Fairytale of New York by The Pogues—Murfin Winter Holiday Music Festival 2023-‘24

 The official video of Fairytale of New York by Irish folk/punk band The Pogues with Shane MacGowan and Kristy MacColl.

Word came the other day that Shane MacGowan, the lead singer and main songwriter of the rowdy Irish punk/folk band The Pogues, died at home in Dublin of pneumonia after being in intensive care for viral encephalitis since July.  He was only 65 years old but had ravaged his body with heavy drinking, drugs, and brawling for years.  He was born on Christmas Day in 1957 in Pembury, Kent, England  so perhaps it was inevitable that his most famous and beloved song was about the holiday.  Or that the song itself was a bitter antidote to the usual relentlessly cheerful seasonal fare.

Shane MacGowan's life was full of boisterous addictions and a fiery temper.  When he died last week the President of Ireland Michael B. Higgins said, "Shane will be remembered as one of music's greatest lyricists. So many of his songs would be perfectly crafted poems, if that would not have deprived us of the opportunity to hear him sing them. The genius of Shane's contribution includes the fact that his songs capture within them, as Shane would put it, the measure of our dreams—of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from." 

MacGowan led a nomadic life as a child and youth, moving between his mother’s Tipperary, Ireland and towns and cities in the United Kingdom.  He had a literary bent was reading Fyodor Dostoyevsky, John Steinbeck, and James Joyce.  But he was also carousing, drinking, using drugs causing him to be thrown out of a prestigious school and spent six months in a psychiatric hospital when he was 17.  He became a participant in the English punk rock scene but also was interested in Irish nationalism, Irish history, the experiences of the Irish diaspora. 

In 1981 he founded The Pogues in and shook up the traditional Irish music scene with punk energy and aggression.  The band became a favorite in the British Isles, although it was far less well known in the United States except in Celtic music circles and with diaspora in Boston and New York.  Between 1985 and 1987, MacGowan co-wrote Fairytale of New York, which he performed with Kirsty MacColl.   In the UK, Fairytale of New York is the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century. It is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time in various television, radio, and magazine-related polls in the UK and Ireland,  including the television special on ITV in December 2012 where it was voted the Nation’s Favourite Christmas song.

The Pogues.  MacGowan center leaning on the bodhrán drum.

In March 1986, the Pogues toured the US for the first time. The opening date of the tour was in New York City, a place which had long fascinated MacGowan and which inspired him to write new lyrics for the song.  The song followed an Irish immigrant’s Christmas Eve reverie about holidays past while sleeping off a binge in a New York City drunk tank. When an inebriated old man also in the cell sings a passage from the Irish ballad The Rare Old Mountain Dew.  For the dialogue between the man and his addicted girl friend Kristy MacColl, daughter of Scottish folksinger Ewan MacColl was added to the final recording schedule.  It was released as a single  on December 23,  1987.

Kristy MacColl and McGowan.

A video featuring Kristy MacColl was directed by Peter Dougherty and filmed in New York during a bitterly cold week that November 1987.

MacColl’s career and life were cut short in December 2000 when she was run over by a power boat at high speed after she pushed her 15 year old son to safety at a Mexican resort.

Despite all of its success across the puddle, the song does not make most American seasonal playlists.  It’s considered to damn depressing for our cheerful tastes.