SHANE'S DRUNKEN FAIRYTALE

If I should fall from grace with God
Where no doctor can relieve me
If I'm buried in the sod
But the angels won't receive me

Let me go, boys, let me go, boys
Let me go down in the mud, where the rivers all run dry

So it seems the festive classic, 'Fairytale Of New York' will be especially poignant this year as news of Shane MacGowan's death floods the timelines of my 'socials'. Christmas has never been the same since that iconic song first appeared on our radios and televisions in 1988 when I was just ten years old. It married both the mythos of Ireland and New York in a duet that avoided the twee sentimentality that is so common with that transatlantic trope (Biden's 'Blarney', for example) by being both of the street and written from deep within the heart and the bottle. If MacGowan had only written this one song in his entire life then his immortality would be easily assured regardless of the many other classics from his canon such as 'The Old Main Drag', 'If I Should Fall From Grace' and 'A Rainy Night In Soho'.

For me, the Pembury born singer/songwriter was both the epitome of punk and a continuation of the eternal raging of defiance and anarchy that one finds throughout the entire history of protest songs. But MacGowan and The Pogues were so much more than just your typical folky politicos who always seem to suffer from a perpetual arrested development of the mind.

Perhaps it's ironic then, that in a week where Ireland finds itself in the grip of a new social/cultural existential crisis following the injuries sustained to young children at a school in Dublin City, that the closest replacement to MacGowan as a punk-like figure of rage and controversy is the MMA fighter, Conor McGregor. Except McGregor can't sing and doesn't appear able to fight much either these days so all we're left with is his gob.

MacGowan had a gob but mostly he used it for singing, where his stubby teeth and drunken obliviousness seemed as compelling as Brando in his hey day, an outsider who drank his way to the top and all the way back down to the bottom like a cross between Walter Brenan and Dean Martin in Howard Hawks's 'Rio Bravo' (1959).

I'll certainly raise a glass of whiskey to the Irish rebel this Christmas when I listen to the original, unwokeified 'Fairytale' and maybe even shed a tear to the timeless heart felt poetry of the immortal lines ...

It was Christmas Eve babe
In the drunk tank
An old man said to me, won't see another one
And then he sang a song
The Rare Old Mountain Dew
I turned my face away
And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one
Came in eighteen to one
I've got a feeling
This year's for me and you
So happy Christmas
I love you baby
I can see a better time
When all our dreams come true

They've got cars big as bars
They've got rivers of gold
But the wind goes right through you
It's no place for the old
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me

You were handsome
You were pretty
Queen of New York City
When the band finished playing
They howled out for more
Sinatra was swinging
All the drunks they were singing
We kissed on a corner
Then danced through the night

The boys of the NYPD choir
Were singing Galway Bay
And the bells were ringing out
For Christmas day

You're a bum
You're a punk
You're an old slut on junk
Lying there almost dead on a drip in that bed
You scumbag, you maggot
You’re cheap and you’re haggard
Happy Christmas your arse
I pray God it's our last

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day

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 all alone
I've built my dreams around you

The boys of the NYPD choir
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day