Can it really be 21 years ago that The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl first sang Fairytale of New York? It seems like only yesterday! Although it now fairly regularly wins polls in the UK as the "best Christmas song ever" (I'm not sure about that, but it has a special place in my heart - and many other people's, I'm sure - because it was so original, so subversive in choosing to celebrate the fact that love can exist even between deadbeats, and can survive arguments and abuse), at the time it only made it to No. 2 in the charts. It was kept off the top spot by The Pet Shop Boys' rather insipid cover of the Elvis classic Always On My Mind (an indignant Shane would sourly refer to them as "two queens and a drum machine"). Here's the original video - don't they look young?
If you're one of those people who just can't get enough of this song..... then you might want to look at this too, a great live performance from St Patrick's Day 1988, just three months after the original release, when the band were in their prime. And I learn from YouTube that last year they performed it on TV again, for the first time in god-knows-how-long (20-year anniversary celebrations, I suppose), with Shane once again reunited with the band and Katie Melua filling in for Kirsty. This one is chiefly interesting to see how they've aged (which is mostly not well, particularly with poor old Shane - but the way those lads used to party, you're amazed that they're still here). A rather more appropriate replacement for Kirsty is Sinead O'Connor, who performed the song in concert with the boys in Dublin last Christmas; unfortunately, her vocals don't come over too clearly on this bootleg, although the picture quality is good. This cellphone camera footage of the same concert is actually rather fun, in that it captures the frenetic singalong atmosphere (even though the sound and the picture are inevitably pretty piss-poor).
Not a dry eye in the house.....
A Merry Christmas to all my readers! (...if I still have any??)
4 comments:
Even looking at Shane McGowan in that 1988 clip is startling -- I didn't realize he'd already lost that many teeth by that point. Those whom the gods love...
.... lose their teeth?
He has a bad habit of picking fights with people when he's drunk. He once got his nose broken by - oh, what was her name? a briefly famous Mancunian girl singer.
There's an amusing biography of him written by his long-time girlfriend Victoria Clarke. I can lend it to you, if you like.
How was your burger?
Lisa Stansfield, that was it!
He made some boorish remark while drunk, and she punched him out! I think was was around the time of Fairytale's original release, maybe the following year.
I think you can leave out the "when drunk" part from any anecdote about McGowan.
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