MacGowan, Shane

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    How Shane MacGowan Made ‘Fairytale of New York’

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    The duet between the Pogues frontman and the singer Kirsty MacColl portrays lovers who turn viciously against one another on Christmas Eve.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.” More

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      Shane MacGowan: Raising a Farewell Pint in Dublin Pubs

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      The Pogues singer, who died Thursday, took traditional Irish music in a new direction. Most people in Ireland loved him for it.Christmas came early this year in Dublin, but too late for a beloved adopted son.On the last evening in November, a wet Thursday, cars at the rush hour stop lights blared “Fairytale of New York” on a thousand radios. From the sidewalk, you could hear drivers and passengers singing along: “The boys from the N.Y.P.D. choir still singing ‘Galway Bay,’ and the bells were ringing out for Christmas Day.”The song’s renowned lyricist and co-writer, Shane MacGowan, the British-born frontman of the punk-folk band the Pogues, died earlier that day. Ireland — his greatest muse, and ancestral home — was coming to terms with a death that had, thanks to MacGowan’s well-known addictions to alcohol and drugs, long been foretold.MacGowan would have turned 66 if he had lived to his next birthday — on Christmas Day, the subject of “Fairytale of New York,” the Pogues’ greatest hit, in which an elderly Irish couple berate and console each other for lives gone to seed in a soured Big Apple.Photographs of MacGowan and the Pogues were shown on screens at the Wall of Fame in the Temple Bar area of Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn South William Street, in Dublin’s city center, a gaggle of young women, dressed for a night out, were singing “Fairytale” as they rushed through freezing rain to a nearby pub. Student nurses at St. Vincent’s Hospital, from which MacGowan was discharged last week after a long final illness, said they had heard news of his death at work that morning.“We all just started singing ‘Fairytale of New York’, and we got very emotional,” said Eve McCormack, 22.“He was fantastic,” said her friend Sophie McEvoy, 21. “We hoped he might make it, because Christmas is his birthday. But not this time, I suppose.”Leah Barry, 37, a social worker, was having a pre-dinner drink nearby at Grogan’s pub on Castle Street, one of the last holdouts of an older, more Bohemian Dublin. She grew emotional as she talked about her favorite Pogues songs — “A Pair of Brown Eyes,” about a broken veteran of a nameless war, and “Rainy Night in Soho,” a bruised and tender love song.“I was with a group of Irish students going off to America,” Barry recalled, “and we bought a compilation album of Irish songs at Dublin Airport on the way out. That’s how I fell in love with the Pogues. Whenever I hear those songs I think of five of us in the one bedroom in Montauk, having a mad summer.”Leah Barry said the Pogues’ music reminded her of traveling from Ireland to America, listening to their music on a summer abroad.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAcross the river Liffey in the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session was in full swing in the front bar: guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum. In the early 1980s, the Pogues gate-crashed this genre with a London-Irish swagger, subverting its pieties with punk vigor and venom. To its old tropes and titles — “The Boys from the County Cork,” “The Boys from the County Mayo,” “The Boys from the County Armagh” — MacGowan added his own variations, like “The Boys from the County Hell,” with lyrics that showcased his scabrous humor and diaspora-wide vision.Born in the county of Kent, near London, to Irish parents, MacGowan first came to music through the city’s punk scene, then found his lifelong inspiration in the dark poetry of his ancestral homeland, and in particular the Irish diaspora in the United States (“Body of an American,” “Fairytale of New York”), Britain (“Rainy Night in Soho,” and many more), Australia (a cover of “The Band Played Waltzing Matilda”) and even Mexico (“A Pistol for Paddy Garcia”).Far from being offended by MacGowan’s irreverence, most people in Ireland loved him for it.A book of condolences for MacGowan at Mansion House, the mayor’s residence, in Dublin on Friday.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesOn guitar at the Cobblestone traditional session on Thursday night was Colm O’Brien, a Dublin-born musician now living in Boston. “My own personal opinion is that we are only going to realize his genius in the next decades,” O’Brien said. “He introduced people to Irish music who wouldn’t have heard it otherwise, even Irish people. People who were young and who were punk, and wouldn’t have listened.”Tomás Mulligan, the 33-year-old son of the Cobblestone’s owner, Tom Mulligan, said that MacGowan had directly inspired his own musical project, a punk-folk collective called Ispíní na hÉireann (“Sausages of Ireland”).“Every Irish trad musician went through a phase when they were young, when their parents forced them to play the old music and then they rebelled,” Mulligan said. “But then they came back to it. It was the Pogues who brought me back to it.”In the Cobblestone pub, a famous venue for Irish traditional musicians, an old-school session in full swing, featuring guitars, tin whistle, fiddles, uilleann bagpipes and bodhrán, a traditional goatskin drum.Paulo Nunes dos Santos for The New York TimesAs Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa wrote in “The Leopard,” “If we want things to stay as they are, everything will have to change.” John Francis Flynn, a rising star of the Irish folk scene, expressed a similar thought over a drink in the back of the Cobblestone.“Most good traditional artists have two things in common,” Flynn said: “a real respect for the source material, but also having an urge to do something new with it.” MacGowan had “opened a door into Irish music for people who might have thought it would be twee,” he added.“What trad songs do is, they are almost like a time machine,” Flynn said. “You can connect with people who are long gone, and with history.”MacGowan’s work “was romantic, but it was real and it was honest. It wasn’t simple,” he added. “And it was sometimes brutal.” More

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      Shane MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor’s Enduring Friendship

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      The two Irish singers interacted like siblings, speaking of each other warmly, but needling each other, too.When I heard the news on Thursday that Shane MacGowan had died, I thought of Sinead O’Connor, his longtime friend and collaborator. I played their duet from 1995, “Haunted,” which MacGowan had originally written for the “Sid and Nancy” soundtrack. Then I watched their joint interview promoting the song for the Irish talk show “Kenny Live.”MacGowan appeared standoffish behind black sunglasses, a lit cigarette resting between his fingers. O’Connor was perched at his side in a big sweater, fiddling with her short hair and smiling slyly at her friend. The host, Pat Kenny, called the collaboration “strange and unlikely,” but they did not see it that way. “We’re different sexes, yeah,” MacGowan said, to which O’Connor replied: “Are we?”O’Connor died this summer, a few months before MacGowan did. When I profiled her in 2021, I interviewed them both. They spoke of each other warmly, but they needled each other, too. They seemed different in the way siblings are different — two musicians riffing on a shared context, picking up different threads of the same conversation.Both made music out of their troubled childhoods, mental illness and addiction. Both helped popularize Irish music around the world, even as they maintained a critical distance from their own stardom. In interviews, they were funny and blunt. Their public reception, however, was different. In our interview, O’Connor identified a double standard. “When men are drunk and on drugs — for example, Shane MacGowan of the Pogues — people idolize them,” she said. “A man could be like that, but a woman couldn’t.”Their relationship was complex. In a 2021 biography of MacGowan, O’Connor recalled performing a version of “Haunted” with him while he was using heroin. “The producers were freaking out because Shane was nodding out on smack in between the verses,” she told MacGowan’s biographer, Richard Balls. “I was singing my verse and they didn’t believe he was going to wake up and neither did I.” In 1999, a few years after that collaboration, O’Connor called the police on MacGowan when she found him using heroin at his home.They fell out over it, then grew back together. Later, when asked if O’Connor’s police call ended his relationship with her, he replied, “No, but it ended my relationship with heroin.” In 2004, when O’Connor gave birth to a baby boy, she named him Shane. And at MacGowan’s 60th birthday party, in 2018, she performed the song “You’re The One,” which MacGowan originally sang with Moya Brennan.O’Connor and MacGowan first encountered each other in the 1980s in London, MacGowan told me over email in 2021, though he did not remember the exact circumstances. What he recalled was their dynamic. “She was very shy and I was speeding, so I talked a lot,” he said. Hanging around with him and Joey Cashman, his Pogues bandmate, “must have been a nightmare for her,” he said. “I talk a lot, but Joey makes me look like an introvert.”In her 2021 memoir “Rememberings,” O’Connor did not write much about MacGowan, but she did make a little joke about him and speed. She experimented with the drug, she said, during a stay at St. Patrick’s psychiatric hospital in Dublin. “In the locked ward where they put you if you’re suicidal, there’s more class A drugs than in Shane MacGowan’s dressing room,” she wrote.Their collaborations highlighted the distinctiveness of their voices — his gruff, hers incandescent. But when I interviewed the singer-songwriter Bob Geldof about O’Connor, he found an aesthetic similarity between them. He appreciated that they were among the few singers who did not sound blandly American. “She has an Irishness to her voice,” Geldof said of O’Connor. “Bono doesn’t sound Irish. Shane MacGowan sounds Irish.” In our interview, MacGowan called O’Connor “a brilliant singer and a brilliant Irish singer, one of the best.”MacGowan described O’Connor as fragile, sensitive and genuinely spiritual. Mostly, he spoke of her care for him as a friend. “She is a generous soul, always looking after people,” he told me. “She looked after me when I really needed it.”You could see it in the “Kenny Live” interview: When Kenny asked MacGowan pointed questions about his drug use, O’Connor lightly intercepted them. “Do you worry at all about your own mortality?” Kenny asked MacGowan, but O’Connor slid in to answer the question herself. “I do,” she said.She took a dig at her friend and turned it into an insight into being a person. “Just the whole thing: What are we all doing here? How does the Earth hang in space?” More

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      Shane MacGowan, Pogues Songwriter Who Fused Punk and Irish Rebellion, Dies at 65

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      As frontman for the Pogues, he delivered lyrics romanticizing whiskey-soaked ramblers and hard-luck stories of emigration, while providing a musical touchstone for members of the Irish diaspora worldwide.Shane MacGowan, the brilliant but chaotic former songwriter and frontman for the Pogues, who reinvigorated interest in Irish music in the 1980s by harnessing it to the propulsive power of punk rock has died. He was 65.Mr. MacGowan’s wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, announced his death on Instagram. She did not provide additional details.Mr. MacGowan emerged from London’s punk scene of the late 1970s and spent nine tumultuous years with the initial incarnation of the Pogues. Rising from North London pubs, the band was performing in stadiums by the late 1980s, before Mr. MacGowan’s addictions and mental and physical deterioration forced the band to fire him. He later founded Shane MacGowan & the Popes, with whom he recorded and toured in the 1990s.Along the way, Mr. MacGowan earned twin reputations as a titanically destructive personality and a master songsmith whose lyrics painted vivid portraits of the underbelly of Irish emigrant life. His best-known are the opening lines of his biggest hit, an alcoholics’ lament-turned-unlikely Christmas classic titled “Fairytale of New York.”It was Christmas Eve babeIn the drunk tankAn old man said to me, won’t see another one“I was good at writing,” Mr. MacGowan told Richard Balls, who wrote his authorized biography “A Furious Devotion,” which was published in 2021. “I can write, I can spell, I can make it flow and when I mixed it with music, it was perfect.”A full obituary will be published shortly. More