Review

Culture

11 December 2023

5 min read

The spiritual depths of the genius

Moved by his songbook and his funeral, Belle Tindall considers the source, and sacrifice, of Shane MacGowan’s genius.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Upon his draped coffin, a picture of Shane MacGowan and a crucifix sit

Celebrating the life of Shane MacGowan at his funeral mass.

RTE.

Have you ever seen a Catholic priest hold up a Buddha during a Mass? Or a crowd applaud and cheer after a reading from the book of Micah? Or Nick Cave miss his cue by half an hour?

No?

Then I suppose you’ve yet to see the footage of Shane MacGowan’s funeral.

On a cold December afternoon - in a Tipperary church which was full to bursting – family, friends and fans gathered to (in the words of the presiding priest) "hold, help and handle the loss of the great Shane MacGowan… to celebrate his song, his story, his lyric, his living." I watched the footage because I had heard rumours of dancing in the aisles, renditions of The Pogues’ songs on the streets, bible readings by Bono and prayers led by Jonny Depp. And I can confirm, the rumours were all true.

People really did climb out of their pews to dance around Shane’s coffin to ‘Fairytale of New York’, a song which has just lost its maestro. Fans really did line the streets of Dublin to greet Shane’s body with raised glasses of Guinness and renditions of his most-loved songs. What’s more, Bono really did read the bible and Jonny Depp really did pray for ‘a deeper spirit of compassion in our world’. In fact, far more interesting (but far less documented) than the presence of Jonny Depp, was the presence of Shane’s raw and gritty Christian faith, which was so obvious throughout. It wasn’t just cultural Christianity on display here, it was far deeper than that. But alas, I’m getting ahead of myself - I’ll get back to that in a moment.

There was defiant joy, immense grief, loud laughter and silent sobs. There was lament and there was celebration, there was bitter and there was sweet, there was light and there was darkness. It was raw and messy and awkward and authentic and, in every way possible, profound. I suppose you could suggest that it was a lot like Shane in that way.

Indeed, this was no ordinary funeral.

Nick Cave performed a rendition of ‘Rainy Night in Soho’, which has only cemented my opinion that it is the most romantic song ever written (we can argue about it later). And then there was the eulogy, given by the person that I like to think inspired the song that Nick had just performed: Victoria Mary Clarke, the woman who has loved, and been loved by, Shane MacGowan since she was twenty years old. And while it was the star-studded eccentricities that enticed me to watch the funeral, it is Victoria’s eulogy that has plagued me ever since. She delivered it with an eloquence befitting of a poet’s soulmate and the composure of someone who has been preparing to eulogise the man she loved her entire life.

Victoria understood MacGowan completely, and through her words, she has helped us to understand him too. She told us how –

"He wasn’t interested in living a normal life, he didn’t want a 9-5 or a mortgage or any of that stuff, he liked to explore all aspects of consciousness. He liked to explore where you could go with your mind…. He chose many, many, many mind-altering substances to help him on that journey of exploration. He really did live so close to edge that he seemed like he was going to fall off many times…"

And I suppose therein lies the source, and sacrifice, of his genius. He was incredibly introspective, almost scarily so. It reminds me of another songwriter – a biblical one – King David, who once wrote:

‘Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: And see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.’

I’m wondering if Shane made similar requests of God, whether anyone would have the boldness to pray this line with as much literality as someone who was fascinated by ‘all aspects of consciousness’. Perhaps such introspective depths are reserved for the geniuses that are brave enough to ask God to take them there. And that got me thinking about other such geniuses - some of them present in that very church - who have plunged the depths of themselves and gifted us with the spoils through their art, those who follow their romantic longing’s lead, those who have an eye for the unseen. I can’t claim to fully understand it, but how interesting that those who live as ‘close to the edge’ as Shane did tend to either bump into oblivion (Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Ian Curtis) or God. Or, as in the case of Shane MacGowan, both.

The reason I could never write a song like ‘Rainy Night in Soho’, is that Shane boldly went where I doubt I ever could - to the costly depths reserved for the brilliant.

At one point, MacGowan was taking one hundred acid tabs a day, and Victoria recounted (with a hint of a giggle – her adoration of him utterly tangible) how, in the early days of their relationship, Shane carried an encyclopaedia of pharmacology around with him. This was so that he could look up each drug he was being offered before accepting it. I suppose to an explorer of consciousness, this encyclopaedia is as close to a compass as it gets. And so yes, there was darkness there. Deep and dangerous darkness. But Victoria wanted us to know that –

"He didn’t just like to go to the dark places and the weird places, he also liked to go to the blissful and transcendent and spiritual places… he was intensely religious."

She evidenced this with a story drawn from the last months of his life, all of which were spent in hospital, when a priest had to confiscate Holy Communion from Shane – who had obtained it ‘illegally’ and taken it daily. You see, in the Catholic Church, Holy Communion has to be administered by a priest under specific circumstances. And so, Shane became, perhaps, ‘the only man in the world who’s been busted for Holy Communion’. But nevertheless, whenever he came to the end of himself, Shane found God. And while he held the pluralistic belief that no religion had a monopoly on God (hence the afore mentioned reference to the Priest displaying a Buddha), he was utterly devoted to Jesus.

"I think what he was trying to get across was that there’s something in this stuff’ explained Victoria, ‘there’s something in Jesus that’s worth thinking about. It’s worth valuing. It’s worth exploring that Jesus is real."

I didn’t know this about Shane MacGowan; how actively he sought God, how deeply he enjoyed Jesus. But it makes complete sense. If one goes looking in the deepest places, they’re likely to find the deepest thing. Roam around the truest place, and eventually you’ll bump into the truest thing.

I, like Shane, believe that to be God.

I suppose the difference, and the reason I could never write a song like ‘Rainy Night in Soho’, is that Shane boldly went where I doubt I ever could - to the costly depths reserved for the brilliant. Instead, I shall simply ponder how beautiful it is that God waits for the brilliant to notice him, even in those depths.

Article

Attention

Culture

Digital

Fashion

14 May 2025

5 min read

Meet London’s newest theologian – the Real Housewives of Clapton

The starter kits that kick-start the study of our souls.

Isaiah Morris

Isaiah is a visual artist and writer.

A woman looks at her phone, behind her is a montage of memes

How might an Instagram account summarise someone who’s a proficient user of Lime bikes, a lover of ‘natty wine,’ and has an affinity for small plates?

Sure, a particular East London ‘creative’ type probably came to mind. And you’d be right. However, perhaps there’s something more to all that social media signalling - a gesture toward late-stage capitalism, the ethical, the bourgeoisie, the material, or, dare I say, the spiritual?

Great religious texts are lived before they are written, and the prominent Instagram account Real Housewives of Clapton intuitively inscribes our new scriptures. (With Hanna Crosbie as its prophet. Along with Socks House Meeting and Dalston Super Stoned.) However, these new scriptures are not written on sacred scrolls but on digital tablets: memes.

Real Housewives of Clapton help us to see the vestments East Londoners are adorned with (new converts should begin with an Acne scarf), the pilgrimage sites to be walked (Broadway Market in Salomons), and the sacred meals one should partake of (rotisserie chicken is in vogue, but Jolene Newington Green is the cathedral). Nevertheless, young Londoners (like the rest of the Western world) are increasingly becoming more religious, not least Christian. As Lauren Westwood and Graham Tomlin discuss. But does all this newfound fervour always come leaping into traditional religion? I’m still not sure.

Ditching the poetic-spiritual contours of sacred writing for the potency of Microsoft Word ‘fancy’ text hastily pasted over stock images, Real Housewives of Clapton is delivering our new scriptures en masse, on pace with the changing of trends themselves. While memes are a longitudinal study nightmare for distilling emergent truths, they are great way to laugh whilst on the toilet. And the consumers of these LOLs? Those involved in the sub-culture themselves. It's post often generate tens of thousands of likes.

Real Housewives of Clapton articulates the aesthetics of our contemporary religiosity as it manifests in the everyday - so much so that religious attire re-emerges as a genuinely distinct perception of ‘East London’ attire, see the post below.. Religion is that term used to describe a community’s ritual, aesthetic, holy scriptures, sacred sites, and understanding of the Divine and how this relates to humanity.

Precisely because the projected identities these East London meme-dealers expose are entangled with a self-awareness for the ethical, it naturally gravitates toward the religious. To consider the aesthetics of ethics is to delve into theology. To meander on the aesthetics of a subculture in this way, then, is to be a theologian. The creators behind Real Housewives of Clapton are East London’s Rowan Williams (the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, not the actor), Germany’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer, or Medieval Europe’s Hildegard of Bingen. They’re reading the signs of the time and distilling it into potent visual metaphors.

So, what might we see if we were to read the memes of Real Housewives as theologians? Well, perhaps we can trace an eschatology (a fancy word for discussing the End Times).

The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

In heightening our awareness of and orienting the sub-culture around “little things”—small plates, chippies, situationships, drinks, vitamin D—East Londoners are highly aware of the particulars of creation and how they can be in service to a more satisfactory existence.

A few months ago, Real Housewives shared this meme about running. Everyone knows someone who joined a run club in recent months; sharing the run map has become a “flex” on your friends (becoming a national security threat in the USA). Yet, the account contextualises this with the phrase, ‘after not posting anything for 9 months.’ There is, undergirding East London, particularly for men it seems, the felt need to maintain an air of nonchalance, aloofness, or, indeed, mystery.

A screen grab of a content creation meme.

Arguably, this nonchalance is from the same guy on Broadway market who ghosted you after the fifth date. Or, as appears every public holiday, the mysteriously unemployed DJ acquaintance who, via his close friends' list, is at his parents’ holiday home in Dorset.

Nevertheless, the account shared another meme a month later, see below, signalling something deeper. The identity of distance or mysterion is undercut by a more potent insight: we are obsessed with projecting our identities. Taking this to its logical absurdity, Real Housewives contrasts the purchase of a £1.29 Twix with the nostalgia of an off-licence. The East London world is your oyster, but only insofar as it’s captured. And it needs to be a captured reality shared online so that we can feel seen.

Participating in this religion includes evangelism through one’s online identity. But, in contrast to popular streams of culture, this aesthetic and its symbolic world only makes sense for those who live in East London. In other words, the Cult of East London doesn’t find its attraction because you might get global stardom. Instead, partaking in this particular cultural aesthetic signals to those you meet on Dalston High Street that you understand them and, hopefully, they might understand you.

Converging across both “social media mystery boy” and its always-online antithesis is the undergirding desire for our projected identity to be known.

As this meme about the sun coming out reveals, behind its comedic options—a designer jacket, spritz and ciggie, or the London sun—is a more dormant reality: we need all three.

A Freudian reading might interpret the designer jacket as the need for physical touch, the spritz as a plea for community, and the London sun as the need for God—the cult of Sol Invictus, perhaps. Maybe. Or, in a theological key, through the triangulation of branded cohesivity, a little drink, and the bodily calmness to feel as though we can finally close our eyes, we might actually find peace.

The garments Real Housewives self-abasingly propagates suggest that the spiritual lives of East Londoners are genuinely concerned with ethics. In aversion to fast fashion, we wear things that promote our being seen beyond a glance. This held-gaze has both to do with the self and the plea for us to look more seriously at the world we find ourselves in. This shift toward a more substantive looking subtly nods to an eschatology of peace.

The spiritual lives of East Londoners gravitate toward a longing for peace that is temporally filled with ethically just choices but is embodied unseriously. We laugh with and double-tap The Real Housewives of Clapton’s memes because we know this identity won’t save us. But spending one afternoon in London Fields wearing an iconic fit amidst the blazing British sun might just give us a taste of eternal serenity.

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