84 - Fairytale

 After talking about the censorship of Fairytale of New York the other day, I kinda feel like talking about the song itself, and why it's one of the greatest songs ever recorded. Heck, I'd put it in my top three of all songs I've ever heard in my life, and this is why...

(Atta Girl by Heavenly, and There is a Light That Never Goes Out by The Smiths before you ask!)

Like most people of my age I first heard FONY when it was released in 1987. At the time I was just 14 years old, and I'd never heard anything quite like it. Christmas songs at the time were pretty much all completely joyous, and uplifting, and talking of how great the time of year was. Think Slade, or Wizzard, or Shakey, or... and yes, I know there were some exemptions like Mud or Jonah Lewie, but these were not that common, and none had anything like we were to get with FONY. I must have played the 7" millions of times. Just the a-side. The b-side was an instrumental version. 

The song, is at heart, the story of a relationship between a man and a woman, and catalogues the ups and downs of this relationship. The song begins with a man, arrested by the Police, thrown in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve. Here, he slurs his drunken words, some almost incomprehensible (a theme that would continue through the song with Shane's parts), but here we still get the central theme of the song, about dreaming of how the future could be better. 

The argument verse is the one the seems to get all the press because of the language (not going in to it here; see post 81); but the whole thing is in character. We've had the optimistic first duet of the song when the couple have first met; here, it's where they've been together for a while, and despite the fact they still love each other, things have not been going so well, so they have a full on blistering row. But this is not the end. 

The peak of the song comes with the last verse - the dreams verse - where the woman complains that he "took my dreams from me"; but this is soon countered with "I kept them with me, babe; I put them with my own", and soon reaches a peak with the line "I built my dreams around you", which is one of the most beautiful lines in any song, and this openness on his part suggests there may yet be hope for this couple to live happily ever after, or at least comfortably with each other. 

I like to hope they have a happy ending. 

"There is no harp player in The Pogues."

If you can track it down (and hopefully it'll be repeated on the BBC this year again) there's an hour long documentary about FONY, going in to how the song came about, its reception, its legacy, and acting as a tribute to the late Kirsty MacColl, who was taken from us 20 years ago. It shows early demo versions of the song, which really don't work anything like as well. But there's a sublime moment where the song's producer Steve Lilywhite takes us through the master tape, isolating individual tracks. At one point he isolates Kirsty's vocal, and even unaccompanied it's so very powerful and the reason the song works so well.

Ironically, though, Shane and Kirsty didn't record the song together. Kirsty's vocals were only meant to be a guide vocal so that the Pogues could used it to show the eventual singer what they wanted. However, as soon as Shane heard Kirsty's vocal he insisted that it was just right and that she be the one on the record. He recorded his bits separately. They performed the song live in concert many times, though. 

It is a song that's been covered many times, and this is something I alluded to in the previous post on this topic; if you are going to sing Shane's part on the song, we have to believe you could be in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve, or it just doesn't work. This is because it is a song as much about the performance, the acting of the roles, as it is of singing a song. That belief. Could you imagine Shane McGowan in the drunk tank on Christmas Eve? Hell, yeah! Ronan Keating? Hell, no. 

There's all sorts of covers released of the song over the years, some fairly straight, some giving it their own spin (one reimagining it as a solo song, rather than a duet), but I don't think there'll ever be a version to top the original 1987 version.