by I fell in love with “New York Fairy Tale,” the Pogues’ indelible Christmas song, before I had even heard a note.
I grew up in boarded-up and bombed-out Northern Ireland during the Troubles. There weren’t many galleries in Derry, where I lived, at the time, and my father would take me to a record shop where the covers were one of my first major art experiences. I spent hours escaping into the strange worlds of progressive rock and heavy metal.
The “Fairytale” manga was different. It was black and white and sober. There it was a photograph of a man resting his head on his drink and his drink on a window. There was a spectacular metropolis outside, but he wasn’t looking at it. He seemed incredibly calm, like a wayward, hungover angel, fed up with heaven. Later I found out it was Spider Stacy, who played whistle in the Pogues.
There was adventure and longing in that image, which was based on a Burt Glinn photography by Sammy Davis Jr. from 1959. As in the original, there were also difficulties, nostalgia and amazement for a vast and enveloping city. But he also captured something essential about exile that generations of Irish would understand implicitly.
I grew up hearing migration stories from uncles who had returned from near-riches and near-breakdown abroad, but it wasn’t until I followed in their footsteps and moved to Britain in my early 20s that I realized how deeply the Pogues, an Anglo-Irish band and frontman Shane MacGowan, who died last month, articulated the experiences of the Irish diaspora.
In Ireland, looking for work has often meant moving to England. The Pogues’ early songs documented what awaited them there in the early 1980s: a time when it was, to put it mildly, challenging to be Irish in London. The Irish had been portrayed in various ways as jesters, insurrectionists and animals in the British media since the Victorian era, and ethnic hatred and discrimination They prevailed well into the 1980s. The merger of the All-Irish with the Irish Republican Army led to miscarriages of justice such as the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven, who were unjustly imprisoned for the IRA bombings in the 1970s.
Irish immigrants clustered in places like Kilburn, northwest London, either tried to assimilate by changing their accents and identities or risked standing out. MacGowan, who was born in Kent to Irish parents and grew up in rural Ireland and southeast England, chose the latter.
He wrote candidly and unapologetically about London-Irish life and drew inspiration from the Irish literary canon. He never hid his republicanism. The band dressed up as Irish workers in their Sunday best and fused the skill and energy of traditional Irish music with the inventiveness of punk. Even its name derives, through “Ulysses” by James Joyce, from a gay gaelic insult.
I heard the Pogues in my early years in Britain, a tour of bedrooms, bars, warehouses and call centres. I would not feel comfort but a sense of solidarity. Someone like us had been here before and found a way to do something that honored existence.
The Pogues lived in working-class areas like Kings Cross and Camden, and that is reflected in the exultant disorder of songs like “Boys From the County Hell” (“And if you lend me £10, I’ll buy you a drink/And Mother wakes me up early in the morning”) or the unflinching “Dark Streets of London” (“And every time I look at the first day of summer/It takes me back to the place where they gave me ECT”) which was based on Mr. La MacGowan’s experience in a psychiatric hospital as a young man.
“Fairytale of New York” was a change, literally in a sense: If England was there to look for work, the United States was there to look for dreams. (“They have cars as big as bars / They have rivers of gold”). It was also a move away from documenting the reality of their lives. MacGowan had apparently never been to New York when he began writing it, but he imagined a haunted place and an unlucky couple who had tried to get there and failed.
The song’s title was inspired by a novel of the same name by Irish American writer JP Donleavy. Part of what we know about the song is somewhere between fact and tradition: either there was a bet, from Elvis Costello to Mr. MacGowan, that he couldn’t write a depressing Christmas song, or the band’s managers simply They had been asked to write a hit. Jem Finer, the band’s banjoist, initially wrote the music as a maudlin sailor song, but his wife, Marcia Farquhar, pushed him toward the version we know. MacGowan wrote the lyrics in a feverish struggle with pneumonia in Malmo, Sweden.
The lines MacGowan exchanges with singer Kirsty MacColl are both fencing (“You took away my dreams”) and dancing (“I kept them with me, darling/I put them with mine”). It’s as intimate and uncomfortable as listening to an argument through thin walls, and yet it’s also epic, evoking the snowy streets of Manhattan’s canyons. He rejects the Christmas song as a snowball fantasy as effusively as he rejects the illusion of youthful, dewy-eyed romance.
That they are a duo is a perfect expression of another thing that made the Pogues great. The magnetic force of opposites: punk and folk; love and destruction; beauty and brutal honesty; Falling snow and puddles of vomit.
It’s a fairy tale in the style of the Brothers Grimm, an unforgiving lesson in how life is and not how it should be. Years wasted in dead-end, poorly paid jobs. The self-destruction that follows in the free time you have. The crumbling environment and the vulnerability of needing someone else (“I can’t do it alone/I’ve built my dreams around you”). It is also a song of exile. But you don’t have to leave your home country for it to mean something to you. You don’t even have to leave the house: age will do it.
Some of the London-Irish pubs of the 1980s that the Pogues would have known remain the same today, but the workplaces and accommodation around them have changed – new precariousness for new immigrants. And “Fairytale” is no longer a cult alternative Christmas song; It is omnipresent. But there are still moments when one line can steal my soul (“When the band finished playing/They howled for more”) and remind me of the lesson I first learned as a kid in that record store. The life in all of us is worthy of a song.
