Shane MacGowan, hard-drinking poet of The Pogues, dies

Dublin | Shane MacGowan, the London-Irish punk who transformed Irish traditional music with the Pogues and penned some of the 1980s’ most haunting ballads before sinking into alcohol and drug addiction, died on Thursday. He was 65.

MacGowan brought Irish traditional music to a huge new audience in the late 1980s by splicing it with punk, and achieved mainstream success with his bittersweet, expletive-strewn 1987 Christmas anthem Fairytale of New York.

Reuters