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Although “Fairytale of New York” is meant now, the song by the Anglo-Irish folk punk band The Pogues, released in 1988, hardly connects anything more than the title with Donleavy’s novel, the mood described in the lexicon also fits this song like a fist in the eye. Even his first stanza contains a whole story in just a few 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
The lyrical self spends its Christmas Eve in the sobering cell, and as if that weren’t sad enough, it meets an old man there who thinks he will probably never see another Christmas. Then the old man begins to sing an Irish drinking song, “The Rare Old Mountain Dew” (it is about the delicious beer from Galway Bay) – and at that moment it becomes clear that both are probably Irish immigrants who stray from New York.
When the bells ring
The singer turns away from the old man, apparently because he can’t stand looking at him, and instead speaks to the aforementioned “babe”, full of longing, as it seems at first: “And I dreamed about you”.
The second stanza describes, so you can understand it, this dream: Now everything is good, the singer has a lucky streak and has obviously won the horse race, it is Christmas and all wishes could come true. Or is it a flashback to the distant past?
Also possible. The song now seems to tip more and more into the memory – the memory of the arrival in America and its promises. It is promises of size and abundance that have attracted immigrants from all over the world – especially Irish who fled the poorest conditions long after the infamous potato hunger of 1845 and even after the Second World War in order to have things better in America.
They’ve got cars big as bars
They’ve got rivers of gold
With the musical change from ballad to dance music, the song also begins to become dialogic: Kirsty MacColl’s singing is mixed in with Shane McGowan’s singing, and in a traditional call-and-response duet, she remembers in the role of the young woman of Immigrant couple to the promises made to them by their partner:
When you first took my hand
On a cold Christmas Eve
You promised me
Broadway was waiting for me
It is becoming increasingly clear that various Christmas evenings overlap in the song text’s “Christmas Eve” – perhaps as Thornton Wilder’s play “The Long Christmas Dinner” shows. On the Christmas stage someone goes off and comes back in the next moment, aged by decades. On the stage of memory it is the other way around.
Als Sinatra swingte
So when was that Christmas the fourth verse that sang, “You were pretty / Queen of New York City”? Was it the same one that says: “Sinatra was swinging / All the drunks were singing”?
In any case, one thing is clear: Those were the days, even if there are barbs in the memory of those early days of New American euphoria. When it says about the Promised Land: “The wind goes right through you / It’s no place for the old”, everyone can understand what rough wind blows there, but it is perhaps also an allusion to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats . The line “This is no country for old men” comes from his poem “Sailing to Byzantium” (1928). The poem uncomprehendingly describes a hedonistic youth who has lost respect for timeless art and the “unageing intellect”. You don’t necessarily need it to understand the song of the Pogues – but with a kind of deep drilling it shows that the singer, Shane MacGowan, who is notorious for his addiction-related total failures and ultimately even thrown out of the band, wrote a very subtle text here, which has it all in many ways.
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