Shane MacGowan of The Pogues performs at Terminal 5 on March 15, 2011, in New York City.
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Theo Wargo/Getty Images
The holiday music season has begun in stores, on radio stations and on the speakers in our living room, and I have come back to a holiday favorite: “Fairytale of New York,” by The Pogues. It’s not exactly “chestnuts roasting on an open fire.”
“It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won’t see another on…”
It’s set in a time of black-and-white movies and Sinatra songs, with a man who’s an Irish immigrant sleeping off a holiday bender in a New York City jail. On that cold floor, he dreams of the woman who has shared his dreams of life in America:
“They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It’s no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
The howled out for more…”
Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan are the couple, who soon hurl curses and slurs at each other’s hearts, about how they quashed their dreams.
Some other performers’ versions over the years have reworded some of the more pungent insults, with the band’s assent, so the song can be more widely played.
And “Fairytale of New York” has become a kind of holiday standard. It gives voice, raspy then sweet, to those may feel anxious, lost, lonely, or just left out of all the merry songs about good tidings, herald angels singing, and ho-ho-ho’s.
Yet even as the couple snap and snarl, they realize how they have changed with each other, and go on together.
“You took my dreams…” she says.
He answers, “I put them with my own…”
Nearly 40 years on, The Pogues’ “Fairytale in New York” can remind us how sailing on a sea of troubles can cause us to hold each other closer:
“I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you
The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day.”
