The holiday classic "Fairytale of New York" will sound even more bittersweet than usual this season. Beloved singer-songwriter Shane MacGowan, best known as frontman for The Pogues, has died at age 65 following years of ill health, the Irish Times reports. Born in England to Irish parents in 1957, MacGowan spent part of his childhood in County Tipperary. He formed The Pogues after his punk band broke up in 1980 and "reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock," per the New York Times.
MacGowan was fired from the band amid well-publicized struggles with alcohol addiction in 1991, but rejoined them for tours starting in 2001. They broke up again in 2014. MacGowan, who had used a wheelchair since breaking his pelvis in a 2015 fall, was diagnosed with viral encephalitis last year. He had been hospitalized in Dublin in recent months but was released last week, the AP reports. "It is with the deepest sorrow and heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of our most beautiful, darling and dearly beloved Shane MacGowan," wife Victoria Clarke, sister Siobhan, and father Maurice said in a statement Friday.
Julien Temple, maker of 2020 documentary Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds with Shane MacGowan, told Rolling Stone in 2021 that before The Pogues came along, Irish music "was all fiddles and tin whistles. And it felt kind of 'in the folk museum.'" MacGowan, he said, restored an "epic quality" to the music. "I think his legacy is that he changed the notion of Ireland," Temple said. "There's a horrible cliché, you know, Darby O'Gill, the old Irish leprechaun and all that nonsense—I think he blew that wide apart and made people see Ireland in a new, more relevant contemporary way." (More Shane McGowan stories.)
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