Songs from the drunk tank

How better to mark Shane MacGowan's passing (other than by listening to his music or sharing that deliciously brutal Twitter riposte to Laurence Fox) than by enjoying the transcript of the remarkable summit that took place in an East London boozer in 1989, when James Brown and Sean O'Hagan somehow managed to get MacGowan, Nick Cave and Mark E Smith together for an NME interview? Needless to say, the results were enormously entertaining, with the trio creating all manner of heat and friction on everything from Elvis and acid house to the political leanings of Nietzsche.

Meanwhile, thanks to Harry Sword for pointing me in the direction of this piece from 1996 or 1997 by Innes Reekie, which was spiked by Loaded's editors at the time and finally published in unexpurgated form by Louder Than War in 2010. Who would've thought that "accompanying Shane MacGowan on a four-day drink 'n' drugs binge in his native Tipperary" could have turned out to be so messy (even if it was most messy before they even made it onto the flight)? Reekie may not have got an interview out of it, but he did get to witness MacGowan perform a luminous version of 'Fairytale of New York' in a tiny pub.

For a more sober account of MacGowan's life and times, see this article by Alexis Petridis, in which he notes how the "poet-musician" wrote "with a startling empathy and tenderness" about "a kind of underclass of outcasts" - an underclass of outcasts of which he himself seemed hell-bent on being a member. Petridis offers a firm rebuttal to those who criticised the Pogues for playing fast and loose with folk traditions, hailing them for "making folk music seem vital and exciting to a post-punk audience at a moment in history when the folk scene was supposed to be in terminal decline".

Petridis notes that "there was something unknowable about Shane MacGowan, which was clearly exactly what he wanted", and his guardedness and outright hostility towards journalists was legendary. So to find out what he was really like, perhaps it's best to rely on the testimonies of musician acquaintances such as Lisa O'Neill, Lankum's Daragh Lynch and Andrew Hendy of the Mary Wallopers. "With Shane", says Lynch, "there was just an absolute lack of pretence on every single level."

Given that Lynch's Lankum are in some ways heirs to the Pogues' crown, it seems fitting that False Lankum is topping end-of-year album lists in the days after MacGowan's death.