"So I said OK, you suggest a storyline and I'll write another one. Photograph: Tim Roneyįiner first tried writing a song about a sailor missing his wife at Christmas but that was dashed on the rocks by his own wife, Marcia Farquhar, who called it "corny", says Finer.
'It's for the underdog' … Kirsty MacColl and Shane MacGowan promote Fairytale of New York. Although their name ("Pogue mahone" means "kiss my arse" in Gaelic) and many of their influences were Irish, most of the band weren't, and their interest in folk songs and historical narratives roamed far and wide. The Pogues had formed amid the grimy pubs and bedsits of London's King's Cross in 1982. Not to mention the fact that MacGowan was born on Christmas Day 1957. "For a band like the Pogues, very strongly rooted in all kinds of traditions rather than the present, it was a no-brainer," says banjo-player and co-writer Jem Finer. Singer Shane MacGowan maintains that Elvis Costello, who produced the Pogues' 1985 masterpiece Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, wagered the singer that he couldn't write a Christmas duet to sing with bass player (and Costello's future wife) Cait O'Riordan.Įither way, a Christmas song was a good idea. We probably said, fuck that, we can do our own."
Fearnley, who recently published a memoir, Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues, remembers manager Frank Murray suggesting that they cover the Band's 1977 song Christmas Must be Tonight. As Pogues accordion-player James Fearnley says: "It's like Fairytale of New York went off and inhabited its own planet."Īppropriately for a song that pivots on an argument, there is disagreement as to where the idea originated.
The story of the song is a yarn in itself: how it took more than two years to get right and became, over time, far bigger than the people who made it. It is loved because it feels more emotionally "real" than the homesick sentimentality of White Christmas or the bullish bonhomie of Merry Xmas Everybody, but it contains elements of both and the story it tells is an unreal fantasy of 1940s New York dreamed up in 1980s London. That song, Fairytale of New York by the Pogues, has just been reissued to mark its 25th anniversary it has already re-entered the Top 20 every December since 2005, and shows no sign of losing its appeal.
0 kommentar(er)
