SHANE MacGOWAN: Genius? I’ll drink to that

Christmas in Britain: a time for Carols from Kings’, a speech from the Queen and a pop song containing the immortal line “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot, happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.”

Written by Shane MacGowan and sung by the much-mourned Kirsty MacColl, the line from Fairytale of New York has been an unlikely source of angst for Radio 1, which decided this year to bleep the word “faggot”, but then changed its mind.

MacGowan is something of an anti-hero: legendarily drunken, he was expelled from Westminster School at 14 for possession of drugs and has only occasionally since then shown signs of sobriety. It is a source of considerable wonder and delight that on Christmas Day he will celebrate his 50th birthday.

This, after all, is a man who damaged his teeth by eating a copy of the Beach Boys Greatest Hits while high on LSD, and lost a couple more last year when he fell over a wall in Limerick while being sick.

But he is also a musical genius – he was at Westminster on a music scholarship and regularly won poetry contests – with a back catalogue to die for. Joe Strummer said he was “one of the best writers of the century”.

MacGowan was born in Tunbridge Wells and spent only the first six years of his life in Ireland. He formed The Pogues in 1982 but, beset by rows, there was a hiatus in the 1990s after the rest of the band sacked him in the middle of a tour of Japan (he says he left). But they reformed for a sell-out tour in 2001, and have been touring regularly ever since.

“He’s always been a bit mad,” his fiancée, a journalist, has said of him. “By normal standards he’s been off the rails, and at any point of his life people might go: ‘He has only six months to live’.”

In 1999, his friend Sinead O’Connor, fearing for his life, intervened: she told the police he had been taking heroin. A year later, he denied it. “She made out I was lying on the floor in a coma,” he said. “Whereas, in fact, I was sitting on the sofa, having a G and T and watching a Sam Peckinpah movie.” MacGowan was once admitted to the Priory, though he was ejected soon afterwards.

Assuming he didn’t sell the rights for half a lager and a packet of B&H, Fairytale of New York, which he co-wrote with a friend, Jem Finer, should be a well-earned pension pot. It is poetic justice that this joyous anthem for miserable gits, one of the best songs never to make No 1, could, this year, 20 years after its original release, make good that wrong.

“In Irish pubs where they still sing,Fairytale has become as much a standard as Danny Boy,” MacGowan has written in his blog. “So I’m like the writers of all those traditional standards, except I’m not anonymous or dead.” To which there is only one possible response: cheers.

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