"It's time we began to laugh and cry about it all again!"

Original Pogues Lineup

Last Christmas, a celebrating O'Riordan had just been thrown out of Dublin's Shelbourne pub when she came across a familiar figure. "I went, 'Shaaane!' " she laughs. "I used to be in your band." Touchingly, MacGowan said that he has missed the Pogues and wanted to build on a previous week-long reunion in 2001 (which was without O'Riordan, who he clearly adores). He won't say whether he misses the way songs once came to him "bang, bang, bang . . . like from above, as if I was just the conduit."

Which brings us back to this apparent creative block. As I tiptoe towards the "dark period", he refutes any suggestion that he's somehow paying the price of abuse, particularly of LSD, which for a time was a major creative tool. "I took my first trip at 14," he snorts. "I've never stopped taking acid." So why did the songs stop? Finally he snaps. "Because my fucking girlfriend left me." Can you not put that in song? "I could, but I'm hoping she'll come back to me." MacGowan looks like he could punch me. I almost want to hug him.

MacGowan recently moved back to the farmhouse in "Tipp" where he grew up, and it's been good for him. The black mood vanishes as quickly as it arrived. He jokes - looking me right in the eye - of "walking in the fields, shooting trespassers". More candidly, he admits that he has been unhappy but has been helped by eastern mysticism, and shows me a book which falls open at the line: "By wiping away ego we can see things as they are." In May, a new MacGowan composition, Road to Paradise, emerged on a charity EP in aid of ex-Celtic and Scotland footballer Jimmy Johnstone, who has motor neurone disease. The situation is further muddied by Woods' assertion that Shane is happier because he's not under pressure. "But he does have new material and I know some of it is really good. He's beginning to come back to what he was."

I ask MacGowan to sign a record sleeve and at first he seems uncomfortable, saying: "Can't we do it at the gig?" Then he remembers that he's in a hotel, "the gig" isn't until December and embroiders If I Should Fall From Grace With God with scrawl. I'm expecting something offensive, but it reads beautifully, like a lyric: "It's time we began to laugh and cry about it all again!"
Dave Simpson, The Guardian