Brendan Ruberry at Commonweal:
MacGowan died last week at the age of sixty-five, and to many it seemed a small miracle that he lived as long as that. His fame as a drinker was almost as great as his fame as a songwriter and performer, and all that dissipation took a toll. For one thing, it could make him sound mean. In Julien Temple’s 2020 documentary, Crock of Gold: A Few Rounds With Shane MacGowan, we see him insult his wife and friends. He is in a wheelchair, frail, and white as a sheet, making his friend (and the film’s producer) Johnny Depp, only five years younger, seem like the very image of youthful vigor by contrast. “You can be a right bitch,” he tells his wife Victoria. “But you really are very, very nice. And beautiful.”
He idolized hard-drinking writers like Flann O’Brien and Brendan Behan, whose apparition MacGowan meets in the song “Streams of Whiskey.”
more here.