Shane MacGowan’s widow Victoria Mary Clarke has described life with the late Pogues frontman as “having a four-year-old child with a credit card and car”.
MacGowan was laid to rest last Friday (8 December) in Nenagh, Co Tipperary, as thousands gathered in the Irish town where he grew up to bid farewell to the iconic musician.
The “Fairytale of New York” singer died in Dublin on 30 November, at the age of 64. Clarke, 57, previously confirmed his cause of death as pneumonia.
During an appearance on Radio 4’s Woman Hour on Friday (15 December), the 57-year-old journalist said she felt a “little shaky and dazed” after her husband’s funeral service – attended by stars such as Johnny Depp, Bob Geldof, and Nick Cave.
“When you have a funeral, there’s a lot to do, there’s a lot of adrenaline because you’ve got so many things to plan and organise. For most of us, these aren’t things we’ve ever thought about before,” she told host Anita Rani.
Clarke also said she still feels “Shane is very much with me” and that it’s “very hard to feel sad” because she believes he’s in a “very blissful state”.
“Shane is very much with me, I don’t feel he’s gone,” she explained. “When I look at his picture, I feel him smiling at me. And I actually feel a real smile, a real genuine connection. I feel his love and that connection very strongly.
“It’s very hard to feel sad about it, even though I do sometimes burst into tears for my own loss, I can’t feel sad for him because I really feel like he’s in a very blissful state.”
Describing her life with MacGowan for nearly 40 years, Clarke said it was like a “soap opera with the volume turned up”, adding there was never a dull moment with him.
The Irish author met MacGowan when she was just 16 and they started dating four years later. They tied the knot in 2018, 11 years after MacGowan and Clarke got engaged.
Clarke told Rani that “there was never any boredom, never any predictability” in their relationship, but “at the same time always wondering will he overdose, will he get arrested, or will he die”.
“It was like having a four year old who’s got a credit card and a car,” she added.
A trailblazing poet and musician, who gave traditional Irish music a punk makeover, MacGowan struggled with drink and drug abuse for a large part of his life.
In an Instagram post after MacGowan’s death, Clarke anyone “in a relationship with someone who has problems with addiction or anxiety or depression” to seek “healing and help for yourself”.
When Rani asked her where she found her own healing, Clarke said she turned to energy healing workshops, breathwork, yoga, Buddhist meditation, and “channeling angels”
Earlier this week, Clarke appeared to defend MacGowan’s “magical” funeral after a Catholic priest criticised the star-studded, three-hour musical service at Saint Mary of the Rosary Church “completely inappropriate”.
“It was an abuse of what mass is and what the Catholic funeral liturgy is all about,” Father Paddy McCafferty told Belfast Live.
MacGowan’s family danced to The Pogues’s Christmas hit “Fairytale of New York” at the singer’s funeral mass, as several of his songs were played during the service, with Cave performing a rendition of “A Rainy Night in Soho”.
Footage from the televised service showed mourners singing and dancing as they bid farewell to the irrepressible musician.
“The introduction of all these elements into that funeral mass frankly was a scandal and it shouldn’t have happened,” the priest added.
Clarke later shared a message on Instagram, thanking her late husband’s friends and fans for their “beautiful messages of support” in the wake of MacGowan’s death.
She added: “I love that so many of you are celebrating his music and his life and his warmth and compassion and grace and beauty and it is a powerful thing to witness.
“There’s a lot of people that I want to individually thank for making his funeral so special and magical and I will probably be doing it for a long time!!!!”
