Shane MacGowan er helt og absolut glemt i denne sammenhæng.
Citat:
MacGowan is an avid proponent of recreational drugs including alcohol. Irish singer Sinéad O'Connor reported him to the police in London for drug possession — in an attempt, she said, to discourage him from using heroin.[4] At first furious over this, Shane later expressed gratitude towards O'Connor and claimed that the incident helped him kick his heroin habit.[5]
He claims to have been introduced to alcohol and cigarettes by his aunt on the promise he would not worship the devil. In a 50th-birthday interview with the Daily Mirror he told a reporter: "I was actually four when I started drinking. I just remember that Ribena turned into stout and I developed an immediate love for it."[6] MacGowan says he tried whiskey when he was 10 and continued to drink heavily thereafter.
Speaking on BBC Four's Folk Britannia television programme (first broadcast February 2006), Robyn Hitchcock recalled: "I remember going to the Hope and Anchor (a pub where many folk punk acts played in London). The Pogues were all on stage and ready, it was a full house, but they hadn't started yet. Then this character shambled in through the door and shambled downstairs. I thought, 'Jesus, you're not letting that guy in are you?'. Then he walked on stage. That guy was Shane MacGowan."
He has suffered physically from his years of binge drinking; he is notorious for performing while drunk, and was often impaired in interviews; on the BBC TV political magazine programme This Week MacGowan gave incoherent and slurred answers to questions from Janet Street-Porter about the public smoking ban in Ireland.
On 7 September 2002 MacGowan became so intoxicated before a performance at the Olympia Theatre in Dublin that he stopped singing and threw up over fans in the front row. Fiona Wynne wrote in the Daily Mirror that the consequent criticism of the behaviour of MacGowan "who was in a wheelchair after breaking his leg" led Sinéad O'Connor to call Joe Duffy's RTÉ Liveline programme three days later to defend MacGowan, saying: "He is an angel near the end who needs support. He's too far gone to stop drinking; he has an illness that cannot be cured, and as far as I can see, the end is near for him".[7]
Conversely, MacGowan's fiancee Victoria Mary Clarke claims that although his alcoholism was so bad that the two had to split up at one point, "[Shane] loves a drink and he probably always will. But he drinks less than people think and I haven’t seen him drunk for quite some time", suggesting that his enjoyment of alcohol is in moderation, and perhaps not as dire or life-threatening as most of his fans believe. According to Clarke, "it became difficult for us to get from A to B without being dragged into bars by well-wishers desperate to buy him a drink", and "Shane, essentially a shy person, hated seeing his picture on magazine covers and on billboards because he thought he was ugly. He loathed interviews and despised schmoozing. To cope with his social anxiety, he began drinking more and more".