Sharon Shannon on the loss of Shane MacGowan: ‘I loved him, I really loved him’

“I remember thinking while all the big stars were singing Shane’s songs during his 60th birthday party in the National Concert Hall, how amazing it would be to bring something like that on tour… to do a Shane MacGowan tribute, so we’ll be doing it,” Sharon tells the Sunday World in an exclusive interview.

Sharon, whose new album is called Now, was a close friend of MacGowan and worked with him on tour.

After achieving massive success with The Galway Girl song featuring Mundy — the most downloaded song of 2007/2008 in Ireland — Sharon started doing major tours at Christmas time with MacGowan.

“We did that every Christmas for about seven years with a big band, playing some of the biggest venues in Ireland,” she recalls.

“We’d have Shane, Mundy, Camille O’Sullivan, Eleanor Shanley, Wallis Bird and Joyce Redmond from Howth who Steve Earle wrote The Galway Girl about. She used to sing Fairytale of New York with Shane in the show.

“On these gigs Shane didn’t have to do a full set himself, so he didn’t have all that pressure.

“We had a big band, the show was full of variety and each of the guests would sing three or four songs, and then Shane would sing six or seven at the end. So it was a very easy gig for Shane, and it was great craic and he loved it.”

Sharon grew close to Shane through the years. “Oh really close,” she says. “I loved him, really loved him, and I really miss him.”

Recalling his funeral, Sharon said Shane would have been smiling to see the hooley in the church at the end with people dancing in the aisles. “It was like a scene from a movie with everyone dancing and you could imagine Shane just giggling laughing,” she says. “It was really gorgeous.”

Looking back on her own life, Sharon recalls an idyllic childhood growing up in Ruan, Co Clare, with her parents I.J. and Mary and three siblings Garry, Majella and Mary.

“They were brilliant parents, they did everything imaginable for us in the hope that we would fare out well in our individual life journeys,” she says.

“My mother brought us to every single fleadh and to everything that was going. And my father used to bring us to horse shows [she did competitive show jumping]. It was non-stop in our house, going to music lessons and dancing lessons and all the rest.

“We used to have a céili every Friday night in Toonagh, the next village over from Ruan. We could not wait for these céilis, it was the highlight of our week. All age groups were there and it was three or four hours of music.

“All those tunes go into your subconscious. Within six months of going there we all had hundreds of tunes in our heads that you didn’t ever have to learn, you just knew them. I would never have dreamt in a million years what all that would lead to.

“A man called Frank Custy was the headmaster in Toonagh and every single pupil there played fiddle, mandolin, banjo and the odd tin whistle. At 12 or 13 myself and my older sister, Majella, joined the Toonagh Ceili Band.

“We were in the Fleadh under 16 céili band competition, so we went over to Toonagh for rehearsal with the band and I was just so blown away to see it wasn’t mathematics on the blackboard, it was loads of tunes… jigs and reels.”

Although they fostered a love of music in the family, Sharon admits her parents were concerned when she dropped out of college to pursue a career as a musician.

“They were so worried about me at the start when I wasn’t inclined to get a normal job,” she recalls.

“My mother, in particular, was worried sick about me.”

However, Mary, who died in 2014, and I.J., who passed away three years ago, would go on to see their musician daughter become a superstar of the trad music scene.

Among the highlights in their life was Sharon’s appearances on The Late Late Show through the decades when they were watching on from the studio audience.

Sharon pays tribute to her mother on her new album with a track in her honour called Mammy Shannon’s Jig.

“I’m very proud of that tune and I wish she got to hear it because Daddy got to hear his,” she says.

“On the second last album (The Reckoning) I had a tune called Daddy Shannon’s Jig and he got to hear it and loved it.”

It was American singer-songwriter Steve Earle’s song, The Galway Girl, that sent Sharon to the top of the Irish charts in the early Noughties when she recorded it with Irish star Mundy.

“The collaboration with Steve Earle became something really bigger than any of us could ever have imagined and that had a huge impact on my career,” she recalls.

“When Mundy and myself did it live on Tom Dunne’s show on Today FM, Tom played it every day, and then Ray D’Arcy started playing it every day when he was on Today FM — it became a big hit.

“It became the most downloaded track in 2007 and 2008 and we won the Meteor Awards both of those years for the most downloaded track.

“It went on to be in a Bulmers advert, and then in the Hollywood movie, P.S. I Love You. It was almost like a theme song for the movie because it was played five or six times throughout P.S. I Love You.

“What that success with the song did for my career and for Mundy’s is that we then had much bigger audiences coming to our gigs and a lot more people discovered us all over the world that wouldn’t have heard us otherwise.

“There are so many things that happened with The Galway Girl.

“It was like a big snowball just rolling along and it still is rolling and gathering pace all the time.

“That was never planned, it was a stroke of luck.”

• Sharon Shannon’s new album, Now, is out now. Her Now & Then box set is also available from CelticNote.com