‘I came, I saw, I scribbled’: Shane MacGowan on Bob Dylan, angels and his lifelong love of art

We join Shane MacGowan, much like a character from one of his songs, in a world where prosaic, often harsh realities vie with feverish flights of fancy. The former Pogue conducts this interview remotely, ‘sitting on a vastly uncomfortable lime green leather chair, within reach of a grey bucket, in a small but surprisingly unspeakable room. In a corner, Jimi Hendrix is repairing some broken guitar strings, while in the kitchen behind me, Bono is loading the dishwasher and a leprechaun with a gold earring is rolling what he says is a cigarette. On the walls are a selection of my wife’s multidimensional angel paintings and one or two of my drawings. Clint Eastwood is on the telly and Maggie Barry is on the record player.’

MacGowan, 64, lives in a flat in Dublin with his long-term partner, Victoria Mary Clarke. Fêted by the likes of Tom Waits and Bruce Springsteen, he was the lead singer and main songwriter in the Pogues between 1982 and 1991 – and again, more sporadically, between 2001 and 2014, when the band reformed purely as a touring act. Having suffered long spells of drug addiction, poor mental health and alcoholism, following a fall in 2015 in which he fractured his pelvis, MacGowan has been confined to a wheelchair and has since struggled to write, record or perform.

The Eternal Buzz and the Crock of Gold is his first art folio, a roughhouse visual carnival containing sketches, paintings, self-portraits, handwritten lyrics, stories, photographs and ephemera spanning six decades. The collection was not so much curated as disinterred. ‘I think Victoria had them stashed away in boxes,’ he says. ‘She’s good at keeping things. I was out of it all the time and we were on the road all the time and everything was all over the place, mainly in plastic carrier bags, so God knows how she did it.