Victoria Mary Clarke didn’t drop the news with fanfare. She didn’t need to. While picking the five songs that shaped her life, she casually revealed something that instantly became sacred: a full-scale tribute album to Shane MacGowan is coming next year. Thirty artists. Global names. Surprises she refuses to spoil. A celebration worthy of the man who rewrote what Irish songwriting could be.
Clarke, speaking with that mix of candour and mischief she’s always carried, explained the project almost by accident. When praising Kneecap, “very like the early Pogues,” in a way only someone who lived it could declare, she mentioned Shane had been aware of them before he passed, even while ill. “He was very interested in them,” she said, before slipping out the nugget: she’s been chasing them to appear on the tribute record.
“We’ve 30 people now doing songs,” she said, brushing past the scale of it like she was describing a dinner guest list. The album will arrive next year, but as for specifics? Forget it.
For Clarke, the project is more than curation, it’s communion. She spoke quietly, almost reverently, about finding comfort in the idea that Shane’s music keeps moving across the world, “still travelling around the place and still very present in this dimension.” In the immediate aftermath of his death, she couldn’t listen to Pogues songs at all. His voice in private recordings? Yes. The music he loved, Faces, Pretty Things, Led Zeppelin? Absolutely. But his own? Not yet. Too raw. Too close.
Now, two years on, she’s ready to help others hear it anew.
A tribute album with 30 artists, spanning Ireland, England, America, and beyond, a patchwork of musicians stitching their voices into MacGowan’s legacy. The obvious names. The unexpected ones. The ones Shane himself would’ve raised a glass to.
Next year, he sails again.
