How Shane MacGowan Made a Holiday Favorite: ‘Fairytale of New York’

MacColl mastered not only the song’s unusual phrasing, in which MacGowan sings so far behind the beat he’s almost left behind, but the lyrics’ mix of bittersweet resignation and rage. “It’s a very nuanced way of singing. I spent a long time getting every note and rhythm right, for it to swing,” Lillywhite said. “Kirsty is perfect on it.” (She died in 2000; a recent boxed set collects her work.)

In the song’s piano-and-voice introduction, MacGowan has been nicked for drunkenness, and his elderly cellmate sings the traditional Irish tune “The Rare Old Mountain Dew,” one of two songs-within-the-song. MacGowan begins to reminisce about a woman, with a slurred sense of optimism: “Happy Christmas, I love you, baby.” Then MacColl enters, and the two reminisce about the joyful start of their relationship as Irish immigrants in New York City.

In the next verse, there’s a jump cut to the miserable present as the couple exchange insults, with MacColl ultimately announcing, “Happy Christmas, your arse, I pray God it’s our last.” It’s a small sign of songwriting savvy that MacGowan made the woman’s invective stronger than the man’s.

The use of a gay slur in that section went largely unnoticed in 1987, but more recently, a few of the song’s epithets have been bleeped out by some broadcasters. In a 2018 statement, MacGowan explained that the words he used were true to the identity of the characters. “She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person,” he said, adding that he had no objection to having the lyrics bleeped.

Finer’s music matches the complexity of the lyrics by using suspended chords and a switch to a minor key in the chorus (“The boys of the N.Y.P.D. Choir were singing ‘Galway Bay’”) to create tension and unease. In the last verse, MacGowan gently tries to reconcile with his lover. “You really don’t know what is going to happen to them. The ending is completely open,” he told The Guardian in 2012.

There have even been covers of “Fairytale of New York,” including one by Jon Bon Jovi (“Terrible,” Lillywhite groaned). This holiday season, the brothers Jason and Travis Kelce, both N.F.L. stars, released a version with changed lyrics, “Fairytale of Philadelphia.” “The song gets to the roots of love, anger, resentment, sacrifice and ultimately companionship. It lays out what relationships really are, that they are something bigger than yourself,” Jason Kelce of the Philadelphia Eagles wrote in an email.