Tim Bradford - Is Shane MacGowan Still Alive?

‘Well,’ she said, ‘we’ll start there then.’

‘What a great idea,’ I said.

(The following tour is a mental and physical assault course of culture and Guinness. I moved around Dublin like a terrified blind man being led by a sadistic, hedonistic guide dog, hearing strange amplified urban voices, following the smell of cheap tourist perfume and beer-stained wooden floors, my fingers caressing the smoothly polished bar-tops and tables of grand pubs, my mouth bitter from the black stuff and the salty taste of laughter’s tears. I thought about writing some of it down, but instead relied on memory. With no particular plan in mind except to imagine I was no longer some East Midlands Kerouac-lite sad bastard but a latter day Dr Johnson-style cleverperson, sitting in pubs and watching people, learning this and that and writing things down then stuffing it all into my rucksack like some kind of demented memory snail. Some of the places we went to have simply disappeared forever. These are the ones that remain.)

This seemed like a logical choice for our first cultural stop-off point. The big pub with glass partitions, somewhere off Grafton Street, was quite austere and formal, perfect for viewing a thousand-year-old manuscript that had been illuminated by monks. As the first pint of the day, the Book of Kells was always going to be popular. There was a bit of a queue at the bar (bloody tourists) and we then had to wait to let the pints settle. It was worth the wait. The Book of Kells was just the right temperature and very smooth. You have to keep thousand-year-old manuscripts that have been illuminated by monks at the right temperature. We talked a bit about people we knew and I hoped the car would be all right.

This was an interesting pub, with two levels and lots of strange pictures on the wall.

This was a quiet old pub on a side street. It was Sarah’s idea to name it after the great Irish heroine, Yeats’ lost love. I’d first met Sarah out in the west of Ireland in the early nineties. In those days she was into karate and was a rumbustous hard-drinking wild woman with mad long hair. Now she had slimmed down to become a slinky hard-drinking wild woman with fashionable long hair, pierced bellybutton and celtic tattoo on the small of her back. She was a Gaelic footballer and also well-versed in ancient Irish history and modern Irish politics. Her grandmother’s family had been old republicans – the grandfather had been De Valera’s driver for a while and had also worked for John McBride, husband of Maud Gonne. I’d talked to her grandmother about all this just after Neil Jordan’s Michael Collins had been released. Being an old anti-Treatyist, Granny Mac wasn’t quite so rosy and sentimental about the likes of Boland and Collins as Jordan’s film. She had also met Maud Gonne. I won’t tell you exactly what she said, but you won’t read about it in the history books.

There was racing on the telly and I was dying for a piss.

A serious, dark pub. We got into a big talk about Irishness and what it means. From the point of view of someone living in London who goes to pubs a lot, Irishness could be a marketing man’s creation, the vision that is Heritage Ireland, the fake Irish pubs.

But there’s the cold-eyed heavily moral and religious Irishness, which has ruled more or less since the twenties. Some of that pious moralism must come from the impeccable double standards of the Victorian English, and has attached itself to a devout Catholicism. But, I’m reliably informed, the church and state thing is already well on the way out, or at least becoming just a part of the heady cultural mix. Travelling in the west a few years ago I found myself in a B&B which was stuffed full of religious icons, lifesize statues of Mary and Jesus scattered around, making the place seem as though it was full of people. In our room, along with a bleeding heart painting of Jesus and another giant statue of Our Lady, was a well-fingered German porn mag. You could have cut the juxtaposition with a knife.

And yet younger folk probably don’t give two craps about all the old-style stuff. Irishness is no longer Collins and Dev, Willie MacBride and Yeats, but Boyzone, Roy and Robbie Keane, Bono and Sinéad O’Connor. Behan and Kavanagh? Zig and Zag!

Bored with that one, we swapped coats, swigged down the last dregs of the Divorce Referendum, took a couple of pictures and headed off in search of more culture.

I tried to remember Jockser’s speech about the stars in Juno and the Paycock , but was already starting to lose it. We had to stand up because it was so popular. Sarah showed me her tongue stud and talked about Gaelic Football. From what I understand, having a tongue stud (and other piercings) is now the rule for anyone who wants to join the official Gaelic Athletic Association (the GAA) and I had this image of all these old lads with nipple studs and Prince Alberts, along with their broken noses and false teeth.

Music pub. We start to get mystical and Sarah talks about her dad in the west. We wonder what it’s all about. None of the cosmologists currently writing today believe in the universe as a swirling bazaar governed by market forces. But if we see the universe as being like a business what were the conditions needed for it to exist? A gap, a need for a universe for a start. Until the idea of existence became real. But where did the funds come from? What bankrolled this fledgling business? Was it a loan? There was nothing. The question is, did it happen spontaneously like, say, the craze for rock ’n’ roll heart tattoos, or did it come from above, like Coke or Barbie?

Noisy boozer. Drank very quickly and flirted with each other a little.

A real dodgy backstreet boozer. Guys in football shirts and littles ’taches, red faces, little slit eyes. A tall old man at the bar looked different. In a suit. Heard us talking.

‘Where are you from?’

‘I was born in Louth.’ I think I’m so clever. It’s true and makes some people think I might be Irish.

‘I presume that’s Louth in Lincolnshire.’

A smart one. It turned out he had been stationed in Lincolnshire in the RAF. He started asking me questions and knew more about Lincolnshire than I did. I went to the bog. A fat bloke in a Man United second strip (the blue and white one – by the time this comes out that will probably be ten second strips ago) came in and said I’m lovely and would I like his limited edition plate then he says I’m not really lovely I’m a daft bastard. Back out in the pub he confronted the RAF lad in a mock fight and they put on English accents.

My head was going, but me and the RAF lad (who by now could hardly stand) then got into a mad conversation which went something like this:

RAF lad: Ah, you English fucker.