A Furious Devotion

Prologue

June 2012, London

Across the road from a private clinic in Belgravia, I wait, watching for the door to open. Shane MacGowan has an appointment and I have arranged to meet him afterwards and interview him for a book about Stiff Records. The rendezvous has been set up by Shane’s old friend Paul Ronan, with whom he stays in London. I haven’t met Shane before, so don’t know what to expect. My instinct tells me to go with the flow.

The heavy door of the exclusive doctor’s surgery opens and the two of them emerge. Shane is tall, with a loping gait, his eyes obscured behind thick black shades. I introduce myself and we shake hands, but he’s a man on a mission. He sets off gainfully alongside the black railings and it’s clear this is no time for conversation. At the end of the pavement, Shane turns into a cobbled side-street. Suddenly, he stops and sways, a gigantic trail of snot dangling from his nose. He snorts it onto the street, takes a slug of water from the plastic cup he’s holding before throwing that down and carrying on.

Around the corner, we settle at a small table outside a bistro. Shane is anxious. His appointment has interrupted his drinking and he seems twitchy as he waits for his order to arrive. However, once the waiter returns with his bottle of rosé champagne he relaxes and, when it seems safe to do so, I switch on my recorder and begin asking some questions. Paul helps to steer things along and encourages him to chat. Shane’s rambling recollections about the record label that took a chance on The Pogues are punctuated with his notorious snigger – ‘tsscchh’ – which sounds like someone gargling with gravel. At one point he falls asleep on the recorder and I have to gently prise it from under him.

He disappears off to the toilet and when after some time he doesn’t return, I ask Paul if he’s OK. He assures me Shane is fine. But I’m not convinced, and I head to the gents to investigate. Inside, I discover Shane has locked himself in a cubicle and is hammering on the door for help. I encourage him to simply turn the handle, but it’s no good, and a key is fetched by the staff to get him out.

His motor skills seem shot. Several times, he clumsily knocks his cutlery through the slats in the wooden table, and I end up helping him light his cigarettes as he struggles to do it himself. Food is spilled down his shirt. He is not drunk, but the years of abuse have taken their toll, as indicated by the carrier bag of medication with which he emerged from the clinic.

It is clear that I am in the company of a highly intelligent, extremely well-read man, with an encyclopaedic knowledge of pretty much everything. There are moments of irascibility, but overall, Shane is good company. He enjoys recounting stories and chuckles away to himself as he remembers funny things that have happened. I ask him to sign a couple of items and he is happy to oblige. ‘To Richard. You boring asshole! Shane x’, he scrawls in the front of Victoria’s book. Paul takes a photograph of the two of us raising a glass. There is no ego at play here. Shane is generous and there is a kindness in his eyes. Definitely.

I want to know so much more about him than his association with Stiff Records and, a couple of years later, I ask Paul, with whom I have stayed in touch, if Shane would be open to me writing his biography. To my surprise, he replies that Shane is not against the idea. And that’s how it starts.

June 2018, Dublin

My eyes open and I gaze around blearily. I am on a mattress on the floor of an office and it takes a few moments for the morning fug to lift. Then I remember. I am in Shane MacGowan’s flat and although last night was a late one for me, I had left the others to carry on, knowing they would still be at it by daylight. I pull on some clothes and pad along the corridor to the sitting room.

Shane’s tousled hair is poking up over the top of his armchair. He hasn’t gone to bed and is still watching TV. Sleep is something he does without any routine. It simply comes over him wherever he happens to be. Day blurs into night and night into day. When I leave the flat to go for a walk or to get food or a pint, I leave Shane’s World and re-join the one outside. Or that’s how it seems.

I wonder if it is possible to find out who this man really is and if I am on a fool’s errand. Shane detests being ‘interviewed’ and asked about his work. He will only talk when he is in the mood. Even then, it is hard to make out what he is saying, especially over the TV, which is never turned off. One documentary maker compared working with him to wildlife photography and it’s a good analogy. So, I sit with him and Paul and whoever else is around and wait for an opening. We watch the World Cup, which Shane loves, but mostly violent films. ‘We’ve missed a lovely garrotting,’ he complains when I distract him with my questions during The Godfather.

One night, I am about to go to bed when Shane asks me to make him a cup of tea. Black with one sugar. I sense he might want to talk, so I fetch my recorder and sit with him, grabbing an unexpected opportunity. I’ve learned that he can be ill-tempered, his invective erupting from nowhere. One night he tells me he is ‘exhausted from trying to explain the bloody obvious things,’ and that it is more fun being interviewed by the police. I politely apologise, desperate not to lose a window of opportunity, and hesitantly ask if I can turn the TV down as I can’t hear what he is saying. This is a high-risk strategy, given that he could easily react by turning it up even louder.

‘Yes, turn it down, but don’t fucking go on all night about it,’ he growls. ‘I’ve got some great stories about the filth’.

‘Well, let’s hear them,’ I reply. And off we go again, as if nothing has happened.

Over two years I spend a great deal of time with Shane. Sometimes I am just sitting with him, chatting and watching TV. At other times I try to get answers to questions that have arisen through the extensive interviews I have conducted with his family, friends and former bandmates. Some of these never get resolved and probably never will be, but I am determined not to give up in my quest to sort the myths from the truths and better understand this shy and complex man.

CHAPTER 1

The Little Man

‘I sat for a while at the cross at Finnoe

Where young lovers would meet when the flowers were in bloom

Heard the men coming home from the fair at Shinrone

Their hearts in Tipperary wherever they go’

‘The Broad Majestic Shannon’, The Pogues

Shane gazed out glassily on the audience which had filled Dublin’s National Concert Hall in January 2018, on a night of competing emotions. Gripped in his hand was the Lifetime Achievement Award bestowed on him by the distinguished venue and presented by its patron and the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins. Not far from Shane’s mind was the memory of his mother Therese who had died just a year earlier. A tear had been shed for her when he had listened to Finbar Furey’s sublime rendition of ‘Kitty’, the song Shane had learned from her as a child. Away from the unbridled excitement in the hall, Shane had quietly watched the performance on a monitor, pride intermingled with grief.

There was no acceptance speech. He sat in his wheelchair listening to the whoops and cheers and looking across a sea of mobile phones. As the President left the stage and the evening ended, Shane simply raised his glass. ‘Good night and good luck, tsscchh,’ he slurred. A reminder that an artist who has penned so many memorable words is, in fact, a man of very few.

The occasion, as well as recognising his quite unique talents as a writer, underlined the extraordinary nature of the journey Shane MacGowan has made in Ireland. The Pogues were seen as a violation of traditional music by purists, and some in the media, when they gate-crashed the pop scene, with Shane accused of playing to the pissed-up-paddy image that 1980s’ Ireland was so desperate to cast off. That the band came from across the water and their singer had more of an English accent than an Irish one only made them more unpalatable. So, as Shane received a standing ovation, both from the sell-out crowd and a line-up of guests that read like a Who’s Who of Irish music, his unlikely transformation from the rank outsider looking in through the window to national hero was complete. No wonder there were tears in the house.

To those who were there that night and to fans the world over, Shane MacGowan is as Irish as St Patrick himself. Over his career, he has aligned himself ever more closely with his native country and in media interviews has lasered in on the remote cottage where he first encountered people playing traditional instruments and dancing on the stone-flagged kitchen floor. However, The Pogues could never have emerged from Ireland’s shores and it was when memories of idyllic childhood holidays in Tipperary were hotwired with those from his markedly different adolescence in London that Shane blessed us with ‘The Old Main Drag’, ‘A Pair Of Brown Eyes’ and ‘A Rainy Night In Soho’.

‘He is as paddy as they come,’ says producer Steve Lillywhite. ‘But he grew up in England and in London, so he had much more of an English punk-rock way of thinking – from The Nipple Erectors early on – than Irish. So, the fact that he grew up in England, but he was an Irishman – there is a schizophrenia that comes from that as well.’

Many people believe Shane was born in Tipperary and not Pembury, near the quintessentially English town of Tunbridge Wells, Kent. This common misconception was only encouraged by the BBC’s 1997 documentary The Great Hunger: The Life and Songs of Shane MacGowan, which stated that he was ‘born on the banks of the River Shannon in rural Ireland’. This and other subsequent films have concentrated heavily on his mother’s family and his time spent at their remote cottage. Much less has been said about his father’s relatives, some of whom still live in England, and around whom Shane spent a great deal of his early life.

Their recollections are shared here for the first time, along with those of his closest friends, musicians, ex-lovers and even his former English teacher. Most have never been approached before, despite some of them having had a significant impact on his life and career. While the story of The Pogues has been well-documented, the complete and frequently surprising journey of their notorious frontman, from outcast to national treasure, has never been told.

Until now.

I step into The Commons, a cottage in a remote part of Tipperary, dipping my head under the lintel as I do so, and I am transported back two hundred years. The Sacred Heart statues draped in cobwebs; the abandoned accordion on top of a cupboard; the blackened stone fireplace. No one has lived here for years, but a fire has been lit to warm it through. It is not hard to see why this place came to be so romanticised by Shane; somewhere untouched by time and a world away from the built-up English suburbs where he grew up.

His sister Siobhan, an author in her own right, has kindly arranged for family members to gather here and share their memories of the boy they called ‘the little man’. A generous pot of tea – or ‘tae’ in Irish – is poured, and I am introduced to them all. His aunts, his cousins. As the stories start to flow, you can almost hear, ghost-like, the music and dancing that once tested the stability of its thick stone walls. This is the place Shane still calls home and where, in the snug bosom of his family, he first sang and played Irish music.

‘Shane loved it here and he’d come for months and months at a time,’ says his aunt, Vicky Cahill. ‘I think he liked the way they lived. He liked their easy-going way of life; he loved the countryside. When he was that little, he didn’t realise how much he loved the countryside, but he did. He loved the music and the dancing and the way everybody wandered in and out, and he knew them all.’

The Commons is in Carney, a townland in the parish of Finnoe, about eight miles from Nenagh and three from Borrisokane. It is a traditional ‘teachín’, a thatched farm worker’s cottage that could stand as a heritage centre today. There is a parlour, two small rooms with single beds, and a kitchen on the ground floor. Brave the steep stairs and you find a cramped attic space where Shane’s LPs are strewn across the floor. The original structure was apparently extended about ninety years ago, and it is remarkable to think that it was home to Shane’s great-grandparents, John and Mary Lynch, and their eleven children: Margaret, Pat, Julia, Ellen, Norah, John, Jim, Mikey, Bridget, William and Tom.

Shane is well-versed in his family’s genealogy and always happy to talk about his beloved Commons. ‘They moved in with this old woman who was a cousin,’ he says of his great-grandparents. ‘She was a D’Arcy and the D’Arcys had been run out of Ireland. We were rebels, they were rebels. There was a whole clan of us around the area, and in other areas there would be other clans and we would all get together for bigger things. They moved in to look after this woman and she promised them the house.’

John Lynch became a well-known figure in the area. He was associated with the Irish National Land League which sought to abolish landlordism in Ireland and enable tenant farmers to own the land they worked. He also wrote himself into the history books of the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) by becoming the first chairman of the hurling and Gaelic football club Shannon Rovers. A framed photograph of him still hangs on the wall in the parlour and the resemblance to his great-grandson, Shane, is inescapable.

Of the Lynch clan, it was the eldest, John, who worked full-time on the family farm and ended up taking it over. These were hard times in rural Ireland. Everyone had to help, including Tom, who was killed in a tragic accident with the threshing machine. Some of the other Lynch sons worked for North Tipperary county council, while several of the girls were excellent seamstresses, among them Nora and Julia, and Shane’s grandmother Margaret, or ‘Maggie’. Nowadays, the thought of so many people living cheek-by-jowl in a stone cottage with no inside toilet or bathroom is unimaginable. However, as the light dimmed on nineteenth-century Ireland, such a basic existence was normal in rural communities.

What was less typical, at a time when the Catholic Church still had a barnacle-like hold on the population, was Maggie’s decision to leave her husband and move back to The Commons with her two young children. She had met and married John Cahill, a guard at the local station, and moved with him to Dublin where they started a family. Their first child and Shane’s mother, Therese Mary, was born on 20 September 1929, and exactly one year later she was joined by her brother Sean. But John was an alcoholic and when the marriage foundered, Maggie and the children returned to The Commons.

‘Mum used to say the Lynches were terribly soft and innocent, but Mum and Uncle Sean’s mother was a shrewd woman,’ comments Siobhan MacGowan. ‘She could see through a lot of the old plámás [nonsense] that might be going on. She left her husband, which in those days you just didn’t do. She was a strong character and she let our dad have it a few times.

‘The Lynches very much supported her decision, though, because at one point her husband, John Cahill, wrote to her begging her to come back. She was wavering, and they absolutely forbid it. They did everything in their power to stop her going back to him.’

Shane says: ‘He was a drunken guard. The only people who complained about him were a few landlords who objected to him turning up and banging on the door with his nightstick. He would arrive with a bunch of other drunks and demand to be let in. And you always let the cops in, especially if you were open that late already. He was very dominating, but he was also a man with a great heart. Everybody loved him but they feared him if they fucked up. He got kicked out of the guards. He had come down from Westmeath and was a first cousin of Dermot O’Brien, who was a second cousin of mine and a first cousin of Patricia Cahill, a famous singer.’

Therese was a bright pupil at both Kilbarron national primary school and St Mary’s convent school, near Nenagh, where she did her secondary education. Her essays were lauded by teachers, just as Shane’s would be thirty years later, says Siobhan. She was a fluent Irish speaker who enjoyed studying and an ardent reader. Had university been an option for a young woman in 1940s’ Ireland, she would almost certainly have gone on to do a degree. But these were different times.

Not surprisingly, given her upbringing at The Commons, Therese possessed a fine singing voice and she won contests in the Feis Ceoil, an annual celebration of Irish music that continues today. ‘The whole family at The Commons were all great singers – my mother was an amazing singer,’ Shane says proudly. ‘She won the adult singing prize at the main Feis when she was three. She had a mature voice at three, not as mature as it became a bit later, but she never had a little girl voice.’

Catherine Leech, a relative by marriage on Maurice’s side, referred to by Shane as Aunty Catherine, adds: ‘Therese had a lovely singing voice. She’d sing all sorts of songs; she’d sing Irish songs. All I remember is that I could sit and listen to Therese.’

After leaving school, Therese worked as a secretary, first in Limerick and then in Dublin. In Limerick she attracted the attention of local man Tony Portley, who was studying at University College Dublin, and was a close friend of Maurice MacGowan. Tony was keen on Therese and even gave up smoking so he could afford to take her out. ‘She was knocking around with Tony Portley and getting free meals; that’s what she did,’ says Shane. ‘If nobody else was offering one, and it didn’t happen that often, she could always get a meal off Tony.’

It was Tony who introduced Therese to Maurice, and it quickly became clear that in doing so, he had made a fatal error. Like Therese, Maurice had a deep passion for literature. He read poetry to her in her small, rented bedsit in Dublin, and they began spending more and more time together. ‘Tony realised that he didn’t have a chance fairly early,’ explains Shane. ‘They [Maurice and Therese] were walking out for ages before they actually started courting. My dad forked out a whole week’s wages for a copy of Ulysses, but she burnt it when she got to the first bit of obscenity! They had this stove and if it went out, they would freeze to death, so they had to keep it going. She could have put one of her Edna O’Brien books in, but instead she put in that brand new Ulysses that had just come out and he had spent all his money to get because it was disapproved of strongly by the Church. So, it was very expensive for a book. Mind you, he didn’t just rely on a week’s wages – he was a very good gambler on the horses. He had a great economic brain.’

Therese was extremely busy in Dublin and earned money from modelling as well as from her secretarial job. On 18 March 1957 she was named Irish Colleen by the Evening Press and given front-page billing. ‘She did loads of modelling and became Ireland’s top model for a while,’ Shane says proudly. ‘She was on the front of all the papers, pictured with three wolfhounds. That was taken in the same place as Van Morrison laid down with wolfhounds on the cover of Veedon Fleece.’

Her striking looks drew plenty of male attention, including that of the poet and novelist Patrick Kavanagh. Siobhan says, ‘He saw Mum and Dad walking over Leeson Street Bridge one day and was said to have asked Mum afterwards if she was involved with that fella. Mum said she was, and Patrick Kavanagh said to her he had thought she was because he saw them shouting at one another and knew they were trying to communicate!’ Adds Shane, ‘She met Patrick Kavanagh loads of times. He used to pick up girls from the country; he just liked talking to them and writing poetry about them. He was pretty attractive to women, especially girls from the country. He was the prince of Irish writers and poets.’

Therese also did some acting and was offered a tour with a theatre company, an invitation she declined as, by that time, she was set on marrying Maurice. They tied the knot on 1 August 1956 at Kilbarron church, just a couple of miles from The Commons. For their honeymoon, the newlyweds borrowed Maurice’s dad’s car and drove around Ireland. Maurice remembers staying at the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis, County Clare, and stopping off at the Galway Races during their two-week trip.

Although they had much in common, Maurice’s upbringing in suburban Dublin had been very different from Therese’s life in a remote village and it is one that offers another perspective on his son’s Irish heritage. Shane’s great-great-grandfather, John MacGowan, was a leading house builder who developed parts of Ranelagh in south Dublin, where there was once a MacGowan Terrace named after him.

He married Belinda Lysaght, a daughter of landed gentry whose surname would later be given to Maurice, Shane and Siobhan as a middle name. One of John and Belinda’s children – referred to in the family as the ‘Ranelagh five’ – was Shane’s great-grandfather William and it was his conversion to Catholicism to marry Jane White that ended the Protestant MacGowan line. The marriage is said to have been a disastrous one and he more or less deserted his wife and two sons William and Noel. Such was William’s ill-feeling towards his father that he later changed his name to Maurice.

Shane’s grandfather took law exams as a youngster but eventually joined the civil service and worked his way up to be deputy registrar of the Land Registry. After taking early retirement, he returned to his interest in legal matters and became a barrister. He married Eileen Green, known as Lena, who came from a steel-making family in Sheffield and who had had a difficult start in life. Her mother had died young and her father was an alcoholic, leaving Lena to be raised by her stern maternal grandfather.

The couple had four children: Sybil, Madeleine, William (Billy) and Maurice. Sybil married Belfast man Rene Harriman and, when he got a job in a London bank, they moved to Tunbridge Wells in Kent, where she started The Childrens Salon. The clothing company is run today by her daughter Michele Harriman-Smith and is a global online empire named Childrensalon. Billy trained as a surgeon and became a professor and registrar at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. Madeleine tragically succumbed to tuberculosis, which claimed the lives of many thousands of people in Ireland in the first half of the twentieth century. She died aged just 18.

Maurice Matthew Lysaght MacGowan was born in Dublin on 7 October 1929 and his sharp intellect was clear from a young age. Billy found that while he read comics in bed, his younger brother was devouring huge encyclopaedias from the family’s generously stocked bookshelves. So advanced was his reading age that he gained early entry to Belvedere College, a Jesuit school for boys in the heart of the city, where he excelled. At University College Dublin he was awarded first-class honours in his BA and MA, both of which were in political economy and national economics. His BA was put on show at an exhibition.

Maurice had a particular flair for Latin and Greek, writing his own translations of the Greek plays, and he would later take Shane and Siobhan to professional performances of them in London – to their dread! Later in life he penned a series of satirical plays and poetry under the pseudonym of George Geneva, which he now says will serve as his epitaph: ‘Have a laugh on George Geneva, whose pseudonym he never needed, as all his works went quite unheeded.’

After completing his studies, Maurice worked in stocks and shares for a firm in Dublin owned by the Brenninkmeijers, the Dutch family who had founded the C&A clothing chain. The company clearly considered him an asset because, when the Dublin operation was closed, he was offered a position at its headquarters in London’s Marble Arch. Maurice was to be head of personnel administration, designing pension schemes, salary structures and taking on other economics-related work. So, following his job offer, he and Therese took the big decision to emigrate to England.

‘There was very little employment really,’ said Therese in the documentary If I Should Fall From Grace With God, broadcast on the Irish channel TG4. ‘Many, many people had to go abroad to either England or America or somewhere else to actually earn a living and Maurice was one of those really. So, we had to go to London.’

A farewell party was held on 29 August 1957 and Maurice and Therese, who was now pregnant with Shane, followed in the footsteps of so many in Ireland by emigrating to England.

Initially, the young couple found it hard to adjust to life in a small, rented flat. ‘We started off in Ealing, which I hated with a great hatred,’ said Maurice in the same documentary. ‘Coming from Dublin it was a real dreary London suburb.’ However, as was common for the Irish diaspora, Therese and Maurice had relatives who had already settled in the UK and could help with their transition. Sybil and Rene were about an hour and a half away in affluent Tunbridge Wells and Maurice and Therese would regularly visit their large, detached home in Madeira Park, bought in 1953 and referred to in the family as ‘Mad Park’.

Britain was experiencing a cold winter in 1957 as the Queen was preparing to make her very first televised Christmas speech. Through the snow, Maurice and a heavily pregnant Therese drove to Kent to wait for the arrival of their first baby. His parents and his brother Billy and his family had come over from Dublin so they could be there for the birth, and as Maurice and Therese would be staying at Madeira Park, it was decided the baby should be delivered at the nearest maternity hospital. Shane says: ‘It was my dad’s idea to visit them for Christmas to cut out the cost, tsscchh’, because you’ve got to think of the baby now.’

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957 at Pembury hospital. As a ‘Christmas Day baby’, his arrival was duly reported in the local press and he was the subject of plenty of attention. Therese recalled: ‘Because he was the Christmas baby, the matron, the doctors, the nurses, the mayor actually, came to give him gifts. And he was photographed and hung up on the wall in the hospital – a sign of things to come.’ [1]

But the festive mood on the maternity ward meant Therese was overlooked by the staff, according to Maurice. ‘He was the Christmas baby, and all the buggers were celebrating,’ he remembers. ‘Therese was roaring in pain and she got very little attention; she never forgot that. They were very poor with her.’

When Therese left hospital, they returned to Sybil and Rene’s at Madeira Park, but there was no cot for Shane, leading to a family legend that was passed on down the years. Paul Harriman, Sybil’s son and Shane’s cousin, says, ‘The story is that when she came out on Boxing Day, they came back here, and Billy and Joan were already here with their son Nick – Shane’s first cousin – who had the cot. So, Shane was put in a drawer of the chest of drawers, which was very sensible.’ His sister Michele, who still lives in the house, adds, ‘My mother was quite into it, putting babies in drawers who came to stay the night!’

Shane’s birth certificate shows that his proud parents registered him on 2 January 1958, with Rene and Sybil’s home at 23 Madeira Park given as their address. Maurice’s profession was recorded as company executive.

In fact, the first two years or so of Shane’s life, aside from holidays, were spent at the ground-floor flat in Woodfield Avenue, Ealing. It was here that baby Shane made a great impression on Miss Lamb, an older woman who lived upstairs, and a photograph from this time shows the two of them together, Shane brandishing a toy knife. ‘Miss Lamb was an old servant of the Brenninkmeijers, and she was a great character,’ says Maurice. ‘She knew them all from when they were little and she’d talk about little Willie, William Brenninkmeijer. She adored Shane. Mother Two, she called herself.’

Shane was about three when his family moved to Tunbridge Wells. They rented part of 50 Claremont Road, a large, terraced house close to Madeira Park, with Shane going to a local playschool. The following year they relocated to Saltdean in Brighton, where he started at St Martha’s convent school in Rottingdean.

Shane’s sister Siobhan was born on 22 February 1963. Perhaps typically for a small child who suddenly has a rival for their parents’ attention, Shane’s initial reaction wasn’t positive. ‘I think when you are the younger sibling you come into a readymade family,’ says Siobhan. ‘For me, it was Shane, Mum and Dad straight away. But when Shane met me, I’m told he wasn’t impressed with this interloper!’

The MacGowans’ stay in the coastal village was short-lived and the following year they returned to Tunbridge Wells, this time buying their own house. Maurice’s grandfather in Dublin had always rented and didn’t believe in owning his own house, a philosophy Maurice had himself adopted. However, Therese wanted them to have their own place, and they bought their first home. Number 6 Newlands is a large, detached house in Langton Green, a quintessentially English, middle-class suburb with neat lawns and driveways – a galaxy away from The Commons. Shane has said his only happy times as a child were spent on his holidays in Tipperary, but Siobhan remembers this chapter of their life in England with great affection.

‘The house at Newlands had four bedrooms,’ she says. ‘I think the houses were built in the sixties, so for then it was a modern housing estate. I loved it because we were very happy there. We had a typical English model house with an A-roof. It had latticed windows and out the back was this big wood, which I can’t believe they’ve now cut down. In our back garden we actually had a wood. It was unreal; beautiful. Shane had a white cat called Mulligan – that was our first cat. Mulligan disappeared for a few weeks and then he was found at the back of a drawer and still in good form.’

Shane paints a less than favourable view of the place to which they moved: ‘Tunbridge Wells is a grotty, London overspill town. There is a top end of the town where they’ve got The Pantiles, which they built because the king started coming there – one of the Hanover kings – because there was a spa there. So, they built pantiles there and shops and stuff. So, there was good housing going pretty cheap around there. Newlands was the first estate we lived in; they were still building it then.’

For the family as a whole it was a happy time. Maurice had a stable, well-paid job, Therese liked the area, and Sybil, Rene and their children lived nearby. The family dynamic was a good one and Shane was close to both his parents. ‘He was very attached to both me and Therese and we had good fun – we were like pals,’ says Maurice. ‘He was my sidekick; we’d laugh and joke together.’

Maurice and Therese were both outgoing and sociable and, when they weren’t entertaining, they were round at the Harrimans. Siobhan and Shane got on famously with their cousins and family parties were a regular occurrence, Rene playing the piano and Maurice always full of talk and with a drink in his hand. By this time, Frank Leech (a distant relation on the MacGowan side), his wife Catherine and their young son John had also moved to Tunbridge Wells to be near Sybil and Rene. They too were close to Shane when he was growing up, particularly Catherine. Maurice and Therese also attended St Augustine’s church in Tunbridge Wells and Father Bill Howell was a frequent visitor to Newlands, playing football with Shane and Siobhan on the lawn. Siobhan recalls Fr Howell and her mother engaging in good-natured debate about social and moral issues and Therese challenging some of his ideas.

Overall, Shane’s childhood mirrored that of so many youngsters growing up in 1960s’ England. Saturday teatime, he and Siobhan would settle down to watch Doctor Who and both had toy Daleks. Shane had a Scalextric, of which Siobhan was very envious, and they careered around the house in Batman and Robin outfits. Board games on the dining room table often brought the whole family together and brought out Shane’s fiercely competitive spirit.

‘We used to play Monopoly a lot on the table in the dining room and Shane did not like losing at all,’ says Siobhan. ‘He also used to cheat at cards when I played with him because he didn’t like losing. Dad had this card game called The Racing Game. My dad was mad into racing horses, liked betting on them, and we enjoyed that.’

Shane had a wicked sense of humour and would say and do things for sheer devilment, something he would continue into later life. ‘On Christmas Day, when I was about 6, Santa Claus apparently bought me Witchy Poo pens, which were pens with witches’ hats on them, and put them at the end of my bed,’ remembers Siobhan. ‘I went rushing into Shane, who was in his room, and went, Shane, Shane, look what Santa Claus bought me. And he turned around and said, There is no Santa Claus. [she laughs] He told me that on Christmas morning. So, I rushed in to see Mum and Dad and said, Shane says there’s no Santa Claus, and then I heard all this shouting in the background. I didn’t believe him at that stage.’

Siobhan recalls another dastardly trick he played on her. ‘There was this dark-haired, very fat boy, that I was in love with for some reason,’ she says. ‘I had seen him in a school play which I think Shane was in as well. I was saying, Shane, Shane, will you tell him I said. Hello? And Shane was going, Fuck off. Anyway, a Valentine’s letter came for me which said, Not to be opened until February the fourteenth. So, I was all excited and when I opened it, it said, Fuck off, you annoying little cow. Love from… whatever his name was. And Shane was like, Hee-hee!" So, he had planned this. He was such a bastard!’

Shane was and remains family-oriented, however, and he could be protective towards his younger sister. Siobhan says, ‘We had next-door neighbours, and they had a little girl who had a tea set and I was mad on this tea set. I was doing what I shouldn’t have been doing, which was sneaking through their gate to play with the tea set. Then one day her brother put an elastic band on the gate so that when I opened it, it sprang in my eye. I went wailing home and Mum had me on her knee, and Shane said, Where’s the fucking bastard? I’m going to kill the bastard.’

Overall, with an older brother she looked up to, Siobhan has fond memories of her early childhood. ‘He could be a bit grumpy with me,’ she remembers, ‘but I wouldn’t have been grumpy with him in those days because I think I was probably just a bit of an adoring little sister. He was older than me. I would have said we got on well in those days. My impression of it is that I just loved him.’

On moving to Langton Green, Shane was enrolled at a local school. But it wasn’t through the gates of a state primary school that he walked on his first day, but the fee-paying Holmewood House. Set in thirty acres of rolling countryside on the Kent border, it had been opened as a boys’ school just after the Second World War. Some pupils boarded there but, as the MacGowans lived nearby, Shane was a ‘day boy’.

The decision to send him to a private prep school was Therese’s and one that Maurice went along with reluctantly. ‘She wanted our first boy to go to public school,’ he says. ‘I wasn’t a bit happy about it. I went along with her on the boy, but I didn’t go along with her on the girl. But she wasn’t so worried about private education for a girl. That was the way it was in those days.’

Shane also emphasises it was at his mother’s insistence that he went to public school. ‘Holmewood was producing young gentlemen and cricket was more important than most things,’ he explains. ‘I was dragged along there to meet [the headmaster] Bairamian and see if I wanted to go there, although it wasn’t up to me. My mother dragged me in. She wanted me to mix with the fucking English middle-class who were trying to be upper-class, like the nouveau riche, trying to get there. But most of them were too thick. They didn’t do much writing or thinking or creating. Their parents were not rich, they were not poor. They thought it was important their children got the Holmewood House name, which was supposed to be a really good name.’

The headmaster at Holmewood, the flamboyant Robert ‘Bob’ Bairamian, shared Maurice’s love of Greek and Latin and was, according to Shane, ‘heavily into Irish books’. The ambitious Armenian was just 24 when he took charge, but he already had a reputation for getting the best out of his pupils. He was quick to identify and encourage Shane’s extraordinary talents when he joined the school and he never forgot him. ‘He was very unusual indeed, one of the most unusual personalities I’ve ever, ever met,’ he told the BBC in 2018. ‘I thought he would end up in the drama scene.’

Shane sniggers as he reminisces about his seven years at Holmewood and is at pains to stress this was no Eton or Harrow. ‘It was a tip when I went there!’ he says. ‘The toilets were fucking filthy; they were like a slum. There were really old classrooms and stuff, and it was Goodbye Mr Chips. Well, they were trying to do that, but it wasn’t Goodbye Mr Chips. We liked some of the teachers and we disliked most of them. But we thought they were funny because we reckoned they were all wife-swappers and alcoholics and chain-smokers who didn’t know the answers to most of their own questions.’

Holmewood admittedly didn’t fit the stereotype of an English public school when Shane was enrolled in 1964. From the outset, Robert Bairamian had welcomed pupils from different countries, including Nigeria and Ghana. He had spent the first ten years of his life in Cyprus and his Armenian father served as chief justice of Sierra Leone and a judge of appeal in Nigeria. At his funeral in 2018, a message was read out from the President of Ghana, Nana Akufo-Addo, who had been taught by him in the 1950s. Shane recalls mixing with black, Pakistani and working-class English pupils, and says Bairamian was interested in anything and anyone who might raise Holmewood’s profile.

‘Schools were like that all over the place, everywhere where they wanted the name to get money out of people, and if they could be bullied into playing cricket maybe they would like it and be really good cricketers. Anything that would put the place on the map. Also, he was offering places to blacks, Irish, Asians. It wasn’t a school like that. It was a tip disguised as a school like that. There was a small handful of brilliant teachers and the kids weren’t generally interested. Nobody likes school. I would have preferred it if I’d got hit with a cricket bat a few times. I used to get my kicks really fucking him [Bairamian] up.

‘When Bairamian arrived, it was big