Twenty-five years ago this month, the only Christmas song worth listening to all year long was released. The Pogues’
“Fairytale of New York” captured something the saccharine, cloying repetition of songs like “Jingle Bell Rock” had no hope of achieving. It’s a four-minute ballad about the rise and fall of expectations, watching the cold real world puncture a shiny bauble of Christmas optimism. It plays out against the backdrop of the rough New York City of the ’80s, a place, as the song says, with “cars big as bars” and “rivers of gold,” which even a member of the band tells The Post they were all
“s – - t-scared” to visit.
The song has a special place in the hearts of even the most cynical New Yorkers. It’s the 11th most-played song on the jukebox at Paddy Reilly’s pub in Kips Bay; a bartender there says she hears it three or four times a night during Christmas season.
But why does this song strike a chord that “Frosty the Snowman” just doesn’t? The story starts more than 25 years ago, when the up-and-coming Irish rockers the Pogues were contemplating writing a Christmas song. Lead singer Shane MacGowan and the rest of the band were enchanted by the idea of a myth of New York, even though none of the band had ever visited.
“We were being a little bit romantic with old films, whole places swathed in steam coming out of the ground,” says James Fearnley, who plays accordion and other instruments in the band, and released a memoir “Here Comes Everybody: The Story of the Pogues” in April.
The song is practically the Christmas national anthem in the United Kingdom, says Steve Wickins, a Sussex, England, native and lead singer of the local Pogues cover band Streams of Whiskey. It hit No. 2 on the UK Christmas charts in 1987; Even Wickins’ 80-year-old mother knows the words and sings along.
Yet it hasn’t quite implanted itself in the American easy listening seasonal radio cannon; it never made it on the American charts. This could be due to its rather dark subject matter, digging into the fears of disappointment and loneliness that haunt us all around the holidays. That’s particularly true in New York, a city of transplants, many of whom are chasing the same flawed dream of opportunity MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl share in the song.
“ ‘Fairytale of New York’ doesn’t feel dated,” says Wickins. “It feels like it could’ve been written yesterday.”
Karen Kelly, a graduate student at Columbia who also plays in Streams of Whiskey, remembers hearing it for the first time on a bus radio in Ireland. The sad opening piano was what drew her in — the depiction of a New York gone by, the place MacColl warns where “the wind goes right through you, it’s no place for the old.”
“It reminds me of a time when New York was just much seedier,” she says.
When the Pogues finally did visit New York City in 1987, they were awestruck, flitting around in limos, getting locked into the Limelight after falling asleep drunk. “It was a place to sharpen yourself up a bit on,” Fearnley says.
“I don’t think it’s as much as a whetstone as it used to be.”
Of course, like any fairy tale, this one contains some embellishment. In the chorus, the band belts: “The boys of the NYPD choir were singing ‘Galway Bay,’ ” which was a problem when they wanted to shoot a video: There is no NYPD choir. Instead, they hired the NYPD Pipes and Drums band to stand out in a cold November day in Washington Square Park. But they still didn’t all know the words to Galway Bay.
Kevin McCarthy, a retired NYPD detective and band member who can be seen in the video, grew up in Jackson Heights and says the song captures a magical alchemy that New Yorkers relate to around this time of year.
“These two [in the song] are wandering around Manhattan with really nothing much for them,” he says.
“I don’t have my finger on it why this is still as popular. Wherever people hear it, they just gravitate to it.”
At the end of the song, MacColl blames MacGowan for stealing her dreams. MacGowan rebuts, in a parting shot, that no, he didn’t steal them; he made them part of his own. As flawed as the romance of New York was, at least they had each other.
tdonnelly2@nypost.com