Shane MacGowan was a chaotic hellraiser and a natural storyteller who could give you a whole life in a handful of lines

Dorian Lynskey on the chaos and contradictions that made The Pogues’ frontman one of the greatest songwriters of our time, with ‘a mouth like a war zone, a laugh like a poltergeist and a voice like a ragged flame’

Shane MacGowan in Barcelona during The Pogues’ heyday (Andrew Catlin)

For fans, the news that Shane MacGowan has died at the age of 65 inspires mixed emotions: it is both too soon and much later than many people had expected. The former Pogues frontman was both a poetic songwriter, capable of enormous beauty and empathy, and a chaotic hellraiser whose troubles warred with his talent. As with great poets such as Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas, the creativity and the lifestyle were impossible to disentangle but, since his death, the scale of his artistry has come to the fore. Nick Cave told The Independent that he had lost “a true friend and the greatest songwriter of his generation”.

MacGowan first appeared in the music press in 1976 as a teenage punk fan, dripping blood at a Clash gig. Born in Kent on Christmas Day 1957, raised in Tipperary and the south of England, he was already proud, brilliant and contrarian: clever enough to win a scholarship to Westminster public school but unruly enough to be expelled for drug possession. “If people try to make me do something, I will do the opposite,” he later told The Face. He had suffered from depression since childhood and spent time in a psychiatric hospital, an experience gruesomely recalled in The Pogues’ song “Dark Streets of London”.

MacGowan’s mother was a singer and model; his father a retail manager with literary aspirations. MacGowan read James Joyce’s Ulysses around the age of 10 (“That took me a while”) and became a voracious autodidact with a slaloming mind. In his memoir Here Comes Everybody, former Pogue James Fearnley recalls that when they first met in the late 1970s MacGowan spoke torrentially about “subjects as far apart as Finnegans Wake, the Khmer Rouge and the buxomness of the women depicted on cans of Tennent’s lager”. He would later pour his freewheeling erudition into songs such as the century-hopping, myth-mangling “The Sick Bed of Cuchulainn”.