How Shane MacGowan Made ‘Fairytale of New York’

The competition to have the No. 1 chart single on Christmas Day in the United Kingdom is rabid; victory is sweet. Since November 1987, when the Pogues released “Fairytale of New York,” it’s been a recurring, if improbable, contender for the crown, but has never finished higher than second. A 2023 victory seems likely; after the Pogues singer Shane MacGowan died on Thursday, the British gambling company Ladbrokes changed its odds from 5-4 to a safe bet 1-4.

“Fairytale of New York” is a duet between MacGowan and the British singer Kirsty MacColl, portraying lovers who turn viciously against each other on Christmas Eve. It’s “a drunken hymn for people with broken dreams and abandoned hopes,” Roison O’Connor wrote in The Independent. There’s misery, despair, drugs, booze and the kind of angry, cutting insults and slurs that could only come after years of marriage.

“It’s a song about the underdog, and that’s a very British thing,” Steve Lillywhite, who produced the track, said in a video interview from his home in Bali. “All the other Christmas records compete against each other, whereas with ‘Fairytale,’ the only competition is itself.”

Fittingly, “Fairytale of New York” began with a bit of marital conflict. Jem Finer, a founding member of the Pogues who played banjo and other instruments, told Irish Music Daily in an undated interview that he had written a song about a sailor who starts getting tearful on Christmas Eve. He proudly played it for his wife, the multimedia artist Marcia Farquhar, who was “disparaging” about the lyrics, he recalled. “Her main point was that it was sentimental twaddle.”

“I was a bit put out, to be honest,” Finer admitted. He challenged her to suggest a better Christmas Eve scenario, and she proposed an unhappy family. (Finer declined an interview request. “I’m rather lost for words at the moment,” he said via email.)

Finer worked on the song and gave it to MacGowan, who wrote the lyrics as a duet for male and female voices. Cait O’Riordan, who played bass in the Pogues, recalled that MacGowan wanted to sing it as a duet with a female studio engineer. “Shane was courting her,” O’Riordan said in a March 2023 interview with the national Irish broadcasting company RTÉ.

When that didn’t work, Finer suggested O’Riordan, who also struggled to interpret the song. “I was trying to sing it like Ethel Merman,” she said. O’Riordan left the band and married Elvis Costello, who had produced the Pogues’ 1985 breakthrough album, “Rum Sodomy & the Lash.”

The group thought about enlisting Chrissie Hynde of Pretenders. Then it began working with Lillywhite, a British producer who had made his name working with XTC, Peter Gabriel and U2. Frank Murray, who managed the Pogues, also managed MacColl, who was married to Lillywhite. Murray suggested MacColl as the duet partner, and Lillywhite recorded her vocals one weekend in the couple’s home studio.

MacColl mastered not only the song’s unusual phrasing, in which MacGowan sings so far behind the beat he’s almost left behind, but the lyrics’ mix of bittersweet resignation and rage. “It’s a very nuanced way of singing. I spent a long time getting every note and rhythm right, for it to swing,” Lillywhite said. “Kirsty is perfect on it.” (She died in 2000; a recent boxed set collects her work.)

In the song’s piano-and-voice introduction, MacGowan has been nicked for drunkenness, and his elderly cellmate sings the traditional Irish tune “The Rare Old Mountain Dew,” one of two songs-within-the-song. MacGowan begins to reminisce about a woman, with a slurred sense of optimism: “Happy Christmas, I love you, baby.” Then MacColl enters, and the two reminisce about the joyful start of their relationship as Irish immigrants in New York City.

In the next verse, there’s a jump cut to the miserable present as the couple exchange insults, with MacColl ultimately announcing, “Happy Christmas, your arse, I pray God it’s our last.” It’s a small sign of songwriting savvy that MacGowan made the woman’s invective stronger than the man’s.

The use of a gay slur in that section went largely unnoticed in 1987, but more recently, a few of the song’s epithets have been bleeped out by some broadcasters. In a 2018 statement, MacGowan explained that the words he used were true to the identity of the characters. “She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person,” he said, adding that he had no objection to having the lyrics bleeped.

Finer’s music matches the complexity of the lyrics by using suspended chords and a switch to a minor key in the chorus (“The boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir were singing ‘Galway Bay’”) to create tension and unease. In the last verse, MacGowan gently tries to reconcile with his lover. “You really don’t know what is going to happen to them. The ending is completely open,” he told The Guardian in 2012.

There have even been covers of “Fairytale of New York,” including one by Jon Bon Jovi (“Terrible,” Lillywhite groaned). This holiday season, the brothers Jason and Travis Kelce, both N.F.L. stars, released a version with changed lyrics, “Fairytale of Philadelphia.” “The song gets to the roots of love, anger, resentment, sacrifice and ultimately companionship. It lays out what relationships really are, that they are something bigger than yourself,” Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles wrote in an email.

MacGowan’s renown as a songwriter extends far past “Fairytale of New York,” but it does sum up his and the Pogues’ distinct mix of Celtic traditionalism and punk attitude. “There’s such a wide spectrum of emotions, expertly conveyed,” Daragh Lynch of Lankum, a Pogues-influenced Irish folk group, said via email. “It is beautiful, brutal, full of despair and hope.” The song, he added, “is one of the finest examples of songwriting in existence and will quite likely never be equaled.”