Watch Nick Cave Perform “A Rainy Night In Soho” At Shane MacGowan’s Funeral
Last week, the legendary Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan died at the age of 65. Today, MacGowan was laid to rest in the Irish town of Nenagh, in County Tipperary. Thousands of MacGowan’s friends and admirers came out to pay their respects, and some of them sang his songs at the funeral. One of them was Nick Cave.
Nick Cave, Shane MacGowan’s friend and occasional collaborator wrote a moving elegy for MacGowan on his Red Hand Files newsletter last week: “Shane was blessed with an uncommon spirit of goodness and a deep sense of what is true, which was strangely amplified in his brokenness, his humanness.” At the funeral, Cave, backed by a full Irish band, sang the Pogues’ 1986 song “A Rainy Night In Soho.”
The Independent reports that Johnny Depp, Bob Geldof, Aidan Gillen, and former Sinn Féin president Gerry Adam all gave readings at the funeral. Bono was scheduled to read, but he couldn’t make it, and a letter from him was read in the church. (U2 covered the Pogues in tribute last weekend.) Shane’s sister Siobhan MacGowan gave an elegy. She ended it with a quote from the Pogues’ “The Body Of An American”: “As the sunset came to meet, the evening on the hill, I told you I’d always love you, I always did, I always will.” Irish president Michael D Higgins was in attendance.
The former Pogues member Caít O’Riordan, John Francis Flynn, Imelda May, and Declan O’Rourke were also among the performers at the funeral. Irish singer-songwriters Glen Hansard and Lisa O’Neill sang a stirring version of “Fairytale Of New York” while people danced in the church’s aisles.