Shane MacGowan, the legendary but erratic songwriter, passed away in Dublin on Thursday.

Shane MacGowan was thought of as an exceptionally talented yet disorderly songwriter who revitalized interest in Irish music during the 1980s, as The New York Times reported.

He was the lead singer of the Pogues and moved the group and genre forward by fusing it with the driving force of punk rock. The iconic singer passed away in Dublin on Thursday at the age of 65.

According to Victoria Mary Clarke, MacGowan's spouse, he passed away in a hospital from pneumonia. In the late 1970s, Mr. MacGowan emerged from the punk scene in London and undertook a turbulent nine-year tenure with the original Pogues.

The band rose from North London taverns in the late 1980s to stadiums, where they performed prior to the band fired MacGowan due to his drug and alcohol issues, as well as his mental and physical deterioration.

He subsequently formed Shane MacGowan & the Popes, a band he toured and recorded with throughout the 1990s.

Throughout his life, Mr. MacGowan amassed dual notoriety as an exceptionally destructive individual and a prodigious songwriter whose verses vividly depicted the complexities of Irish immigrant existence.

The most recognizable lines of his most successful song, an improbable Christmas classic adapted from a lamentation of alcoholism called "Fairytale of New York."

“It was Christmas Eve babe/In the drunk tank/An old man said to me, won’t see another one. I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography, “A Furious Devotion” (2021). “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow, and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”

Many people, including Bruce Springsteen and Bono, agreed with his evaluation of himself.

His drunken caricatures of racy immigrant life, delivered with a London punk sneer, infuriated both the Irish public and the country's music industry at first, but that eventually pushed him to fame.

Shane Patrick Lysaght MacGowan was born in a hospital near the English town of Tunbridge Wells, Kent, on Christmas Day 1957, to parents who had emigrated from Ireland only a few months prior.

His Dublin-born father, Maurice, was an employee of a textile retail chain. Therese, his mother, was a former secretary and was a native of rural Tipperary.

Despite the fact that MacGowan was raised in the middle-class London suburb of Tunbridge Wells, southeast of the capital, his family frequently visited Ireland.