Shane MacGowan, the singer of Irish punk band The Pogues, has died at the age of 65. The band are best known for their 1985 album Rum, Sodomy & the Lash, along with tracks such as “Rainy Night in Soho”, “A Pair of Brown Eyes” and their cover of “Dirty Old Town”. But by far their most famous song is “Fairytale of New York”, a 1988 collaboration with singer Kirsty MacColl which has become a Christmastime staple (in recent years, the discourse about whether it’s problematic or not has become a Yuletide tradition of its own). Once considered a kind of ‘anti-Christmas’ classic, it’s now the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century in the UK. 

Both abject and romantic, maudlin and magical, “Fairytale” captures the true spirit of the festive season: alcohol abuse, misery, disappointment, despair, and bitter arguments with loved ones, but also a sense of enchantment and the possibility of redemption. Oscar Wilde once said “we are all lying in the gutter, but some of us are staring at the stars“, and few songwriters have captured that quality as well as Shane MacGowan.

Telling the story of a romance gone sour, “Fairytale” opens with the narrator locked up in the “drunk tank” on Christmas Eve and dreaming of the better times that await him and his lover. The first verse – a call-and-response between MacGowan and MacColl – is a flashback to the golden days of their relationship, and an ode to the bright lights of New York, where “they’ve got cars big and cars, they’ve got rivers of gold.” In the second verse, their relationship has collapsed into mutual loathing and bitter recriminations: “you’re a bum, you’re punk,” “you’re an old slut on junk, lying there almost dead on that trip by that bed.”

Many people seem to think of “Fairytale” as a naughty Christmas song or, if they’re straight, a free pass to scream the word “f*ggot” without getting cancelled. But while it’s raucous in parts, seeing it as just an edgy alternative to Cliff Richard or Slade misses its aching sincerity. After all the mud-slinging of the second verse, the bridge at the end has the wounded, tender atmosphere of two people exhausted from screaming at each other and trying their best to be kind: “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 out alone, I built my dreams around you”.

These characters have been bitterly disappointed, their youth is gone, their hopes have come to nothing, their lives have dissolved into alcoholism and addiction, and yet there is still the suggestion that their love for each other has endured and could be the thing that saves them. “Fairytale” is no less sentimental, no less alive to the magic of the season, than the canon of classic Christmas songs which it’s often juxtaposed against; it’s just a rawer kind of sentimentality, one which is made all the more powerful for being grounded in misery and pain. The idea that things could get better for you at your lowest, most degraded moment (with a little help from the magic of Christmas!) is hopeful in a more meaningful sense than banal homilies about peace and understanding.

Over the last few years, the song has, unfortunately, become a staple of the culture wars in the UK, where there are annual debates over whether its use of the word “f*ggot” should be censored. As a gay man myself, it’s always been my stance that Kirsty MacColl is allowed to say it, but the eagerness with which some straight people defend this aspect of the song is a little sus. Shane MacGowan said that he was “absolutely fine” with the word being bleeped when it aired on the radio, but insisted that it made sense in the original context of the song. 

“The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way we should speak and with her character,” he said in an interview. “She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person. 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 to tell the story effectively.” 

It makes sense for radio stations to bleep the word, as it would with any other slur or swear word, but this seems like a reasonable explanation to me. I also admire the fact that McGowan pushed back on the right-wing’s attempts to co-opt the song as part of a campaign against political correctness: when Laurence Fox complained about the song being ‘censored’ by the BBC, McGowan responded on Twitter with “fuck off you little herenvolk shite” [effectively calling him a Nazi.] To pay our respects, it would be nice if we could collectively agree to do away with this recurring argument. The only “discourse” any of us should be having is about what a fantastic songwriter Shane McGowan was. Rest in peace. 

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