A Curious Career (14 page)

I suppose my favourite pop star ever was Jarvis Cocker, whom I first interviewed in 1998. But for some bizarre reason, he insisted on doing the interview at my house. This caused me a sort of category confusion – I found it hard to be an interviewer and a hostess at the same time – and also I was star-struck which is a terrible fault in an interviewer. Before he came, I spent hours whirling round the house, hiding the more embarrassing family photos, trying to arrange my CDs in some sort of faintly plausible order, banishing the pot-pourri (he once described pot-pourri, along with Belgian chocolates, as his ‘worst fear’) and generally behaving like a demented fan. Of course I
am
a fan (Pulp’s ‘Common People’ is my favourite pop song ever) but you can’t be a fan while doing an interview because you have to try to meet as equals. Years later I interviewed Jarvis Cocker again, at
his
home in Paris, and we had to make lunch for his stepson and again there was this confusion between the domestic and the professional, between him cooking fish fingers and me laying the table while asking questions. I think Jarvis does it deliberately as a way of ‘keeping things real’, which I approve of in theory but in practice find difficult. Perhaps I don’t really want interviews to be too ‘real’ – I need my professional armour.

Recently, I went to Paris to interview a pop star again, this time Pete Doherty of the Libertines and Babyshambles. It was in a strange, scuzzy, evil-smelling flat with piles of books on the floor and a big shaggy dog sniffling around, but it turned out the flat was not his own but a friend’s so whatever clues it might have yielded were misleading. I told myself beforehand not to let myself be charmed by Doherty – of course he charmed me within minutes, not least by saying, ‘Are you
really
Lynn Barber? I’m so honoured.’ He is, or seems to be, a very sweet lost soul. But I find drug-users very difficult to understand. Barely ever having taken drugs myself, I can never tell if they are ‘on’ something and how far gone they might be. Doherty at one point used a menthol inhaler and I got wildly excited thinking this must be some new way of snorting cocaine. Doherty mischievously urged me to try it – it had no effect at all, apart from clearing my sinuses. Doherty told me he was off heroin – but he told another interviewer, just a few days later, that he was on a maintenance dose. Who knows? I feel I am too old, now, ever to understand drug-users.

Drunks, of course, are a different matter. My father and plenty of my friends are or were big drinkers and I am not exactly teetotal myself so I don’t feel fazed by interviewing alcoholics. But this one, below, with Shane MacGowan, was a marathon, and one that came back to haunt me when my husband died.

From the
Observer
, 11 March 2001

Five o’clock, Bloom’s Hotel, Dublin. Shane MacGowan tumbles out of the lift into my waiting arms. The photographer and his assistant and I have been waiting since three, with a cheery Irish PR saying, ‘Oh, this is nothing – he kept a journalist waiting four hours yesterday!’ I want to murder him. We made various sorties to Shane’s hotel room but were blocked by a burly man who seemed to be acting as his minder.

So on the one hand I am relieved to see Shane at last. On the other hand, I quite want to bundle him back in the lift and forget him. I was prepared for the teeth, the famous blackened stumps, but the suit is an unanticipated horror show, with its thickening patina of stains down the trousers culminating in big blobby spatters on the shoes. If he has not been sick down his trousers several dozen times, he must have a very good stylist. His skin has the shiny pallor of someone who has never seen daylight. He lurches towards the bar. The photographer tries to head him off, saying he wants to do photographs outside before the daylight fades. Shane says, ‘Ginantonic’ and plonks himself in a chair. I chatter brightly about James Joyce; Shane mumbles unintelligibly; the photographer tears his hair.

But eventually, with coaxing from the photographer, the assistant, the PR and me, we get him out into the street. He flinches as the last rays of sunlight hit him and sinks into a doorway – luckily a very photogenic doorway – and the photographer clicks away. Every single person who passes down the street stops and says, ‘Shane, good on yer!’ or ‘How’re you doing?’ A few bravely rush up and hug him. I didn’t realise till then that he is a sort of god in Dublin – or not a god, more a prodigal son. Everyone seems to know him, everyone seems to love him, even little old ladies who surely can’t ever have been Pogues fans shake their heads fondly and say, ‘Shane! God love you!’

After the photographs, we stagger back to the hotel. I remark that the bar is terribly noisy – couldn’t we sit somewhere else? Shane says, with sudden furious clarity, ‘It’s a bar. It’s meant to be noisy.’ The bar it is then – our home for the next six hours. Of all the Irish bars in all the world, this must be the most thoroughly charmless. It looks like a motorway Travelodge.

But it is Shane’s bar and no doubt after his death it will be called ‘Shane’s Bar’ – maybe the hotel will be rechristened ‘Shane’s Hotel’. Gin and tonics begin to appear as if by magic – rows and rows of them filling the table, perhaps materialised by fairy folk because I never see them coming.

I start by saying I very much enjoyed his book
A Drink with Shane MacGowan
– it is one of the freshest, most original biographies I’ve ever read. It’s written as a conversation with his girlfriend, Victoria Mary Clarke, and it’s a picture of their relationship as much as of his life. Shane, truculently, mumbles that it’s not his book, and he is not happy with it. He doesn’t like the title – ‘A Drink with Shane MacGowan’ is not accurate because of course it is many drinks over many years. And then he doesn’t like the byline – why is he credited as co-author when it was all Victoria’s work? It was just an interview, he insists, just her sometimes switching on the tape recorder when they were talking. And he doesn’t ‘stand by’ anything he is quoted as saying because he might say one thing one day and something else the next.

So is he cross with her for writing the book? ‘I can’t be cross with her,’ he says indignantly, ‘I love her!’ But he is cross with the book. And with the publishers, Sidgwick & Jackson. There is some ongoing saga whereby he claims they agreed to pay his hotel bill and haven’t done so. They say they did agree to pay – for two days while he was doing interviews – not the six weeks (and counting) he has stayed there.

Anyway, he says ominously that he has not finished cutting the book. The press release claims that it recounts his days as a rent boy in London, but there is nothing about being a rent boy in the book. ‘I can’t believe you were a rent boy,’ I say rudely, ‘who would pay to rent you?’ ‘You’d be surprised,’ he says. ‘There are women who would climb over their grandmothers to get to a celebrity – Victoria, for instance!’ and he emits the first of his exploding-coffee-machine laughs.

Where is Victoria now? ‘Off ligging with U2 in London,’ he says. She is Irish but prefers living in London – he prefers Dublin or Tipperary. He was meant to go to the U2 concert but couldn’t face travelling to England. Travel must be a serious problem for him – Victoria in the book mentions the hours or even days spent in airports waiting to find a flight willing to take him. Once when he was booked to join Bob Dylan in the States, four flights came and went without him.

And yet Victoria is obviously devoted – she calls him ‘Sweet Pea’ throughout the book. They have been together fifteen years, so why haven’t they married? ‘Because we never had enough celebrities in the same place at the same time.’ (This gnomic utterance is later explained by Victoria – they plan to sell their wedding to
Hello!
or
OK!
magazine.) ‘But we’re getting married this year. Hopefully.’ And will they start a family? ‘I think when we grow up we should [he is forty-three, she thirty-five] – it’s something we’ve discussed. But probably I’m dropping myself in the shit even talking about it.’

His mother told him never to have children till he was rich. He was rich, he made millions with the Pogues, but he says now he’s spent it all. ‘If you hug money, you clog up the cash flow, know what I mean?’ He says he’s not destitute – he still gets enough from song-writing royalties to keep him in booze and fags – but he missed out on the rock-star mansions. All he owns is a flat in Gospel Oak which he shares with Victoria, and the old family farm in Tipperary which has no running water. His current group, the Popes, has never achieved success by Pogues standards. Supposing he never makes another record, will he have enough to live on? ‘Well,’ he sputters, ‘I could always open supermarkets!’

The wit is quick and comes like a wake-up call to me, reminding me of Bono’s remark, ‘Shane is more together than people imagine.’ (Bono obviously respects him, because he lent him his Martello Tower to live in for a year after the Pogues split up.) Shane’s speech may be slurred, his movements uncoordinated, he sometimes gets stuck on saying, ‘Know what I mean? Know what I mean? Know what I mean?’ till you want to scream – but he is not ‘out of it’. On the contrary, he seems to be controlling this interview much better than me. When he doesn’t want to answer a question, he ignores it, or mumbles into his G & T. But every time he mentions an Irish name, he spells it out carefully, complete with accents, into my tape recorder. Moreover, unlike me, he remembers everything he says. This was brought sharply home a couple of hours into our conversation when the barman called him over to take a phone call. It was from Victoria and he came back saying, ‘You’ve got to take out that line about her climbing over her grandmother to get to a celebrity. She didn’t think it was funny. So take it out, or I’ll fucking sue you, right?’ (Later, in London, I persuaded Victoria to let me keep it in – she says it’s OK because her grandmother is dead – but fancy him remembering.)

Shane sees it as his duty to educate me in Irish history, so I’m in for a lot of lecturing about Brian Ború, the Black and Tans, Michael Collins, Partition, ‘Ireland is a woman’, the craic, the whole tear-stained Emerald Isle package. And yet if you step outside Bloom’s Hotel, you can see that Dublin today is just about the glossiest, yuppiest place in Europe – it has such full employment it actually has to import workers. Hasn’t Shane noticed?

Evidently not. ‘I live in the past. It doesn’t feel like 2001 to me.’ In any case, his Ireland is an entirely personal construct of songs and myths and stories his relatives told him in infancy, i.e. an Ireland that was probably extinct by the time he was born, if it ever even existed. He has lived in England since he was six – he won a scholarship to Westminster, for heaven’s sake! (Admittedly only for a year, but still . . .) There are people who knew him in his teens who say he didn’t have an Irish accent then. But, on the other hand, all his song-writing inspiration comes from Ireland and he achieved his ‘crusade’ with the Pogues to make Irish music hip and popular, to build Irish self-esteem. In fact, he was one of the founders of the current Irish cultural renaissance – it is just unfortunate that he looks more like a relic of the old pre-boom Ireland of hopeless old pissheads doing zilch.

Shane’s father ‘likes a drink’, his uncles, aunts, cousins ditto. Shane claims that, when he was a small child in Tipperary, they gave him two Guinnesses a night as his bedtime drink and later, when he was eight, an uncle introduced him to Powers Whiskey. He says he never really drew a sober breath after the age of fourteen. ‘In our family it was like, if the kid likes a drink, let him have a drink – because all the kids who weren’t allowed to have a drink turned into raging alcoholics.’ Mmm, yes, Shane – and . . .? Even he notices some logical flaw in his argument because he starts sputtering, ‘We’d never even heard of alcoholism. We’d have thought it was some kind of weird religion. Our household was an open house where no one was refused, there was a continuous ceilidh going on, people would come from miles around for a drink, twenty-four hours, there’s always one or two people awake.’

This was his mother’s family’s house in Tipperary, where he lived till he was six, while his parents worked in England. He says in the book, ‘My life was a happy dream when I was a little boy.’ But when he came to live with his parents in London, the picture grows darker and there are glimpses in the book of a deeply dysfunctional family – father out boozing every night, mother lying in bed with arthritis or depression, pilled out of her head, Shane trying to look after his little sister Siobhan. In the book he talks about his mother having a nervous breakdown but now he retracts that and says, ‘I was just projecting, you know. I was depressed.’

When he was seventeen, he had a major breakdown and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital for six months. ‘I was drinking a lot and I’d been put on a heavy prescription of tranquillisers by the GP. This was a big thing in the ’70s – there’s thousands of people in mental hospitals who were made zombies by downers. Anyway, they got me off the gear, the drugs that had put me there, and I started drinking again – but then they wouldn’t let me drink, which is where the trouble started. It was called Acute Situational Anxiety – which basically meant I didn’t like being in London. Perpetual panic – I panic in London.’

Does he panic about performing? ‘No, that isn’t the panic at all. My family were, are, all singers, performers. No, just sitting in a goddamn bloody flat in bloody London, that’s a panic situation. Basically, I’ve been holding my breath half my fucking life. I can only relax when I’m in Ireland or one or two other places – Thailand, Spain, Japan and certain parts of America. I actually feel physically sick when I think of London.’

And yet, Victoria told me later he seemed happy enough living in London till Christmas, but then he went to Dublin for a Popes concert and never came back. He now claims to live in Tipperary, in the old family farmhouse with the sign on the door saying ‘Trespassers will be shot’. His parents live in a new house down the road. He describes them as ‘very young at heart, intelligent, warm, loving sociopaths’. (Everyone else describes them as ‘characters’.) But actually he seems to have been living in Bloom’s Hotel, Dublin, since January.