It’s the Christmas carol for people who hate Christmas carols.
There’s none of the loved-up gooeyness you find in Mariah Carey‘s All I Want For Christmas Is You, and it completely dodges the dulcet tones of Michael Bublé‘s Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.
Instead, this carol aims for a raucous concoction of banjo strings and accordion melodies accompanied by a tin whistle while a couple’s colourful fight is sung over the top of it all.
Fairytale of New York is somewhat of an anti-Christmas carol.
It doesn’t share the sentiment of most other festive tunes – that Christmas is the happiest, most wonderful time of year. Instead, it tells the story of a couple who both drink too much and have fallen on hard times.
It’s honest about the fact Christmas can both tear us apart and bring us together at the same time, and that’s why it’s still a hit 36 years later.
Fairytale of New York was released in 1988 by The Pogues after Elvis Costello bet the Celtic punk band’s late frontman Shane McGowan that he wouldn’t be able to write a Christmas duet to sing with bass player (and Costello’s future wife) Cait O’Riordan.
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Jem Finer, the band’s banjo player, told The Guardian in 2012 a Christmas song was something the band had toyed with for a while: “For a band like The Pogues, very strongly rooted in all kinds of traditions rather than the present, it was a no-brainer.”
Although The Pogues were formed in London, their influences were deeply rooted in the pubs of Ireland.
Their name in Gaelic, ‘Póg mo thóin’, translates to ‘kiss my arse’, so it’s no wonder that if anyone were to come up with the somewhat jarring Fairytale of New York, it would be them.
Finer, who co-wrote the song with McGowan, originally started with a maritime tale, a story of a sailor missing his wife at Christmas. It was quickly scrapped, however, after his own wife Marcia Farquhar described it as ‘corny’.
Finer told Farquhar: “OK, 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,” he said.
Finer and McGowan got to work, and while they had never visited New York at the time, it was a theme they had always considered for the tune.
Legends of the music world, then and now
The first demo of the song was recorded in 1986, but it was clear it still needed some work.
That first recording doesn’t sound like the seamless classic we know today, it was much clunkier, stumbling through lyrics like, “It was a wild Christmas Eve on the west coast of Clare / I looked ‘cross the ocean, asked what’s over there?”
“I don’t think the band was capable of playing the song as it needed to be played at that point,” Finer said.
“Shane and I batted arrangements around for ages, and we’d periodically try and record it. Shane’s a tireless and meticulous editor.”
McGowan added, “Every night I used to have another bash at nailing the lyrics, but I knew they weren’t right.
“It is by far the most complicated song that I have ever been involved in writing and performing. The beauty of it is that it sounds really simple.”
Not long after that original recording, the band had nailed the name of the song after Finer read JP Donleavy’s 1973 novel A Fairy Tale of New York and got the author’s blessing to use the title.
They soon after finally found themselves in New York, which McGowan described as, “A hundred times more exciting in real life than we ever dreamed it could be, it was even more like New York than the movies.”
About a year later, the band begun working on their next album with U2 producer Steve Lillywhite, and Fairytale of New York far in the back of their minds.
But, when their first recording session went well, they decided to give their Christmas tune another shot, and they finally almost had it right except for one small hurdle – Cait O’Riordan was no longer in the band. They had no one to complete the duet.
Multiple names were thrown around, but Lillywhite pushed for his wife, the late Kirsty MacColl, to get the part.
“To be honest they weren’t 100 per cent convinced that Kirsty was the right person,” said Lillywhite.
“I spent a whole day on Kirsty’s vocals. I made sure every single word had exactly the right nuance. I remember taking it in on Monday morning and playing it to the band – and they were just dumbfounded.”
But McGowan said he was sold on the idea instantly: “I was madly in love with Kirsty from the first time I saw her on Top of the Pops. She was a genius in her own right, and she was a better producer than he was!
“She could make a song her own, and she made Fairytale her own.”
So, two years later the band had finally perfected their Christmas song, which went on to become even bigger than the band itself.
Years later when radio stations begun censoring the song, McGowan was asked for his thoughts on the topic, to which he explained the censored words were simply used because it fit the character.
“She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person,” he told The Independant in 2018.
“She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history and she is down on her luck and desperate. Her dialogue is as accurate as I could make it, but she is not intended to offend!
“She is just supposed to be an authentic character and not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable, sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty in order to tell the story effectively.”
Despite its controversial lyrics, the song has remained a classic, played across the world every year in the lead up to Christmas Day – which also happened to be McGowan’s birthday.
Many saw McGowan as just another lead to a punk band, but others saw the genius behind his lyrics, with Nick Cave referring to him as, “The greatest songwriter of his generation, with the most terrifyingly beautiful of voices.”
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But it seems Fairytale of New York was one of McGowan’s more personal tunes, he said both the characters were different versions of himself.
“I identified with the man because I was a hustler, and I identified with the woman because I was a heavy drinker and a singer,” he explained.
“I have been in hospitals on morphine drips, and I have been in drunk tanks on Christmas Eve.”
As for the ending of the song, where the duo reach somewhat of a reconciliation after the male half of the duet finally lets up and shows a warmer side, McGowan said it was his favourite part.
“You really don’t know what is going to happen to them, the ending is completely open.”
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