Bobby Gillespie’s favourite lyric of all time: “I was always in awe of his talent”
In 2006, HMV began their ‘My Inspiration’ promotional series. Over the years, HMV managed to pull in some of the biggest names in music to share the lyrics and words which had inspired them the most. Amy Winehouse found inspiration in Donny Hathaway’s ‘I Love You More Than You’ll Ever Know’, Bryan Ferry in Bob Dylan’s ‘Gates of Eden’, but Bobby Gillespie went down a different route.
The Primal Scream frontman has a canny knack for capturing vignettes of ‘the people’ of this world. So, beyond the seasonality of the song, it doesn’t come as much of a surprise that he chose to champion the heartbreaking final verse of The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s 1988 Christmas classic, ‘Fairytale of New York‘.
Written by Shane MacGowan, the closing crescendo of the epic song feature the famed lyrics, “I could have been someone / well, so could anyone”, which so brilliantly echo and respond to Marlon Brando’s historic lines as Terry Malloy from the 1954 film On the Waterfront, “I could have had class. I could have been a contender. I could have been somebody, instead of a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it”.
Part of Shane MacGowan’s brilliance had always been taking older influences and weaving them through his own work, turning them on their head and creating something new from them; imbuing old ideas with new life and creating timeless and raucous new songs from them. ‘Fairytale of New York‘ does that better than just about any other pop song. As you listen, you perhaps picture the 1920s, but strip away the sentimentality of Christmas, and the same tale may very well be from today.
When MacGowan died last year, Gillespie remembered the Irish songwriter at length in a piece for the Guardian titled “All punk power and visceral emotion: farewell, Shane MacGowan, my Celtic soul brother”, writing that, “I was always in awe of his talent as a songwriter: his songs were highly literate stories of oppressed and downtrodden people marginalised by society; full of empathy and compassion for ordinary working men and women and their daily struggles – not forgetting the junkies and the drunks.”
Gillespie’s description could apply to countless MacGowan songs, from ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ and ‘The Old Main Drag’ to ‘Rock and Roll Paddy’, but maybe none more so than ‘Fairytale of New York’, which he singled out as one of his favourites in his article. It resonates with many, but for a singer from Glasgow, the frigid chill in its air makes it feel all the more homely and honest.
What was Shane MacGowan’s favourite lyric?
Interestingly, for his own pick in the HMV My Inspiration series, Shane MacGowan picked a verse from Nick Cave’s 2005 song ‘Lucy’, citing the following as his favourite:
“Now the bell-tower is ringing
And I shake on the floor
O Lucy, can you hear me?
When I call and call”
Much like the motif that moves Gillespie, there is something decidedly cinematic about this ‘Lucy’ verse. You don’t just pore over the poetry, you also picture the scene.
