Special Guest Blogger: Shane MacGowan

To everyone i was as a rough, tough Irishman and about as Irish as a shamrock in a Leprechauns top pocket but life began for me in England as i was born in leafy Pembury, Kent and grew up in Tunbridge Wells and it was there that my fee-paying prep school where my creative writing skills were first identified and which got me scholarship to Westminster School in London at the age of 14, but a year later i found my groove when i fell in with the London based Irish Community and was expelled for being in possession of drugs.
At age 17, i spent six months in a psychiatric hospital due to drug addiction and on release i drifted through casual jobs in a record store and as a barman as well as writing a punk fanzine under the pseudonym Shane O'Hooligan but it was when i was photographed at a Clash gig with a bleeding ear after being hit with a beer bottle that i really got noticed.
With my broken teeth and large ears, i might have seemed the most unlikely frontman for a pop group but i formed my own band, the Nipple Erectors, and toured London pubs and clubs and had the idea of singing Irish rebel songs with a punk attitude and changed the name to Pogue Mahone, the Gaelic for 'kiss my arse' but as we gained notoriety, we were asked to change our name and shortened it to The Pogues.
Weirdly we were referred to as an Irish Band despite none of us having been born there but our repertoire of Irish traditional songs gave the impression that were were and using folk band instruments such as a banjo, accordion and tin whistle while singing with a punk vibe was a genius move.
We put out three albums and toured continuously for two years and in 1987 we had success with the Dublinber's singing Irish Rover, Dirty Old Town, Sally MacLennane and The Irish Rover and followed it up with Fairytale of New York with Kirsty McColl.
Every year there would be a debate over whether the word 'faggot' in the song should be censored or not, it was Kirsty who would change the lyrics to 'You scumbag, you maggot, you're cheap and you're haggard' but it regularly won the nations favorite Christmas song because a festive tune about  
Irish immigrants to the US who dealing with despair, broken dreams, and heroin addiction is definitely the song you want playing in the background while you wrap your presents.
If nothing else it paid for my drink and drugs which were becoming a problem, i would frequently miss flights, rehearsals, photoshoots and sometimes just forgot to turn up for gigs but when i painted my hotel room, face and chest blue the rest of the band said enough and sacked me.
I did make up another band called the Shane MacGowan and the Popes but the drink and drugs gave me stomach ulcers and alcoholic hepatitis and that band fell away and then in 2015 i fractured my pelvis and despite now being in a wheelchair, i still managed to break my knee.
Following years of deteriorating health, i died of pneumonia in November 2023, aged 65 and in tribute the president of Ireland called me one of music's greatest lyricists so, in the spirit of The Pogues classic tune and the holidays: Merry Christmas and kiss my ass, ya bastards.