Plans for Shane MacGowan’s 60th birthday celebrations in January 2018 were originally modest: a few musicians gathering to play a scattering of the songs he wrote for The Pogues or his later band The Popes. What actually happened, says Victoria Clarke, MacGowan’s wife and partner from the mid-’80s to his death in 2023, gathered momentum to become “something incredibly moving and really magnificent” – a fullscale tribute at Dublin’s National Concert Hall featuring Nick Cave, Bono, Sinead O’Connor and the Irish President Michael D Higgins, who gave MacGowan a Lifetime Achievement Award. For Clarke, the show felt like a metaphor for his reputation: “We just sat back and watched while it grew.”
As Clarke explains to MOJO, MacGowan’s VIP…

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