How Shane MacGowan and the Pogues' controversial 'Fairytale of New York' became an unlikely, enduring holiday hit

In 2016, George Michael died on Christmas Day, just as Wham!’s wistful “Last Christmas” was chiming on seemingly every radio station and at every holiday party. Now the voice of another beloved — if occasionally misunderstood — ’80s Christmas classic, the Pogues’ “Fairytale of New York,” has left us during the holiday season. Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, who would have turned 66 on Christmas Day, died in Dublin on Thursday after battling many health issues, including viral encephalitis — thus rendering “Fairytale’s” ragged line, “An old man said to me, ‘won’t see another one,’” all the more poignant.

The rabble-rousing singer leaves behind a rich legacy with his Celtic punk band, with whom he recorded five seminal albums. Upon the news of MacGowan’s death, Michael D. Higgins, the president of Ireland, released a statement declaring MacGowan “one of music’s greatest lyricists,” whose songs captured “the measure of our dreams — of so many worlds, and particularly those of love, of the emigrant experience and of facing the challenges of that experience with authenticity and courage, and of living and seeing the sides of life that so many turn away from.” But no MacGowan song quite captures Higgins’s sentiment as affectingly and universally as “Fairytale.”

Penned by MacGowan and bandmate Jem Finer after (according to a MacGowan-perpetrated urban legend) the Pogues’ then-producer Elvis Costello made a bet that they could not write a Christmas hit single, “Fairytale of New York,” on its surface, seemed dark, tragic, even nasty — hardly in the holiday spirit. Its coarse language even generated controversy and debate, prompting the BBC to censor it several times. But the enduring song, released in November 1987, did, in fact, prove the doubting Costello wrong, eventually becoming the most-played Christmas song of the entire 21st century in the United Kingdom. This is because ultimately, “Fairytale” is a deceptively, surprisingly, sweet song of hope.

A love-hate, call-and-response folk duet featuring singer-songwriter Kirsty MacColl, the song was almost called “Christmas in the Drunk Tank” (a title that MacGowan rejected because, ironically, he feared it would prevent the song from receiving BBC radio play), “Fairytale of New York” depicts a down-and-out alcoholic sleeping off a Christmas Eve binge in a local jail cell. There, he reminisces about happier Christmases past spent with his youthful lover, before their dreams were crushed and their relationship turned toxic. At the core of the crusty carol, however, is a new dream — that one day, maybe next year, they'll get that old holiday magic back.

“Hope springs eternal on one of the unlikeliest classic Christmas songs ever,” Annie Zaleski wrote in The Guardian. “Despite [the characters’] intense life regrets and marked lifestyle differences, the couple still hear the beauty in the bells that are ‘ringing out on Christmas Day’ — a sign that even life’s darkest moments contain glimmers of optimism.” Helen Brown of The Daily Telegraph also wrote, “In careening wildly through a gamut of moods from maudlin to euphoric, sentimental to profane, mud-slinging to sincerely devoted in the space of four glorious minutes – it’s seemed perfectly suited to Christmas a time which highlights the disparity between the haves and have-nots around the world. … As MacColl and MacGowan’s dialogue descends from the ecstasy of their first kiss into an increasingly vitriolic argument, their words puts the average family’s seasonal bickering into perspective. … The song’s row ends with an expression of love and hope (against all the odds), as MacGowan’s character promises MacColl’s that, far from wrecking her dreams, he has kept them with his own.”

While “Fairytale” remained a holiday favorite for decades, its crude lyrics — namely MacGowan calling MacColl “an old slut on junk” and MacColl retaliating with “you scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy f****t,” during the song’s brutal central argument — generated backlash in later years. During a 1992 performance on the British chart program Top of the Pops, MacColl changed her controversial lyric to “you’re cheap and you’re haggard,” and BBC Radio 1 and Radio 2 intermittently edited out the song’s slurs between 2007 and 2020. MacColl’s own mother called the ban “ridiculous,” and MacGowan’s friend and occasional collaborator Nick Cave accused the BBC of “mutilating” the track to the point that it was “stripped of its value.” In a 2018 statement, MacGowan himself said he didn’t mind if radio stations chose to play a censored version, but explained:

“The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak and with her character. 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. If people don’t understand that I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically as possible, then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word, but I don’t want to get into an argument.”

The Pogues actually worked on “Fairytale” for two years, originally with then-band member Cait O'Riordan playing the part of the bitter, cynical ex-girlfriend. But it was only after the band’s eventual producer and MacColl’s then-husband, Steve Lillywhite, suggested MacColl that everything came together. “Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it and she had a very strong character and it came across in a big way,” MacGowan once told Mojo magazine. “In operas, if you have a double aria, it’s what the woman does that really matters. The man lies, the woman tells the truth.” (MacColl herself died at age 41, in a freak boating accident one week before Christmas Day in 2000.)

“Fairytale of New York” is now the odds-on favorite to be this year’s U.K. “Christmas No. 1” — an annual, much-hyped chart coup across the pond — in the wake of MacGowan’s death. In an unexpectedly sweet example of just how widely appealing the song remains, MacGowan’s final tweet, posted on Nov. 16, was a video of NFL star Travis Kelce singing the song with his brother and fellow football star, Jason, for the latter’s charity holiday album.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

• Shane MacGowan, founder of the Pogues, dies at 65

• The unlikely tale of 'Do They Know It's Christmas?': An 'OK song that became something much better than it actually was'

• Did you know there are 4 different 'Do They Know It's Christmases'? Throw your arms around them all.

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