A Homage to Shane MacGowan
The poster announcing the event.
Radio broadcast recorded live in Paris at O’Sullivan’s pub Franklin Roosevelt on Sunday June 23rd 2024 by host Patricia Killeen for Turning Points Paris. Featured guests were Maria D’Arcy, Desmond McGetrick, Marcolino da Costa, Alma Fakr, Virginie Roche and Irish musicians Niall Regan and Irish singer Stephanie MaCárthaigh.
Novelist, Maria D’Arcy has a conjecture that, at the moment of our death, our subconscious jumps forefront and conjures up a vision of Heaven, unique to each of us. Today’s story is “Shane MacGowan Sails on to Heaven’s Shore.”
Shane MacGowan Sails on to Heaven’s Shore
Worn down, from prolonged pneumonia, Shane MacGowan was snuggled up, under a soft blanket, at home in Dublin, his long-standing wife, Victoria Mary Clark, at his bedside. What a rock ’n’ roll, Celtic-hued, road-trip they had been on, with peaks and leaks, pinnacles and penalties, ovations and rejections. They smiled into each others’ eyes until he let her comforting hand fall. Time to slip away from “The Rocky Road to Dublin” and “Sail onto Heaven’s Shore.”
A tunnel of light showed him the way and a waft of traditional music greeted him. Lo, death was a friend!
A gentle tune embraced his sensitive ears. It was uilleann piper Liam O’Flynn’s opening to The Brendan Voyage as Shane sailed off the Dingle peninsula on a large barge into an orange and lemon sunrise.
A sail boat approached, the captain stood to salute Shane Patrick MacGowan calling out “Pogue Mahone.” Captain James Joyce made a gesture and they belly-laughed, a joke with which both had enjoyed shocking society.
A grand yacht reared up, filled with past Dubliners, a group named after the eponymous novel by Mr Joyce. Here were Luke Kelly, Ronnie Drew, Barry McKenna and Jim McCann. All together now, they strummed and crooned “Dirty Old Town.”
A gleaming raft with mermaids perched on the edge drifted by—the eternally beautiful siren Sinead O’Connor, enticing him with “Nothing Compares 2 U.”
Presently, a large ship loomed up, from which he heard fiddles ’n flutes, banjos ’n mandolins, whistles, bodhráns and accordions, and who looked over starboard at him? His ex-Pogues, musical allies who had died of drug overdoses, and here they were thriving radiantly, agile on each and every instrument.
Towards the land where the streets are famed to be paved with gold, such “A long way from Tipperary” and “The Cross of Spancil Hill” onwards to the “Fairytale of New York” he floated.
The vessel sailed on and he sighted other sea crafts with significant beings from his past, present and future lives, for in the spirit world, time is a continuum without walls, interweaving in melodious waves.
Maria is the author of Seventh Heaven Seven Perceptions, as well as an accomplished storyteller who incarnates female characters from Ulysses and Oscar Wilde’s Salomé.
All images, video and text are © 2024, Maria D’Arcy, all rights reserved. Written permission is required for any use.