U2 Shane MacGowan Tribute Joins Springsteen, Depp and Hozier on 20th Century Paddy

The U2 Shane MacGowan tribute album 20th Century Paddy: The Songs of Shane MacGowan comes into sharper focus this week, as the band release their cover of the Pogues’ 1988 classic ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’, offering the clearest indication yet of just how expansive and unpredictable a collection this will be. Due on 13 November via Rubyworks, the album assembles a cast that ranges from Bruce Springsteen and Tom Waits to, as confirmed by the BBC, a duet between Johnny Depp and Imelda May on ‘Haunted’.

U2 Shane MacGowan tribute draws an unlikely and wide-ranging cast

The full track listing confirms just how far the net has been cast. Primal Scream, Steve Earle, Kate Moss and Dropkick Murphys all appear, alongside Hozier and Oscar nominee Jessie Buckley, who perform together as a duet. The album on Spotify also lists David Gray performing ‘The Old Main Drag’, one of MacGowan’s more bruising dispatches about London street life, a song that sits in an entirely different register to the euphoric stomp of ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’. The breadth of contributors here is not a question of completism. It reflects the degree to which MacGowan’s songwriting had seeded itself across vastly different musical communities.

MacGowan died in November 2023 at the age of 65, following a period of ill health. He had been one of Irish music’s most singular and contradictory figures: a writer whose vocabulary for diaspora experience, mythology and the specific sadness of displacement had almost no parallel in popular song.

For U2, ‘Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah Yeah’ is a curious and telling choice. The track, from the Pogues’ 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God, is one of the more jubilant pieces in MacGowan’s catalogue, propulsive and loose-limbed, carrying the energy of a session that has somehow stumbled into a recording studio. How U2 have reframed it remains to be heard in full, but the Edge’s accompanying statement positions it within a broader meditation on who MacGowan actually was.

The Edge on MacGowan: ‘a mask tells us more than a face’

‘Shane MacGowan was full of contradictions, and that’s where the truth of him lived,’ the Edge writes. He describes MacGowan as ‘precise about what mattered and gloriously careless about everything else’, before reaching for Oscar Wilde to make the case: ‘a mask tells us more than a face.’ The Edge goes on to place MacGowan within a lineage running, in his words, ‘from the pub storyteller to the punk stage’, the ‘crooked grin, the wildness, the old-Ireland inflections’ functioning not as disguise but as cultural signal. It is a more carefully considered statement than many tribute-album liner notes manage.

MacGowan’s widow, Victoria Mary Clarke, announced the full track listing with a statement that recalled meeting him in the early 1980s, when he was, she says, ‘inflamed with a powerful, passionate mission to bring Irish music, history and culture to the attention of the world through his songwriting.’ She writes that it made him ‘feel like the happiest man alive to know that he had achieved his mission, and that there were many more musicians who came after him and who seized that torch and lit fires with it in places that he had not even dreamed of.’

At least 50% of artist royalties from the album will go to the Dublin Simon Community, in recognition of MacGowan’s long-term connection to the organisation and his commitment to supporting those experiencing homelessness.

The release arrives at a moment of renewed activity for U2. The band put out a new track, ‘Street of Dreams’, in July, described as the first preview of a new studio album, their first in nine years. Their most recent full-length, Songs of Experience, was released in 2017. Whether MacGowan’s spirit of glorious carelessness leaves any trace on that record, the 20th Century Paddy project suggests the band have been thinking carefully about what Irish music owes him. The album is released on 13 November via Rubyworks.