvous back at Gatwick the following evening.

....Continue on to PART 3.

Check out ZIO's other blogs about Shane MacGowan and The Pogues:

Irish Soul: Experiencing Shane MacGowan & The Pogues

Live Review: The Pogues @ Roseland Ballroom NYC 2009

Originally from Edinburgh, Scotland, Innes Reekie currently resides in Maida Vale, London.

Re-Action Recordings bleeds him white!

A freelance journalist for 15 years, his work has appeared in no less than 40 publications including NME, LOADED, GQ, The Observer, The Scotsman, Glasgow Herald and The Sunday Times. Primarily covering music, literature and film, he thrives on the challenge of confrontations with supposed difficult subjects who inhabit the darker side of life; Nick Cave, Shane McGowan and Bobby Gillespie being his unholy trinity of most interesting subjects to date.

He was once described on television as being, 'firstly a journalist, but foremost, a chronicler of urban decay' by Irvine Welsh's original publisher, Rebel Inc. It is a description he believes to be 'fairly accurate, although not one my mother is over-fond of quoting'.