Britt Collins
I thought Shane MacGowan was indestructible and would outlive us all, so it was a sad shock when I found out he had died. My memories of him seem outsize and shimmer with warmth and tenderness. The first time I laid eyes on Shane, a punky, bat-eared snarler with a mouth full of broken teeth and skin as pale as a vampire’s, half-singing, half-shouting If I Should Fall from Grace with God, was on the video screen at Poseurs, an indie club in Washington D.C. He certainly didn’t look like the rock stars I saw and idolized on MTV. Ten months later in the fall of 1988, soon after finishing university and returning to London, I met him through a mutual friend, Paul Ronan, an Irish music promoter who’d given my then-boyfriend Steve Ludwin his first gig. Shane, like a gale-force wind, blew into our living room and crashed on the sofa. When he woke up the next day, I offered him coffee. “Cooo-ffee?” he sputtered, with a fag hanging from his lips, “Haven’t you got any booze?” Isn’t it a bit too early? I’d asked. “Nah, I drink all day, every day,” he said with his wheezy, cackling laugh. Clearly, it was drink that got him out of bed in the afternoons.
Days later he returned like a stray cat with his girlfriend Victoria Mary Clarke. He was fascinated that we had vivariums with deadly rattlesnakes and copperheads in the front room. Steve was obsessed with snakes. Standing in our sun-washed living room on an unseasonably warm October afternoon, Shane, in black sunglasses and head-to-toe in black with rosary beads strung around his neck, was in a state, glowing with sweat and drooling. Victoria, with her big green eyes, was in tears, hiding behind the fringe of her long dark hair. They’d obviously had a row earlier. We went out for a boozy lunch that lasted until midnight. By the end of the night, we were surrounded by empty glasses—mostly Shane’s—and the only ones left in the restaurant.
I wasn’t interested in Shane or the Pogues, but I found Victoria quietly intriguing. That was the start of a deep, enduring friendship that’s lasted pretty much our whole adult lives. Victoria started writing for my indie-music mag Lime Lizard and we grew close very quickly. So close that one of her insanely jealous friends had the equivalent of a voodoo doll of me in her kitchen, a cork-board pinned with cut-out tabloid headlines: “BRIT STABBED, BRIT MURDERED, BRIT DEAD IN PLANE CRASH.”