The Story Behind The Song: The true story of The Pogues’ Christmas classic ‘Fairytale of New York’
The Pogues are a band that stretches back into the mystic depths of music’s past. When the 1980s swung around with a salvo of samey synth-pop that temporarily sedated sincerity, The Pogues were one of the few bands around who seemed to scurry off into history, resuscitating the spirit of the old folk origins that first offered hope to the ne’er-do-wells of this world. In short, traditions rule the roost in the Irish band’s unfurling mythology, so perhaps it isn’t all that surprising that they crafted Christmas’ finest classic.
However, the song itself is somewhat of an oddity. It’s the sort of hymn that barely seems to have been written; it’s so timeless and perfect that it just seems to be a strand in the fabric of our existence, like the tin of peaches at the back of the cupboard that you never bought and no human ever made, but somehow the tin’s mystic presence is comforting, as though it wards off catastrophe. The festive anthem is simply too deeply entwined with society to imagine the human race without it. From the first guttural wail of “It was Christmas Eve, babe,” you know pure timelessness will soon unspool. In fact, the title itself seems to stretch back through eternity in a manner that Carl Sagan ought to have looked into. In other words, can you really imagine Christmas without it?
The whole track and its fateful tale add credence to Hoagy Carmichael’s notion of fishing songs from the floating ether when he described songwriting as follows: “And then it happened, that queer sensation that this melody was bigger than me. Maybe I hadn’t written it all. The recollection of how, when and where it all happened became vague as the lingering strains hung in the rafters in the studio. I wanted to shout back at it, ‘maybe I didn’t write you, but I found you’.” As the band’s accordion player, James Fearnley, remarks: “It’s like ‘Fairytale of New York’ went off and inhabited its own planet.”
On the other hand, the song seems to forgo the usual cheesy tropes of camp Christmas crackers and gets down to the nitty-gritty drunk tank. Traditionally speaking, this is no place for a Christmas song. They usually render the real world genuine fairytales. This track refuses to do so, dabbling instead in deriving beauty from the drabbest of circumstances, albeit it does still occasionally gaze at the stars from its perch in the whisky-sipping gutter for sweet moments. Otherwise, in true misanthropissed fashion, the duet is as scathing as they come, as Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan vent their festive spleen in a tale of loss, yearning, and the age-old lament of squandered youth. And that handbags tale was woven into the song from the very start.
The initial impetus for the track originated in a row of its own. As Fearnley recalls, their manager wanted them to break into the Christmas market with a cover of the little-known track ‘Christmas Must Be Tonight’ by The Band. Needless to say, Fearnley and his fellows didn’t think it was one of their best. “It was an awful song,” he remarks in his memoir Here Comes Everybody, “We probably said, f*** that, we can do our own.”
Thus, the notion of writing an original song out of spite was firmly in the air. Jem Finer, The Pogues’ multi-instrumentalist, initially got the ball rolling by trying to write a Christmas song about a love-sick sailor who misses his wife while out at sea, but his own dearly beloved quickly sunk his floated idea. “So I said, okay,” Finer recalls, “you suggest a storyline and I’ll write another one. The basic plotline came from her: this idea of a couple falling on hard times and coming eventually to some redemption.” Her storyline was based on “mutual friends living in New York”.
These days, the song might seem to typify the late MacGowan, but in the same way that Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t write about his own deeply personal experiences in Dresden until someone else instructed him how he should do so at a dinner party, it took an intervention from elsewhere for the frontman to awaken his spirit song. MacGowan was a man of empathy, and he seemingly saw himself somewhere in the idea she had offered up.
So, with the help of MacGowan, who slipped into the song like a glass slipper, the anthem began to take shape. When Finer pitched New York as the setting based on the warring couple that he and his partner knew, MacGowan was happy to go along with it after he developed a fascination with the cinematic notion of the town thanks to obsessive re-watches of Once Upon a Time in America while on tour. That epic film is four hours long, and that’s quite a lot of time to sit through for endless re-runs, but this was a labour of love for the frontman who pored over the poetic nuances he could derive from each viewing. And ‘Fairytale of New York’ would follow suit as he sweated over the anthem for two years.
If that sounds like a literary allegory for the notion of coaxing timelessness from painstaking devotion, then it is certainly a fitting one, as literature itself would later enter the welter in a much more direct sense during this period of procrastination. The drifting snow in the shimmering Big Apple was a motif that MacGowan lifted from JP Donleavy’s 1961 novel of the same name. This move saw the band land another heavyweight fan.
The song is very keenly attached to the novel, lifting many of the same characters from the book, which focuses on two immigrants returning to New York after a spell in Dublin, only it just so happens that one of them is dead. It’s a tragicomic skid row story featuring lines like: ”I got disappointed in human nature as well and gave it up because I found it too much like my own.” Borrowing so liberally from it could have landed MacGowan and the band in hot water, if not for Shane’s father, Maurice. The author told the Daily Mail in 2009: “Technically, I could have taken legal action for piracy but as I know Shane MacGowan – I believe his father is a fan of my work – I decided not to bother.”
Thus, the song finally began to take form, and it was whisked into a studio with none other than Elvis Costello on production duties. Therein, MacGowan gave the performance of his life in an almost literal sense. Throughout the songwriting process, he exposed the true duality of his character. “I identified with the man because I was a hustler,” he said, “I identified with the woman because I was a heavy drinker and a singer. I have been in hospitals on morphine drips, and I have been in drunk tanks on Christmas Eve.”
This is also reflected on by Finer, who said: “A stable perception was never reachable as to whether Shane was a genius or a fucking idiot.” It is human to be both and that is luminously illustrated in the song, as well as its final message of a sense of redemption. However, even this seems fragile. “You really don’t know what is going to happen to them,” MacGowan suggests. “The ending is completely open.”
And it is this open-ended final note, too, that lends the anthem a certain beauty. There is so much of the song that happens outside of the lyrics, little vignettes that you invent from what is there. Year after year, our own personal corroboration are conjured as reimaginings of the drunk tank scenes, keeping the amorphous hymn forever changing, forever fresh and forever woven into the fabric of Christmas as you get older and wiser to the ways of the world, hopefully empathetically realising none of us are two from the fate of our protagonists.
Scenes constantly crop up anew, whether that be MacGowan coming clean about his lucky 18/1 racecourse lie, or this year you happen to believe him and picture him down at the track clutching his winning ticket like a crucifix. You might imagine the days of their youth, dancing away till the wee hours, high on the hope that just about remains. I wonder if they ever bought a dog? I wonder if the diabolical drunken couple that used to live in the maisonette above me are the unnamed couple 15 years on from the Fairytale, or their dreams saw them onto a new chapter?
Much of this might not be there in the song, but it’s certainly stirred up by what is. All culminating in one of the most beautiful and romantic couplets in the history of music: “You took my dreams from me, When I first found you / I kept them with me babe, I put them with my own” – hope, union and you suspect honesty is offered as the opportune culmination after an entire relationship unfurls in five minutes of the song; from the wherefores of the sanguine past, the drunk tank present, to the Christmas morning ahead and beyond.
As Nick Cave wrote of his late friend’s effort: “Truly great songs that are as emotionally powerful as ‘Fairytale of New York’ are very rare indeed. Fairytale is a lyrical high wire act of dizzying scope and potency, and it rightly takes its place as the greatest Christmas song ever written. It stands shoulder to shoulder with any great song, from any time, not just for its sheer audacity, or its deep empathy, but for its astonishing technical brilliance.”
