Shane MacGowan’s cause of death revealed after The Pogues star passed away aged 65 following eight-year battle with brain condition

Shane MacGowan’s wife has revealed The Pogues star’s cause of death following the news of his passing on Thursday after battling a brain condition for eight years.

MacGowan, 65, had been battling viral encephalitis and was released from hospital just last week. He died in the early hours of Thursday morning at home in Dublin surrounded by his family. 

His wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, confirmed the cause of death as pneumonia.

Funeral details are yet to be confirmed for the frontman, whose death was announced in a heartbreaking statement issued on The Pogues’ social media accounts on behalf of the band and his wife, sister Siobhan and father Maurice.

The death prompted an outpouring of tributes from famous faces and Pogues fans – and has rejuvenated a campaign to make the band’s best known song, Fairytale of New York, the UK Christmas number one. 

The statement read: ‘It is with the deepest sorrow and heaviest of hearts that we announce the passing of Shane MacGowan.

‘Shane died peacefully at 3am this morning (30 November 2023) with his wife Victoria and family by his side.

‘Prayers and the last rites were read which gave comfort to his family. 

‘He is survived by his wife Victoria, his sister Siobhan and his father, Maurice, family and a large circle of friends.

‘Further details will be announced shortly but the family ask for privacy at this very sad time.’

McGowan had spent most of the last year receiving treatment for viral encephalitis – a condition that causes inflammation in the brain – at St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin, but had been discharged just over a week before his death.

His cause of death was first reported in an obituary published by the New York Times.

Victoria later shared further tributes to her husband, whom she married in Copenhagen, Denmark in December 2018, on social media.

She shared an image of MacGowan smiling on X, formerly Twitter, and captioned it: ‘I am going to miss him so much! His smile, his eyes his laugh his sense of humour and his voice, every little part of him.’

She later revealed MacGowan had spent his final months binging on the Channel 4 Irish comedy classic Father Ted.

She brought him a portable DVD player in hospital – and said he couldn’t get enough of the Graham Linehan show about a pair of hapless priests living off of Ireland’s west coast.

Victoria, 57, told The Sun: ‘So he wouldn’t get bored we brought a little DVD player into Shane and friends have been giving him presents of classic movies on DVD.

‘But the thing he won’t stop playing is the ‘Father Ted; boxset. Shane watches that all day long and can’t stop laughing.’

In recent years, the Irish icon was confined to a wheelchair and was aided by his wife and carer at home, having been plagued by ill-health linked to his years of alcohol and substance abuse. 

He had even written in a memoir, co-authored with his wife, of memories of his uncle bringing him bottles of Guinness from the pub each night from the age of five.

MacGowan was first hospitalised last December suffering from viral encephalitis, but was able to send a message in which he wished his legions of fans well and ‘all the luck in the world’. 

‘Hi friends, I’m sitting here suffering from encephalitis,’ he said. ‘The light is killing me. But I wanted to wish you a Happy New Year and Happy Christmas and many more.

‘All the luck in the world and all the love. Happy Christmas and Happy New Year, love Shane.’

But he has enjoyed visits from a string of famous stars, including his Pogues bandmates Spider Stacy and Terry Woods as well as US star Bruce Springsteen. 

The Born To Run Singer was photographed paying homage to MacGowan and urging him to keep fighting in his health battle.

Announcing the news of the beloved punk star’s death yesterday, Victoria wrote she had been ‘blessed beyond words’ to have been ‘so endlessly and unconditionally loved by him’.

She declared: ‘You will live in my heart forever… you meant the world to me.’

Bandmate Spider Stacy posted a black and white photo of the singer performing on stage to X, formerly Twitter, writing: ‘O Captain! My Captain! Our fearful trip is done.’ 

Irish President Michael D Higgins hailed the musician as one of ‘music’s greatest lyricists’, adding: ‘Like so many across the world, it was with the greatest sadness that I learned this morning of the death of Shane MacGowan.

‘Shane will be remembered as one of music’s greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them.

‘His words have connected Irish people all over the globe to their culture and history, encompassing so many human emotions in the most poetic of ways.’

In the UK, Downing Street said Rishi Sunak’s thoughts were with MacGowan’s family and fans, adding that ‘Christmas would not be Christmas without Fairytale Of New York’.

Irish DJ Annie Macmanus – better known as Annie Mac – said he was ‘one of the finest lyricists of a generation. A man who loved Ireland with all his heart and took the music and culture and mixed it with his London upbringing to bring us The Pogues.’

And Irish singer and actress Imelda May said: ‘Thank you Shane. Thank you for opening your heart and sharing with us your glorious talents. We’ll never see the likes of again.

‘Your genius song writing and poetry weaved of words and wisdom that made mortals feel seen, heard and moved from stoney stoicism to quiet tears.

‘In a world of perfection bulls*** you were always real. You always lived your truth.

‘Your defiance, passion, energy, self awareness, honesty, daring, anger, love was always inspiring.

 

Farewell to the Spirit of Christmas Plastered: Hellraiser Shane MacGowan defied the doctors so often he achieved a kind of immortal status. Aged 65, the Pogues star has passed away – decades later than anyone expected (including him)

By CHRISTOPHER STEVENS  

Farewell to the Spirit of Christmas Plastered. Shane MacGowan, the ravaged, staggering, foul-mouthed, broken-toothed rock star who co-wrote the best-loved festive karaoke song of all time, has died aged 65 – decades later than he or anyone else expected.

The former singer with punk-folk band The Pogues defied the doctors so often that he achieved a kind of immortal status.

Earlier this month, his devoted wife Victoria, who became his lover at 16 and stayed loyally at his side ever after, released photographs of him in a hospital bed. He was skeletal, paper-skinned but still flashing his reprehensible grin.

His beloved festive hit, Fairytale Of New York, will be bellowed out at pub parties across the land this year with more gusto than ever.

The lyrics are infamous: ‘You’re a bum, You’re a punk, You’re an old sl*t on junk, Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed. You scumbag, You maggot, You cheap lousy f****t, Happy Christmas your arse, I pray God it’s our last.’

The belligerent former junkie, with a book of poetry in one hand and a bottle of Bushmills in the other, became the unlikely patron saint of Yuletide, after surviving heroin addiction, a high-speed fall from a car on a motorway and numerous booze-fuelled fights.

But, like a drunk on Christmas Eve whose personality flipped from raucous extrovert to maudlin crybaby at the flick of a switch, there was a surprising hidden side to Shane MacGowan.

For a start, he was born in England – outside Royal Tunbridge Wells, of all places.

In 1957, his parents were visiting dad Maurice’s sister in Kent, when mum Therese went into labour unexpectedly. Shane, their first child, was born in Pembury maternity hospital.

He spent the first few weeks of his life sleeping in a drawer in his auntie’s bedroom, before they returned to the crowded family farmhouse in Tipperary, Ireland.

Therese was a singer and imbued the boy with a passion for music. Maurice, a Dubliner, was a great reader, though all the family believed Shane’s gift with words emerged after a bout of measles, aged four: ‘The spots never came out, they went to my head and I went completely mad for a month. That’s when I started making up stories and poems and songs.’

While he was growing up on the farm, both his parents were away working in England. Shane’s aunts and uncles started him on Guinness when he was just four years old. When he was eight, he got drunk on whisky for the first time.

Rather than send him to the Christian Brothers school in Tipperary, his parents enrolled him in an English prep school, Holmewood House in Langton Green, Kent.

The villages around Tunbridge Wells were an unlikely hotbed of punk. Sid Vicious (whose name was then John Ritchie) was in the same year at the nearby Sandown Court school.

As a London schoolboy in 1971, he discovered marijuana, grew his hair long like a hippie, and got hooked on prescription tranquilisers.

After a brief spell at art college, he suffered a drug-induced breakdown and spent six months in a mental hospital, being weaned off Valium.

When he emerged, he hacked off his hair and dyed the spikey remnants white. His name, he announced, was now Shane O’Hooligan.

He launched his own band, The Nipple Erectors. Known as The Nips, they released four singles but failed to dent the charts. MacGowan’s next band, Poguemahone, appeared to be destined for equal obscurity.

After a 1984 tour supporting The Clash they landed a record deal – as the Pogues.

Elvis Costello produced their second album, Rum, Sodomy And The Lash, and though he and the band grew to loathe each other during the recording, it yielded their first hit single – a dirge called Dirty Old Town.

Goading them in the bar at Dublin’s Blooms Hotel, Costello bet the band they couldn’t write a Christmas song without turning into a schmaltzy pop variety act, all twinkles and knitwear.

Winning the bet took nearly two years, but in December 1987, Fairytale Of New York was No 2 in the UK, No 1 in Ireland.

Sell-out tours followed, but MacGowan found life on the road gruelling. Sustaining himself with alcohol and drugs, he became increasingly paranoid.

In 1991, after too many missed flights and drunken collapses, he was kicked out of his own band. He retaliated by forming The Popes, effectively a tribute band to himself.

Famous for his mouthful of rotten teeth, in 2015 he underwent extensive dental surgery to replace them with implants.

He married his wife, the music journalist Victoria Mary Clarke, in 2018. By then, they’d been together, with periodic break-ups, for 36 years.

She became his carer as a series of medical problems saw him hospitalised. MacGowan used a wheelchair since 2016, when he fell and broke his pelvis while dancing.

Actor Johnny Depp, who was best man at his wedding, calls him ‘one of the most important poets of the 20th century’. But it is that rebellious, contrary, angry, lyrical Christmas ballad which will always be his great achievement.

That angered him, because he claimed not to like Christmas. ‘I can’t stand all that sort of stuff. It’s gross.’

‘Not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable. Some have to be evil or nasty to tell the story effectively. Fairytale of New York is a fine record,’ he admitted, ‘but the Christmas song I like best is by Nat King Cole. Ours is good but his is better.’