Xander Berkeley

Xander Berkeley Instagram – RIP Shane MacGowan🙏❤️‍🩹 I feel so lucky to have gotten to know the enigma himself. Self destructive as anyone I’ve ever known, and more brilliant than most can imagine. Infused with Spirits of all kinds, Alcohol, the Holy Ghost and the ghostly spirit of Federico Garcia Lorca. Punk poet for the ages. Shane shambled down from the mountainside behind us there, one dawn when Joe Strummer and I had camped out on set to escape the chaos of the fiesta surrounding our hotel in Almeria. Sergio Leone’s old sets, dubbed Little Hollywood for all the Spaghetti Westerns shot there. As the sun crept up over the Andalusian hillsides, painting the desert orange, down came Shane (still sporting his spurs and Mariachi outfit from filming the day before) prophetically proclaiming to us, down there in our #sleeping bags, “He’s out there! Garcia Lorca, mates! He’s out there! Shane was deeply superstitious about me reading gruesome passages from the bible during breaks in filming. The second shot, for those still reading, was one I took to capture his revulsion of the sacrilege my character represented. He would ward me off with the V as if holding a cross up to a vampire, muttering, “Preacher… Evil…”.
(A la ‘get thee back Satan’). Once when the two of us wrapped early, a cab took us back to the hotel, and I got him to sing ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’. Brought me to tears, which I hid, looking out the cab’s window. He stopped just short of the end, suddenly embarrassed and vulnerable for singing to some guy in a taxi. I was shocked he had consented in the first place, and I’ll be forever grateful that he did. His voice was ragged and rough, but like the lyrics he wrote, he plumbed a depth of authenticity, that was pure and rare and will remain increasingly so as time passes. Glad we all had him for as long as we did, and have him with us still. Cheers, 🍻 to Shane MacGowan. | Posted on 01/Dec/2023 05:27:58