Double Elvis. About a Girl is a production of I Heart Radio and Double Elvis. Let Me tell You about Shane McGowan, the lead singer of the legendary punk band The Pogues, a genius songwriter on his best days and the renown drunk on his worst. When the Pogues had to kick McGowan out of the band, the only singer who could fill his shoes was Joe Strummer from the Clash. But this story isn't about Shane McGowan. This is about his wife, Victoria Mary Clark, a girl who ran away from her Irish roots to sixteen, landing in London in a moment of infinite possibility, who imagined she was the next in line of Irish poets, and whose first attempt to make a name for herself as a music journalist earned her death threat from Alternative Rocks. Right as to star, I'm Nicki Linnette and this story is about a girl. The phone's ringer was turned off, but the light kept flashing, followed by a click as the answering machine tape came to life. Victoria Mary Clark was in a borrowed department in Seattle, Washington, in bed with the flu she should have been sleeping. Instead, she was wrapped in blankets, staring at the answering machine as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love left message after message threatening to have Clark killed. Her new career as a music journalist was off to a rough start. It all felt so promising a year before, in September, she landed a job at a British music magazine, and her editor, brit Collins, was playing her a record that was about to drop. Never Mind was the second album by Nirvana, their first on a major label. Collins had been a fan of the band for a while, I had put them on the cover of Lime Lizard back in April. She sensed this album, a stunning combination of heavy and hooky, was going to break big. She couldn't have been more right. Victoria and Collins decided to write a book about Nirvana. By the time never Mind hit the top of the Billboard charts in January, the media hype around the band, not to mention the record label feeding frenzy in Seattle meant they landed a deal with the first agent they pitched too. Collins got in touch with Nirvana's management and they were offered all access passes for Nirvana's European tour that summer, they decided to divide and conquer according to their strengths. Collins, the more experienced journalists, would go to Seattle to research the music scene. Nirvana came up in Victoria, who had built up the stamina to survive touring life through her years with The Pope's hard drinking frontman Shane McGowan, would join Nirvana on their European tour. Victoria met up with the band in Dublin and was shocked to find that when Nirvana said all access they minted she was free to wander backstage, in and out of dressing rooms and green rooms. Kurt Cobain was distant, but polite and willing to talk with her about almost anything. Victoria was backstage at the Roskild Festival, a massive music fast held on an island in Denmark. She spotted Courtney Love. Kurt Cobain's wife and lead single of Whole, Love, was at the show as a fan. Whole wasn't playing because Love was seven months pregnant. Victoria had a connection to Love that predated even the band she was supposed to be writing about. Courtney Love hit co starred in the seven movie Straight to Hell, a spaghetti western that I need a whole other episode to tell you about, but the short version is that Straight to Hell grew out of a fail tour of Nicaragua by musical acts including Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, The Circle Jerks and the Pokes. When violence by the Sandinista's mate touring nic Oaragua a no go, the bands decided to shoot a spaghetti western in Spain instead, Like You Do. Courtney Love had just been Inside and Nancy, and a role in Straight to Hell was written specifically for her by the director of both the films, Alex Cox. The Pogues and everyone else just had weird bit parts with Love and Joe Strummer as the lead. Shane McGowan and Courtney Love had gotten along pretty well on set, and Victoria used their mutual friend as a way to strike up conversation with the mercurial singer. Love agreed to be interviewed for the book, and the two set up a time later in the tour when they could talk on the record. A few hours later, waiting for Nirvana set, Victoria was approached by the band's management. They wanted her to leave the tour immediately. Kurt was apparently pissed that she tried to interview Courtney for the book. It turned out he had good reason. There was a ticking time bomb in the Cobaine Love marriage. That summer, Love had done an interview with Lynn Hershberg for Vanity Fair in which she confessed to using heroin while she was pregnant. The article hadn't come out yet. With a couple knew what kind of ship storm was heading their way, Kurt Cobaine didn't want interviewers anywhere near Courtney Love kicked off the tour. Victoria flew to Seattle to help brit Collins with background research. As the summer wound down, they amassed hours of interview tapes, mostly people saying nice things about the band, even if they didn't have great things to say about Courtney Love. Collins and Clark's book was going to be a fans i view portrait, after all. When the Vanity Fair article hit the stands a week and a half after Cobain and Love's daughter was born, it sparked a massive public outcry. There was talk of criminal charges against Love for knowingly taking drugs while pregnant and the baby was briefly removed from the couple's care by child protective Services. Love claimed Lynn Hershberg made it up that she had never said she used heroin while pregnant. Hershberg said she had the whole interview on Hape for the sake of the book. Britt Collins figured she should know who was telling the truth. She called Lynn Hershberg to find out, and then Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love found out that the supposedly friendly British journalists writing a book about Nirvana had talked to the reporter whose story almost wrecked their lives, which brings us up to October to Victoria huddled in blankets listening to the couple on her answering machine. If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife, I fucking hurt you, Kurt Cobain said, I'm at the end of my ropes. I've never been more fucking serious in my life. You are going to pay and pay and pay out of your ass, Courtney Love said, by the time we finished with you, you will wish you'd never been born. They kept calling, going on and on until the beep cut them off, then calling back. By morning, there was a half hour of threats on the Answering Machine tape. Feverish and exhausted, Victoria called the Seattle police. They couldn't do anything about it. Victoria called Britt Collins to figure out how they handled the situation. They decided the best thing, both to protect themselves and to promote the book was to go public with the tape. They sent it to Entertainment Weekly, who ran a full transcript, and then Victoria decided to get the hell out of Seattle. She moved to l A, where Collins was living, and the two of them started to work on the actual writing of the book. Even though they lost all passion for the project, no one associated with the band would talk to them. They'd been barred from even attending Nirvana shows as fans. One night in December, they decided to take a night off to head too Ragi's, a club on Hollywood Boulevard that was a regular hangout for rock stars like James Addiction, Green Day, and Back. Victoria should have had her guard up as she chatted with some other members of Whole, neglecting, for instance, to ask if the band's lead singer was at the club. The answer to that question came in the form of a full glass of champagne smashed against the side of Victoria's head. She was knocked to the floor. Courtney Loved grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag Victoria out of the club. The bouncers pulled Love off her and Cobain and Love left the club. The next day, Victoria filed assault charges. Love filed the counter charge, claiming Victoria attacked her. Axel Rose, who always felt that Nirvana had knocked guns and Roses off the throne of nineties Rock, sent his lawyer to represent Victoria free of charge. The lawyer played the answering machine tape in court. Courtney said the voice on the tape was hers. She hadn't meant any of it as a threat. She asked the judge how long the trial was going to take her Limo was waiting outside. In the end, the charges were dropped, so was the book. Under pressure from Nirvana's lawyers, Victoria's publishers backed out, but copies leaked. The book was exactly what Britt Collins and Victoria Mary Clark set out to write after being blown away by never Mind. It was a book written by fans, a love letter to a band they adored. The phone rang in the London pub and the bartender answered in a heavy Irish accent. The man on the other end of the line said he was looking to speak to Shane McGowan. Maybe it tells you all you need to know about the state of Shane McGowan in that someone who wanted to get a hold of him thought they could do so by phoning pubs. If that sounds like an overstatement, let me add that the caller was right. The bartender passed the phone to McGowan, who had been teetering on a bar stool for most of the name in his trade mark mumble and slur. McGowan asked what this was all about. The man on the other end of the line said that he was Victoria Mary Clark's long lost father. Victoria Mary Clark grew up thinking she knew her dad from the time she was one. She was raised at the daughter of Dartias Clark, the man whose last name she bears to this day. There was a heritage that went with the name. Dartis Clark was the son of Austin Clark, a poet regarded by many of the successor to William Butler yates as Ireland's greatest Austin Clark was a proud irishman, and his poems used rhythms and meters from Gaelic, the traditional language of the Emerald Isle. Dartis Clark, his son, and the man Victoria believed was her father, was a major presence in Dublin's literary scene. A man about town with lots of quote unquote famous friends. He was a big fish in literary dublin small pond, but he wasn't much of a husband. When Victoria was seven, her mother packed her and her younger sister Vanessa in the car in the middle of the night and drove off. The girls were too little to ask many questions. Victoria knew things were bad between her parents, but Dartis Clark was the only father the girls had ever known. Now, her mother told them that Dartias didn't like the girls anymore, which is probably the worst thing she could have said to two impressionable young girls. There would be other men in her mother's life with varying degrees of interest in playing the role of father. For her part, Victoria herself was uninterested in playing the dutiful daughter. Punk music and its fashion sense arrived in Dublin when she was in her early teens, and rebellion was just Victoria's style. She hid punk magazines under her mattress, including one with a picture of Shae McGowan at a class show, his ear low bleeding from a vicious bite, with the headline cannibalism a clashgig. She snuck out of the house wearing safety pins through her ears and outfits made out of trash bags. She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. She became to Dublin's punk scene what the man she thought was her father was to its poetry scene, a big fish. Once she peered up with Shane mc gowan, Clark was practically a princess among punks with mc gowan as her drunken, toothless prince. But a fairy tale of doubling twist was in store for Clark in her twenties. Her younger sister Vanessa, had requested a copy of her birth certificate when it showed up. Rather than giving her father's name as Dartis Clark, it listed father unknown, a mark of shame for a good Irish Catholic girl. Victorian Vanessa confronted their mother about the revelation of the birth certificate. She wouldn't cough up any names, but admitted that the girls had two different fathers, in neither of them was Dartis Clark. She had gotten pregnant with Victoria at nineteen, and the family dispute ruined any chance of Victoria's biological father making an honest woman of her mother. She had been given a ticket to ride sent away to a home for wayward girls, where she could give birth and then give the baby up for adoption. Victoria's grandfather ultimately offered to care for the baby while her mother finished school, but rather than go straight, her mother ended up in the same kind of trouble, pregnant again at age twenty, which was when Dartis Clark showed up in their lives, willing to give baby Victoria and her soon to be born sister a home and a name. Victoria was always a girl with fanciful ideas. Now with her parentage in question, she imagined herself a true fairy tale princess who suffered through the indignities of a peasant upbringing while her real parents waited off stage to make their dramatic entrance and save her from her mendane little life. But by then her life wasn't all that mundane. She was a celebrity girlfriend, and that meant occasionally a Dublin paper would find her in London, where she and Shane McGowan were living, to write a puff piece. In Interviewed in the couple's flat, Clark told her fairy tale waiting to Happen story and how she hoped it one day she might find her real dad. It was shortly after that peace was printed that the phone rang in the London pub near their flat, a call from across the Irish Sea from a man claiming to be victorious biological father. After a few minutes of conversation, Shane McGowan, in an agreeable state after several pints, decided the guy sounded legit and gave him the couple's home number. Then he forgot the entire conversation. A few days later, Victoria got a call at home, this time a woman claiming to be her half sister. The woman said her dad had been acting suspiciously, nervous and edgy. If Victoria was the kind of woman who imagined herself in a fairy tale. This woman imagined herself in a Hitchcock movie. She was convinced her father had murdered somebody. She was so sure of it she dug out her father's diary and read it. Rather than a murder confession, she found Victoria's phone number. No dead body, just an illegitimate daughter abandoned almost three decades ago. With the secret revealed, Victoria and her biological father made plans to meet up. He came to London and met her at a local bar, not to diet where he located McGowan, but a swankier social club in the West End. He did indeed have the nervous energy of a murder suspect. He apologized for not being a father to Victoria. He told her there was a time he could have been what she dreamed of, the wealthy dad who whisked her away from a life of bouncing from flat to flat, faux father to faue father. There had been a family fortune once, but all that was gone. All he could offer her now were apologies and four new siblings she'd never met, but asked for making her an Irish princess. Written up in Celebrity Max and hob nobbing with rock Royals. Victoria had done that all by herself. By the time she turned sixteen, Victoria had passed through her punk phase. She chucked the dress made of garbage bags and electrical tape, the torn fish net stockings and safety pan earrings. She chucked all of Ireland. She ran away from her mother's house in West Cork, where nothing ever happened, and where Victoria, with her big dreams and huge personality, could still never be more than that Clark girl, an odd animal. The mums in the neighborhood clucked their tongues at in church. She had been making and selling her own jewelry, geared to the gaudy excesses of the New Romantic movement. But nobody in West Cork wanted to look like they were in Adam and the Ants, so Victoria's entrepreneurial efforts sunk. She did what anywise kids stifled and the counties would do. She pulled up stakes and ran off to London. She took a job in a shop which hardly paid the bills, but kept her in wild clothes. The jewelry business never took off, but there were pubs, and there was music. There were opportunities to look absolutely fabulous in rub elbows with artists and musicians. London was playing dress up, imitating itself from the swinging sixties. To the older generation, it was inauthentic, a second go round for ideas and fashions that had all been done before, But to a sixteen year old girl fresh off the boat, it was a dream. There was nothing special going on that night, but Victoria was dressed as if there were. Headed down to her local for a few drinks, she ran into her friend who went by the name of Spider Stacy. Spider played tin whistle in a band called Pope Mahome. They would shorten the name after signing to Stiff Records the next year to the Pokes, since the BBC refused to play tracks by a band whose name was Gaelic for kiss my Rs. Victoria was not particularly impressed by a man who played tin whistle and called it a living. She wasn't impressed by the popes punk sensibilities either, which felt very five years ago to a girl who left the Ramons and the sex pistols behind in favor of Duran, Durant and boy George. And she certainly wasn't impressed by the band's efforts to drag Gaelic language and traditional music and culture across the Irish Sea and try to sell it as punk to the punters in London. Victoria, as far as she knew then, was the daughter of Dartis Clark, the granddaughter of Austin Clark, the greatest Irish poet of his generation. She'd grown up listening to old men cough out Gaelic while other old men played the tin whistle. The pogues were everything about home that she never wanted to be reminded of. She was never shy about telling people about her famous grandfather, though people would remember a detail like that, which meant they would remember her. Victoria was piecing together in identity for herself the same way she pieced together outfits. She was a magpie, assembling shiny things to create a beautiful nest she could live inside that attracted others. Spider's bandmate Shane McGowan had heard about the legendary poet's wild granddaughter who's been slumming around the London pubs, But if he learned Victoria was the girl in question on that particular night, he forgot about it. By the next day, he forgot most everything about that night. It was Spider's birthday, but McGowan was drinking as if he was the birthday boy. Not that he ever needed an occasion or excuse. Shane McGowan was already a celebrated drinker, known since his days with punk bands like The Nipple Erectors as a man who could drink anybody under the table. Victoria had made her way to the bar when McGowan shouted at her to buy their next round. It was Spider's birthday, after all, which somehow entitled both of them to free drinks. He tried to balance out his aggressive tone with a charming smile. But okay, let's take a minute to talk about Shane McGowan's teeth. Even in his prime, the man's chompers were in rough shape. He had certainly never seen the inside of a dentist's office. When a tooth started to go bed, his mother wrapped a strain around it, tied the other into a door knob, and slam. In this respect, he wasn't all that different from the boys Victoria grew up with. McGowan's two front teeth were withered nubs with room enough between them. For the wind to blow through. Over the course of his career, and by career, I'm talking more about his drinking and drug use than his singing. He'd eventually lose all his teeth. His last one gave up the ghost. In two thousand nine, in British television aired an hour long documentary about McGowan getting a complete set of new teeth fitted into his jaw with titanium pegs. It was aired as a Christmas special, soundtracked with the Pope's biggest hit, fairy Tale of New York. The specials big dramatic moment with Shane McGowan biting into an apple for the first time in twenty years. But back in the pub on Spider's Birthday, his shiny new implants were still years away. Grinning over his pint glass on that night was McGowan and his desiccated nubs, demanding free drinks from a sixteen year old shop girl he just met, Victoria Mary Clark told him to funk off in English that is no Gaelic cussing for the girl from West Cork, and McGowan respectfully did. Over the next four years, the two saw each other at clubs and shows and parties, they weren't much more than acquaintances. The Popes got a gig opening for the Clash, which put them on the map and landed them a record deal and the name change. They were part of a growing scene of like minded acts like The Men They Couldn't Hang and Billy Bragg using protests folk and punk. Stiff Records was a cutting edge label, original home to Elvis Costello, The Damned and Reckless. Eric McGowan and Clark became friends in the way you're friends with people you see out at the pubs every night, mostly insubstantial until the night they split a cab after a show. McGowan was making a point about Gaelic singing. Shane making a point was one of the standard phases of a night out with McGowan, often followed by Shane getting into a fight. Whatever his point was supposed to be, Clark called bullshit. If either of them knew about Gaelic singing. It wasn't McGowan, who had Irish parents but was born and raised in Kent. It was Victoria Mary Clark, offspring of the vaunted Irish poet, a child of West Cork. As the cat pulled up in front of the apartment Clark shared with her boyfriend, McGowan told her she was full of ship. Victoria responded by leaning across the seat of the cab and kissing him good night. However, it had happened, despite his arrogance and drunkenness, and his silly nostalgia for all things Irish, and the fact he was ten years older than her, and the fact of his truly dreadful teeth, Victoria Mary Clark had fallen in love with Shane McGowan. There was the small matter of Victoria ditching her boyfriend, but that didn't take long. Soon she was living with McGowan in a flat stone with cigarette butts, empty bottles, and fast food rappers. They had no furniture except for a record player and already mattress on the floor. The two became a UK celebrity couple, a national train wreck for the tabloids to follow. The Pogues steadily gained popularity over the course of the eighties, though held back by McGowan's erratic behavior in substant abuse. In later years, Victoria would sometimes make it sound like she with the sobering influence on McGowan, but mostly she just recognized the bottom when they both hit it, while McGowan needed to suffer through the bounds. They were in and out of rehab, in and out of love, until eventually they wound up with their own reality show. If nothing you've heard so far indicates that either Victoria, Mary Clark or Shane McGowan would make excellent farmers, well you're right. But in two thousand nine the couple found themselves the stars of Victoria and Shane Grow on their Own, a reality special on Irish Television, shot in Dublin and narrated by acclaimed Irish actor Stephen Ray. As a spoiler, let me tell you they didn't grow much of anything. The potatoes came out blacker than Chaine's teeth. The show was in fact cringe worthy. The people tuned in. Victoria and Shane were Ireland's answer to Ozzy and Sharon Osborne. Victoria was a bona fide celebrity in Ireland, but it was second hand celebrity. She was famous for dating someone infamous. By two thousand nine, Shane McGowan was a cautionary tale arec one step beyond Keith Richards on the downward spiral of hard rock life. Despite being fifteen years younger than the Indestructible Stones guitarist. Even with the profile pieces and reality television appearances, Victoria suffered from bouts of depression. A lack of identity, a lack of anything she could call her own, wore on her mind and on her heart. It was part of the reason she hadn't gotten around to tying the not with shame, even though they'd been together almost thirty years. Marriage would be the last straw. It would mean she'd never be anything more than Shane McGowan's wife. That was when Victoria Mary Clark had a revelation, a true heavenly visitation. Like many an Irish Catholic girl, she'd always been interested in angels. In the early nineties, she started channeling angels through a process called automatic writing. It's a technique that goes back to early twentieth century spiritualism, back to the famed Irish poet W. P. Yates for one, where someone left their mind go completely blank and allows a spiritual force to communicate through them. When Victoria's depression was at its worst, she turned to the angels for help, and they came through for her. She found herself in more frequent and more vibrant communication with heavenly messengers. She was moved to speak about angels publicly, more often and more honestly than she ever had before. Skeptics be damned. She wrote a book, her third The first was The Bury Nirvana Biography. The second was a Drink with Shane McGowan, where Victoria served as interviewer, inscribed for her notoriously difficult to understand partners telling of his life story. This one, Angels in Disguise, was finally about her own experiences. Her communication with angels led her into painting, creating visual representations of the beings that she felt had helped guide her through her darkest depressions. Sometimes, when she still feels at her lowest, she says that it's Shane who reminds her of the angels in her book. She offers that same guidance to others, helping them find their own better angels. She was more sure of herself than she'd ever been, more clear of who she was on her own, apart from her famous boyfriend. As an end to a courtship that began with a funk off and went on for over thirty years, she married Shane McGowan, Johnny Depp was a witness Shane had, against all odds, gotten sober. He probably told Boston Globe brighter Jim Sullivan that he kicked heroin, though he added if you had some, now I do it. As with many lifelong addicts, it's always just one slip away. He continued to tour intermittently with the Pogues and to write and record on his own. He outlived his cautionary tale status to become a revered figure, considered a model of an uncompromising artist. But this isn't about him. This is about Turia Mary Clark, a girl who imagined herself into the strangest to fairytale lives and never gave up believing the tale might come true. This is About a Girl About a Girl is produced by Scott Jenovis and executive produced by Jake Brennan and Brady Sadler for Double Elpis. The show was created by Eleanor Wells and hosted by me Nikki Lynnette. This episode was written by Bob Prole. For sources used in this episode, go to About a Girl pod dot com. Music by Scott Jenevis and Matt ta Hainey, with additional music and score elements by Ryan Spraker. The show is on Instagram at About a Girl Pod, and you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Nikki Linnette two

Double Elvis. About a Girl is a production of I Heart Radio and Double Elvis. Let Me tell You about Shane McGowan, the lead singer of the legendary punk band The Pogues, a genius songwriter on his best days and the renown drunk on his worst. When the Pogues had to kick McGowan out of the band, the only singer who could fill his shoes was Joe Strummer from the Clash. But this story isn't about Shane McGowan. This is about his wife, Victoria Mary Clark, a girl who ran away from her Irish roots to sixteen, landing in London in a moment of infinite possibility, who imagined she was the next in line of Irish poets, and whose first attempt to make a name for herself as a music journalist earned her death threat from Alternative Rocks. Right as to star, I'm Nicki Linnette and this story is about a girl. The phone's ringer was turned off, but the light kept flashing, followed by a click as the answering machine tape came to life. Victoria Mary Clark was in a borrowed department in Seattle, Washington, in bed with the flu she should have been sleeping. Instead, she was wrapped in blankets, staring at the answering machine as Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love left message after message threatening to have Clark killed. Her new career as a music journalist was off to a rough start. It all felt so promising a year before, in September, she landed a job at a British music magazine, and her editor, brit Collins, was playing her a record that was about to drop. Never Mind was the second album by Nirvana, their first on a major label. Collins had been a fan of the band for a while, I had put them on the cover of Lime Lizard back in April. She sensed this album, a stunning combination of heavy and hooky, was going to break big. She couldn't have been more right. Victoria and Collins decided to write a book about Nirvana. By the time never Mind hit the top of the Billboard charts in January, the media hype around the band, not to mention the record label feeding frenzy in Seattle meant they landed a deal with the first agent they pitched too. Collins got in touch with Nirvana's management and they were offered all access passes for Nirvana's European tour that summer, they decided to divide and conquer according to their strengths. Collins, the more experienced journalists, would go to Seattle to research the music scene. Nirvana came up in Victoria, who had built up the stamina to survive touring life through her years with The Pope's hard drinking frontman Shane McGowan, would join Nirvana on their European tour. Victoria met up with the band in Dublin and was shocked to find that when Nirvana said all access they minted she was free to wander backstage, in and out of dressing rooms and green rooms. Kurt Cobain was distant, but polite and willing to talk with her about almost anything. Victoria was backstage at the Roskild Festival, a massive music fast held on an island in Denmark. She spotted Courtney Love. Kurt Cobain's wife and lead single of Whole, Love, was at the show as a fan. Whole wasn't playing because Love was seven months pregnant. Victoria had a connection to Love that predated even the band she was supposed to be writing about. Courtney Love hit co starred in the seven movie Straight to Hell, a spaghetti western that I need a whole other episode to tell you about, but the short version is that Straight to Hell grew out of a fail tour of Nicaragua by musical acts including Joe Strummer, Elvis Costello, The Circle Jerks and the Pokes. When violence by the Sandinista's mate touring nic Oaragua a no go, the bands decided to shoot a spaghetti western in Spain instead, Like You Do. Courtney Love had just been Inside and Nancy, and a role in Straight to Hell was written specifically for her by the director of both the films, Alex Cox. The Pogues and everyone else just had weird bit parts with Love and Joe Strummer as the lead. Shane McGowan and Courtney Love had gotten along pretty well on set, and Victoria used their mutual friend as a way to strike up conversation with the mercurial singer. Love agreed to be interviewed for the book, and the two set up a time later in the tour when they could talk on the record. A few hours later, waiting for Nirvana set, Victoria was approached by the band's management. They wanted her to leave the tour immediately. Kurt was apparently pissed that she tried to interview Courtney for the book. It turned out he had good reason. There was a ticking time bomb in the Cobaine Love marriage. That summer, Love had done an interview with Lynn Hershberg for Vanity Fair in which she confessed to using heroin while she was pregnant. The article hadn't come out yet. With a couple knew what kind of ship storm was heading their way, Kurt Cobaine didn't want interviewers anywhere near Courtney Love kicked off the tour. Victoria flew to Seattle to help brit Collins with background research. As the summer wound down, they amassed hours of interview tapes, mostly people saying nice things about the band, even if they didn't have great things to say about Courtney Love. Collins and Clark's book was going to be a fans i view portrait, after all. When the Vanity Fair article hit the stands a week and a half after Cobain and Love's daughter was born, it sparked a massive public outcry. There was talk of criminal charges against Love for knowingly taking drugs while pregnant and the baby was briefly removed from the couple's care by child protective Services. Love claimed Lynn Hershberg made it up that she had never said she used heroin while pregnant. Hershberg said she had the whole interview on Hape for the sake of the book. Britt Collins figured she should know who was telling the truth. She called Lynn Hershberg to find out, and then Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love found out that the supposedly friendly British journalists writing a book about Nirvana had talked to the reporter whose story almost wrecked their lives, which brings us up to October to Victoria huddled in blankets listening to the couple on her answering machine. If anything comes out in this book that hurts my wife, I fucking hurt you, Kurt Cobain said, I'm at the end of my ropes. I've never been more fucking serious in my life. You are going to pay and pay and pay out of your ass, Courtney Love said, by the time we finished with you, you will wish you'd never been born. They kept calling, going on and on until the beep cut them off, then calling back. By morning, there was a half hour of threats on the Answering Machine tape. Feverish and exhausted, Victoria called the Seattle police. They couldn't do anything about it. Victoria called Britt Collins to figure out how they handled the situation. They decided the best thing, both to protect themselves and to promote the book was to go public with the tape. They sent it to Entertainment Weekly, who ran a full transcript, and then Victoria decided to get the hell out of Seattle. She moved to l A, where Collins was living, and the two of them started to work on the actual writing of the book. Even though they lost all passion for the project, no one associated with the band would talk to them. They'd been barred from even attending Nirvana shows as fans. One night in December, they decided to take a night off to head too Ragi's, a club on Hollywood Boulevard that was a regular hangout for rock stars like James Addiction, Green Day, and Back. Victoria should have had her guard up as she chatted with some other members of Whole, neglecting, for instance, to ask if the band's lead singer was at the club. The answer to that question came in the form of a full glass of champagne smashed against the side of Victoria's head. She was knocked to the floor. Courtney Loved grabbed her by the hair and tried to drag Victoria out of the club. The bouncers pulled Love off her and Cobain and Love left the club. The next day, Victoria filed assault charges. Love filed the counter charge, claiming Victoria attacked her. Axel Rose, who always felt that Nirvana had knocked guns and Roses off the throne of nineties Rock, sent his lawyer to represent Victoria free of charge. The lawyer played the answering machine tape in court. Courtney said the voice on the tape was hers. She hadn't meant any of it as a threat. She asked the judge how long the trial was going to take her Limo was waiting outside. In the end, the charges were dropped, so was the book. Under pressure from Nirvana's lawyers, Victoria's publishers backed out, but copies leaked. The book was exactly what Britt Collins and Victoria Mary Clark set out to write after being blown away by never Mind. It was a book written by fans, a love letter to a band they adored. The phone rang in the London pub and the bartender answered in a heavy Irish accent. The man on the other end of the line said he was looking to speak to Shane McGowan. Maybe it tells you all you need to know about the state of Shane McGowan in that someone who wanted to get a hold of him thought they could do so by phoning pubs. If that sounds like an overstatement, let me add that the caller was right. The bartender passed the phone to McGowan, who had been teetering on a bar stool for most of the name in his trade mark mumble and slur. McGowan asked what this was all about. The man on the other end of the line said that he was Victoria Mary Clark's long lost father. Victoria Mary Clark grew up thinking she knew her dad from the time she was one. She was raised at the daughter of Dartias Clark, the man whose last name she bears to this day. There was a heritage that went with the name. Dartis Clark was the son of Austin Clark, a poet regarded by many of the successor to William Butler yates as Ireland's greatest Austin Clark was a proud irishman, and his poems used rhythms and meters from Gaelic, the traditional language of the Emerald Isle. Dartis Clark, his son, and the man Victoria believed was her father, was a major presence in Dublin's literary scene. A man about town with lots of quote unquote famous friends. He was a big fish in literary dublin small pond, but he wasn't much of a husband. When Victoria was seven, her mother packed her and her younger sister Vanessa in the car in the middle of the night and drove off. The girls were too little to ask many questions. Victoria knew things were bad between her parents, but Dartis Clark was the only father the girls had ever known. Now, her mother told them that Dartias didn't like the girls anymore, which is probably the worst thing she could have said to two impressionable young girls. There would be other men in her mother's life with varying degrees of interest in playing the role of father. For her part, Victoria herself was uninterested in playing the dutiful daughter. Punk music and its fashion sense arrived in Dublin when she was in her early teens, and rebellion was just Victoria's style. She hid punk magazines under her mattress, including one with a picture of Shae McGowan at a class show, his ear low bleeding from a vicious bite, with the headline cannibalism a clashgig. She snuck out of the house wearing safety pins through her ears and outfits made out of trash bags. She smoked like a chimney and drank like a fish. She became to Dublin's punk scene what the man she thought was her father was to its poetry scene, a big fish. Once she peered up with Shane mc gowan, Clark was practically a princess among punks with mc gowan as her drunken, toothless prince. But a fairy tale of doubling twist was in store for Clark in her twenties. Her younger sister Vanessa, had requested a copy of her birth certificate when it showed up. Rather than giving her father's name as Dartis Clark, it listed father unknown, a mark of shame for a good Irish Catholic girl. Victorian Vanessa confronted their mother about the revelation of the birth certificate. She wouldn't cough up any names, but admitted that the girls had two different fathers, in neither of them was Dartis Clark. She had gotten pregnant with Victoria at nineteen, and the family dispute ruined any chance of Victoria's biological father making an honest woman of her mother. She had been given a ticket to ride sent away to a home for wayward girls, where she could give birth and then give the baby up for adoption. Victoria's grandfather ultimately offered to care for the baby while her mother finished school, but rather than go straight, her mother ended up in the same kind of trouble, pregnant again at age twenty, which was when Dartis Clark showed up in their lives, willing to give baby Victoria and her soon to be born sister a home and a name. Victoria was always a girl with fanciful ideas. Now with her parentage in question, she imagined herself a true fairy tale princess who suffered through the indignities of a peasant upbringing while her real parents waited off stage to make their dramatic entrance and save her from her mendane little life. But by then her life wasn't all that mundane. She was a celebrity girlfriend, and that meant occasionally a Dublin paper would find her in London, where she and Shane McGowan were living, to write a puff piece. In Interviewed in the couple's flat, Clark told her fairy tale waiting to Happen story and how she hoped it one day she might find her real dad. It was shortly after that peace was printed that the phone rang in the London pub near their flat, a call from across the Irish Sea from a man claiming to be victorious biological father. After a few minutes of conversation, Shane McGowan, in an agreeable state after several pints, decided the guy sounded legit and gave him the couple's home number. Then he forgot the entire conversation. A few days later, Victoria got a call at home, this time a woman claiming to be her half sister. The woman said her dad had been acting suspiciously, nervous and edgy. If Victoria was the kind of woman who imagined herself in a fairy tale. This woman imagined herself in a Hitchcock movie. She was convinced her father had murdered somebody. She was so sure of it she dug out her father's diary and read it. Rather than a murder confession, she found Victoria's phone number. No dead body, just an illegitimate daughter abandoned almost three decades ago. With the secret revealed, Victoria and her biological father made plans to meet up. He came to London and met her at a local bar, not to diet where he located McGowan, but a swankier social club in the West End. He did indeed have the nervous energy of a murder suspect. He apologized for not being a father to Victoria. He told her there was a time he could have been what she dreamed of, the wealthy dad who whisked her away from a life of bouncing from flat to flat, faux father to faue father. There had been a family fortune once, but all that was gone. All he could offer her now were apologies and four new siblings she'd never met, but asked for making her an Irish princess. Written up in Celebrity Max and hob nobbing with rock Royals. Victoria had done that all by herself. By the time she turned sixteen, Victoria had passed through her punk phase. She chucked the dress made of garbage bags and electrical tape, the torn fish net stockings and safety pan earrings. She chucked all of Ireland. She ran away from her mother's house in West Cork, where nothing ever happened, and where Victoria, with her big dreams and huge personality, could still never be more than that Clark girl, an odd animal. The mums in the neighborhood clucked their tongues at in church. She had been making and selling her own jewelry, geared to the gaudy excesses of the New Romantic movement. But nobody in West Cork wanted to look like they were in Adam and the Ants, so Victoria's entrepreneurial efforts sunk. She did what anywise kids stifled and the counties would do. She pulled up stakes and ran off to London. She took a job in a shop which hardly paid the bills, but kept her in wild clothes. The jewelry business never took off, but there were pubs, and there was music. There were opportunities to look absolutely fabulous in rub elbows with artists and musicians. London was playing dress up, imitating itself from the swinging sixties. To the older generation, it was inauthentic, a second go round for ideas and fashions that had all been done before, But to a sixteen year old girl fresh off the boat, it was a dream. There was nothing special going on that night, but Victoria was dressed as if there were. Headed down to her local for a few drinks, she ran into her friend who went by the name of Spider Stacy. Spider played tin whistle in a band called Pope Mahome. They would shorten the name after signing to Stiff Records the next year to the Pokes, since the BBC refused to play tracks by a band whose name was Gaelic for kiss my Rs. Victoria was not particularly impressed by a man who played tin whistle and called it a living. She wasn't impressed by the popes punk sensibilities either, which felt very five years ago to a girl who left the Ramons and the sex pistols behind in favor of Duran, Durant and boy George. And she certainly wasn't impressed by the band's efforts to drag Gaelic language and traditional music and culture across the Irish Sea and try to sell it as punk to the punters in London. Victoria, as far as she knew then, was the daughter of Dartis Clark, the granddaughter of Austin Clark, the greatest Irish poet of his generation. She'd grown up listening to old men cough out Gaelic while other old men played the tin whistle. The pogues were everything about home that she never wanted to be reminded of. She was never shy about telling people about her famous grandfather, though people would remember a detail like that, which meant they would remember her. Victoria was piecing together in identity for herself the same way she pieced together outfits. She was a magpie, assembling shiny things to create a beautiful nest she could live inside that attracted others. Spider's bandmate Shane McGowan had heard about the legendary poet's wild granddaughter who's been slumming around the London pubs, But if he learned Victoria was the girl in question on that particular night, he forgot about it. By the next day, he forgot most everything about that night. It was Spider's birthday, but McGowan was drinking as if he was the birthday boy. Not that he ever needed an occasion or excuse. Shane McGowan was already a celebrated drinker, known since his days with punk bands like The Nipple Erectors as a man who could drink anybody under the table. Victoria had made her way to the bar when McGowan shouted at her to buy their next round. It was Spider's birthday, after all, which somehow entitled both of them to free drinks. He tried to balance out his aggressive tone with a charming smile. But okay, let's take a minute to talk about Shane McGowan's teeth. Even in his prime, the man's chompers were in rough shape. He had certainly never seen the inside of a dentist's office. When a tooth started to go bed, his mother wrapped a strain around it, tied the other into a door knob, and slam. In this respect, he wasn't all that different from the boys Victoria grew up with. McGowan's two front teeth were withered nubs with room enough between them. For the wind to blow through. Over the course of his career, and by career, I'm talking more about his drinking and drug use than his singing. He'd eventually lose all his teeth. His last one gave up the ghost. In two thousand nine, in British television aired an hour long documentary about McGowan getting a complete set of new teeth fitted into his jaw with titanium pegs. It was aired as a Christmas special, soundtracked with the Pope's biggest hit, fairy Tale of New York. The specials big dramatic moment with Shane McGowan biting into an apple for the first time in twenty years. But back in the pub on Spider's Birthday, his shiny new implants were still years away. Grinning over his pint glass on that night was McGowan and his desiccated nubs, demanding free drinks from a sixteen year old shop girl he just met, Victoria Mary Clark told him to funk off in English that is no Gaelic cussing for the girl from West Cork, and McGowan respectfully did. Over the next four years, the two saw each other at clubs and shows and parties, they weren't much more than acquaintances. The Popes got a gig opening for the Clash, which put them on the map and landed them a record deal and the name change. They were part of a growing scene of like minded acts like The Men They Couldn't Hang and Billy Bragg using protests folk and punk. Stiff Records was a cutting edge label, original home to Elvis Costello, The Damned and Reckless. Eric McGowan and Clark became friends in the way you're friends with people you see out at the pubs every night, mostly insubstantial until the night they split a cab after a show. McGowan was making a point about Gaelic singing. Shane making a point was one of the standard phases of a night out with McGowan, often followed by Shane getting into a fight. Whatever his point was supposed to be, Clark called bullshit. If either of them knew about Gaelic singing. It wasn't McGowan, who had Irish parents but was born and raised in Kent. It was Victoria Mary Clark, offspring of the vaunted Irish poet, a child of West Cork. As the cat pulled up in front of the apartment Clark shared with her boyfriend, McGowan told her she was full of ship. Victoria responded by leaning across the seat of the cab and kissing him good night. However, it had happened, despite his arrogance and drunkenness, and his silly nostalgia for all things Irish, and the fact he was ten years older than her, and the fact of his truly dreadful teeth, Victoria Mary Clark had fallen in love with Shane McGowan. There was the small matter of Victoria ditching her boyfriend, but that didn't take long. Soon she was living with McGowan in a flat stone with cigarette butts, empty bottles, and fast food rappers. They had no furniture except for a record player and already mattress on the floor. The two became a UK celebrity couple, a national train wreck for the tabloids to follow. The Pogues steadily gained popularity over the course of the eighties, though held back by McGowan's erratic behavior in substant abuse. In later years, Victoria would sometimes make it sound like she with the sobering influence on McGowan, but mostly she just recognized the bottom when they both hit it, while McGowan needed to suffer through the bounds. They were in and out of rehab, in and out of love, until eventually they wound up with their own reality show. If nothing you've heard so far indicates that either Victoria, Mary Clark or Shane McGowan would make excellent farmers, well you're right. But in two thousand nine the couple found themselves the stars of Victoria and Shane Grow on their Own, a reality special on Irish Television, shot in Dublin and narrated by acclaimed Irish actor Stephen Ray. As a spoiler, let me tell you they didn't grow much of anything. The potatoes came out blacker than Chaine's teeth. The show was in fact cringe worthy. The people tuned in. Victoria and Shane were Ireland's answer to Ozzy and Sharon Osborne. Victoria was a bona fide celebrity in Ireland, but it was second hand celebrity. She was famous for dating someone infamous. By two thousand nine, Shane McGowan was a cautionary tale arec one step beyond Keith Richards on the downward spiral of hard rock life. Despite being fifteen years younger than the Indestructible Stones guitarist. Even with the profile pieces and reality television appearances, Victoria suffered from bouts of depression. A lack of identity, a lack of anything she could call her own, wore on her mind and on her heart. It was part of the reason she hadn't gotten around to tying the not with shame, even though they'd been together almost thirty years. Marriage would be the last straw. It would mean she'd never be anything more than Shane McGowan's wife. That was when Victoria Mary Clark had a revelation, a true heavenly visitation. Like many an Irish Catholic girl, she'd always been interested in angels. In the early nineties, she started channeling angels through a process called automatic writing. It's a technique that goes back to early twentieth century spiritualism, back to the famed Irish poet W. P. Yates for one, where someone left their mind go completely blank and allows a spiritual force to communicate through them. When Victoria's depression was at its worst, she turned to the angels for help, and they came through for her. She found herself in more frequent and more vibrant communication with heavenly messengers. She was moved to speak about angels publicly, more often and more honestly than she ever had before. Skeptics be damned. She wrote a book, her third The first was The Bury Nirvana Biography. The second was a Drink with Shane McGowan, where Victoria served as interviewer, inscribed for her notoriously difficult to understand partners telling of his life story. This one, Angels in Disguise, was finally about her own experiences. Her communication with angels led her into painting, creating visual representations of the beings that she felt had helped guide her through her darkest depressions. Sometimes, when she still feels at her lowest, she says that it's Shane who reminds her of the angels in her book. She offers that same guidance to others, helping them find their own better angels. She was more sure of herself than she'd ever been, more clear of who she was on her own, apart from her famous boyfriend. As an end to a courtship that began with a funk off and went on for over thirty years, she married Shane McGowan, Johnny Depp was a witness Shane had, against all odds, gotten sober. He probably told Boston Globe brighter Jim Sullivan that he kicked heroin, though he added if you had some, now I do it. As with many lifelong addicts, it's always just one slip away. He continued to tour intermittently with the Pogues and to write and record on his own. He outlived his cautionary tale status to become a revered figure, considered a model of an uncompromising artist. But this isn't about him. This is about Turia Mary Clark, a girl who imagined herself into the strangest to fairytale lives and never gave up believing the tale might come true. This is About a Girl About a Girl is produced by Scott Jenovis and executive produced by Jake Brennan and Brady Sadler for Double Elpis. The show was created by Eleanor Wells and hosted by me Nikki Lynnette. This episode was written by Bob Prole. For sources used in this episode, go to About a Girl pod dot com. Music by Scott Jenevis and Matt ta Hainey, with additional music and score elements by Ryan Spraker. The show is on Instagram at About a Girl Pod, and you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Nikki Linnette two