In a recent statement, The Pogues said that the band’s lead singer and songwriter, Shane MacGowan, has died at age 65, surrounded by family and having received the last rites.

Born in Kent, England, MacGowan’s family hailed from County Tipperary in Ireland. He would go on to found and lead The Pogues, a Celtic punk band. His songwriting was as precise as his self-presentation was shambolic. Consider the reeling, hilarious, joyously vulgar tribute to a race horse named “Bottle of Smoke“:

Some years ago, I wrote about the sentimental genius of “Fairytale of New York,” one of the few Christmas songs written after the 1960s that will live on for another century or more.

In his compilation of essays, Feckers: 50 People Who Fecked Up Ireland, John Waters wrote about the surprising way that MacGowan was able, as an Irish-Londoner, to take Irish music in hand with a joy, pride, and inventiveness that seemed impossible for the native Irish who either revered their musical tradition too much to experiment with it, or disdained it as a kind of false Paddyism:

For here was a music that simultaneously expressed both our attachment to a slightly false version of ourselves and an ironic repugnance of it. As though insisting on some undefined ethic of rigour and clarity, it reached into the heart of the music, wrenched the sentimentalist heart out of it and cast it away. It was at once a celebration and a refusal, a kick and a kiss. It was a soundtrack for the neurosis born of the post-independence failure of Irish culture to find a way of jump-starting itself — but also, for the same reasons, a living, leaping, soaring blurt of the spirit that had become suppressed. It was a deconstruction of something recognizable as having been put together in slightly the wrong way — the clue that much more than this was fundamentally wrong. The Pogues offered a rejection, but only of the superficial presentation, the sugar coating. The deeper qualities were subjected to a firm and passionate embrace, pulled together and kicked onstage. The music conveyed an unmistakable sense of nostalgia, but also a rage that seemed to announce itself as deriving from the overall tragedy of Irish history. There was mockery, too, but of a gentle kind that seemed to comprehend the extent of the pathos to be dealt with. It had both pride and the awareness of a received loathing. It celebrated and mocked at the same time. It did not choose between allegiance and disdain, but crammed them both into the same mix.

The song that always floors me though is “Thousands are Sailing,” a song about the Irish who were emigrating from Ireland to New York in the depths of the economic downturn and Troubles of the 1980s. It begins with an encounter with a famine emigrant ghost from the past:

Here, precisely is the genius of MacGowan. He has invoked all the potential clichés and romance of Irish immigration to America. The ghost answers with the grim reality, dead before arrival:

“Ah, no”, says he, “it was not to be
On a coffin ship I came here
And I never even got so far
That they could change my name”

The song narrates the lives of men and women who celebrate the “land that make us refugees” in the streets, and revel in all the possibilities and opportunities that New York might offer them, though many of them never realize it themselves:

Postcards we’re mailing of sky-blue skies and oceans
From rooms the daylight never sees
And lights don’t glow on Christmas trees
But we dance to the music and we dance

From my childhood, there are haunting memories of precisely these men and women hovering above me as we moved from bars to a tight apartments in Queens. Men laughing broadly as they retold horrors about gunfire in the Divis Flats. Women, thinking their children had gone to sleep on the pullout, moaning in hopes that they earn enough money that year visit their mammy. And my own mother, listening to them, who could throw more light on these memories, is now gone more than a decade. I meet them all as ghosts in MacGowan’s songs. R.I.P.