the making of “fairytale of new york” by the pogues - featuring steve lillywhite, jem finer and james fearnley

Intro:

Dan Nordheim: You’re listening to Life of the Record. Classic albums, told by the people who made them. My name is Dan Nordheim.

The Pogues formed in London in 1982 by Shane MacGowan, Spider Stacy and Jem Finer. MacGowan had gotten his start playing in the punk band, the Nipple Erectors, and when that band broke up, he began playing in an Irish traditional music style. Gradually, they added James Fearnley, Cait O’Riordan and John Hasler to become a sextet. Andrew Ranken replaced John Hasler on drums as they signed with Stiff Records. Their debut album, Red Roses for Me, was released in 1984. For their second album, they added Philip Chevron on guitar and hired Elvis Costello as their producer. Rum Sodomy & the Lash was released in 1985, and they continued working with Costello for the Poguetry in Motion EP, released the following year. At this point, Cait O’Riordan left the band and they updated the lineup to include Darryl Hunt and Terry Woods. They signed to Island Records and hired Steve Lillywhite to produce their third album. If I Should Fall from Grace with God was eventually released in 1988 and included the Christmas single, “Fairytale of New York.”

In this episode, Steve Lillywhite, Jem Finer and James Fearnley reflect on how “Fairytale of New York” came together. This is the making of “Fairytale of New York.”

Steve Lillywhite: My name is Steve Lillywhite and I'm a music producer from the UK and I produced “Fairytale of New York” by the Pogues and also the album If I Should Fall from Grace with God for them. And have a listen to this podcast. The whole idea of making art of any sort, you know, whether you are building a house, it's art. The pinnacle of any art maker is timeless art, of course. And you know, you never know whether you've made timeless art until time has elapsed, because that's the definition of it. So you cannot say this song's gonna be timeless because you don't know. But you know, I think with “Fairytale of New York,” I think we did make timeless art. You know, the idea of writing the anti-Christmas, Christmas song, it came from that idea. And I love when a big idea works. And the big idea was that the anti-Christmas, Christmas song, no one had written that before.

Jem Finer: My name's Jem Finer. I'm a member of the Pogues. I've written, recorded, performed with them for over 40 years. Banjo is my main instrument and I wrote a lot of songs with Shane MacGowan, among them, “Fairytale of New York.” We'd been in a kind of hiatus as far as recording went. There were some problems with Stiff Records, which I've never quite understood what they are or were, I mean. And we had, you know, most of the songs that ended up on If I Should Fall from Grace with God, we were playing for a year or two. So by the time we got this situation resolved and we could record a new album, somehow we'd been hooked up with Steve Lillywhite.

Steve Lillywhite: Before I worked with them. I was, it wasn't really the sort of band that I was used to. And in fact, I was in Dublin working on, The Joshua Tree with U2 and I happened to be in Paul McGuinness, their manager's office when the Pogues manager was in there as well, just visiting and I sort of knew Frank Murray at the time, because he also managed my, had managed my wife at the time, Kirsty MacColl. So Frank said to me, “Steve, the Pogues are gonna do an album soon,” you know, terrible Irish accent, I apologize. “Would you be interested?” And I said, “Well, I don't really know much about that style of music,” but he sort of said, “Yeah, you'd be great. You'd be great.” So I sort of went and had a meeting and we agreed to do it. And I found myself recording instruments I'd never really even heard of, you know, and to have a tin whistle in every song was definitely something that I wasn't used to.

Jem Finer: Steve was suggested and he was interested. And for us that was really exciting because, you know, our whole history of recording had been something where we were obviously getting better, playing our music. We were getting more savvy about recording studios, so we'd started off being quite kind of amateur on the first album. Elvis Costello had produced the second album, which was a kind of revelation in many ways, musically, and just someone coming that had, you know, a lot of experience of recording, production experience too. So the idea of working with Steve was really exciting to work with someone who had worked with lots of bands that we liked and you know, it felt like a sort of step up production wise. So yeah, we were kind of chomping at a bit, really, because we'd been, you know, denied the opportunity to make this record for a while.

Steve Lillywhite: The lineup had changed a little bit from Rum Sodomy & the Lash. It was much more broad than just doing Irish style songs. You know, they wanted to really prove to people that they had a varied palette, you know, and I was very lucky, I got them at a great time. You know, they were really ready to go. And I felt their ambition, you know, I felt that they wanted to have more than just a folk Irish record, you know, because they were ambitious. They’d expanded the band and, you know, they felt that their songs were as good as anyone's, which they were of course.

James Fearnley: My name's James Fearnley. I play, according with The Pogues, I was the piano player on the opening to “Fairytale of New York.” We had an outfit, I think with Jem, Spider, myself, Andrew, Cait O’Riordan at the time as well. And with Shane, the six of us were doing all right except for the erraticness of Shane's guitar playing. He was a good guitar player because he just played on instinct and passion and anger and emotion basically. But when it came to playing live and in the studio particularly, actually it felt like he had too much to do singing and playing at the same time. So that's basically, as far as I remember how Philip, we asked Philip to come into the band. And thenTerry was Frank, our manager's longtime associate friend from Dublin, and then we became eight. And then Cait fucked off after rehearsal one day. She was our original bass player, age of 17, she came on board, because, I think Shane fancied her. I don't think Shane had identified any particular talent in her as a bass player, but none of us had any particular talent in what we were playing at the very beginning. I had no idea, Jem was learning the banjo from scratch. So I don't mean that to say that she was never gonna be a great bass player. In fact, I think she was, she was a great singer. And then, through Philip Chevron, actually Philip invited Elvis Costello to come to one of our gigs and Elvis basically just fell in love with Cait on site. And then, so she went away to marry him.

Jem Finer: Cait left the band and Darryl, who had been sort of helping us out really since we started, driving us around and doing sound and stuff for us, you know, he came in playing bass and musically that was a step up. No disrespect to Cait. I mean, you know, I've seen her playing bass in the last few years and she's really amazing. But at the time she had a great presence and energy, but musically she was still quite raw. So that was one thing. The other thing was that Andrew, the drummer, we'd always made him, well, we'd always restricted him to two drums, a snare, and a floor tom. As much as he sometimes hinted he’d like, maybe a kick drum or a hi-hat or a cymbal, we wouldn't let him. And that was very much part of that early Pogues sound, the sort of real driving, minimal beat you got from these two drums.

James Fearnley: We said to Andrew, you know, “You got to stand up cause every, it is great when everybody stands up.” It wasn't just the designing of the drums, it was also because, “everybody stands in this band to play.” Until a tour of Germany…

Jem Finer: He injured one of his fingers through some rim shots he was doing, he must have been hitting the corner of his finger on the rim of the drum and he got sepsis.

James Fearnley: And he went off to the hospital and he came back rather tearful to say that he could have lost his hand because of the septicemia in his knuckle. So then we allowed him (laughs) and then we allowed him to sit down after that. It wasn't until, you know, a brush with death that we allowed anybody to do what they wanted (laughs). So, yeah, he was allowed to sit down after that. And that's how, you know, then the rest of the sound that we made was with the full kit with somebody playing the fucking drums properly.

Jem Finer: So once that came in, it never went away. Even when his hands were better, the kick drum stayed and he very quickly amassed a whole drum kit around him. So the combination of that and Darryl being the bass player, suddenly the rhythm section was like a whole different animal. It was like, it was like this amazing thing that could do lots of stuff that it could never do before. So that really opened up a lot of things.

James Fearnley: When we got into the recording studios with Steve at RAK, Andrew and Philip and Darryl became known as the engine room. Those three of them were identified as the, by Steve as the engine room. And I suppose then Jem and me and Terry became the kind of, well, deck swabbers maybe.

Steve Lillywhite: To start with, in the middle you've got the engine room, because we called them the engine room, which was Philip Chevron on acoustic guitar, Darryl on bass, and Andrew on drums. And those three was the basic sort of, I mean, the acoustic guitar, it's one of those sounds in the Pogues that you don't really hear it, but if I took it out, you'd go, “The glue's gone.” There's something about the glue of the acoustic guitar that Philip played, which was brilliant. So I'd had that there, and then I would have the wingers, you know, which was Terry Woods, the cittern and the accordion of James. So they would be on the outside, and then inside I would have the whistle and the banjo. So I sort of looked at it as a football team. So we went in and, and recorded If I Should Fall from Grace with God, which included “Fairytale of New York.” But the thing that, my first impression really of being in the studio was, “Oh my God, I can't remember all their names.” So actually I had a cheat sheet (laughs) underneath the desk, which had all the names of the band on because, you know, it was a lot of people.

Jem Finer: By the time we got in the studio with Steve, I think the songs benefited from having been played live a lot. We could work very quickly, getting the tracks down, good performances. And then it was interesting to work with him the way he worked as opposed to previous producers.

Steve Lillywhite: I try to run the ship, you know, I'm like the captain of the ship and I wanna keep the craziness, you know, that's what the Pogues are all about. But you know, you record them early in the morning because you don't do a backing track at 10 o'clock at night because they're all probably a little bit squiffy. Now Shane is, Shane was probably the most bohemian person I'd ever met. You know, probably him and Keith Richards are the two truly bohemian people I've worked with. You know, if they get up at nine o'clock in the morning, it's purely coincidental. You know, they could get up at nine o'clock at night, midnight, you know, they sleep where they're tired. I'm far too middle class, you know, I, I have to have my bed at night and my routine, you know, otherwise I'd go crazy. But these people are so free and so, I mean, it's a wonderful thing to experience. But, you know, I knew when he was in good form, I thought, (snaps), “gotta get him.”

Jem Finer: I mean, Shane was, I don't know, maybe it sort of surprises people cause he has this reputation of having, you know, which is often focused on all the wrong things, but certainly in those days, he was an incredibly dedicated songwriter. He would endlessly revise and write and move things around from one song to another. So Shane's writing was developing, I was writing more and writing with Shane, band were getting better at playing their instruments. The rhythm section was suddenly this reborn, you know, fully fledged amazing world class rhythm section.People are more imaginative, maybe about arrangements. No, not more imaginative, but we could actually realize more of the things we imagined. You know, “Fairytale of New York”’s, a prime example. You know, it took about three years for us to be able to play that the way it needed to be played.

James Fearnley: The evolution of Fairytale of New York was protracted, so it was, seemed to go on for ages and ages and ages and ages. It came out of a collaboration, if you will, between Jem and Marcia, his wife and Shane, and also from the weird sort of input that Frank Murray would have with it as well. Isn't it funny, as soon as I say Frank Murray's name, it is sort of like, I want to denigrate his input into our musical thing cause I want to keep him distant in my mind. But he said, you know, “Why don't we do a Christmas single?” And it's like, (sarcastically) “alright, fine, great.”

Jem Finer: I remember the manager suggesting we do a Christmas song, and do a cover version of some song by the Band and thinking, “Well, if we're gonna do a Christmas song, we should write one for a start.” And talking to Shane about it and we thought, “Yeah, let’s write a duet.” I think we were quite to the idea of duets. We were at the time, rather into, well, Tom Waits, who's always been in enduring object of admiration. And there was a duet with Bette Midler we used to listen to a lot. So it was probably, “Oh yeah, let's do a Tom Waits-esque Christmas duet or something” (laughs). I mean, yeah, there was a lot of fanciful ideas floating around, sometimes they sort of found their way into being. So Shane and I decided to write a Christmas duet, and the way we had worked together was we'd kind of work apart and then we'd get together and see what we had and take it from there. Sort of put things together, reject stuff, edit stuff.

James Fearnley: So after, I suppose, collectively considering the Christmas single recording or whatever, so Jem went away to think about, you know, what a Christmas song would be about. And it was turned out to be about somebody going away to see and missing his girl somewhere and then coming home and everything, all the bells ring or something, (laughs) something like that.

Jem Finer: So I wrote two songs, sort of embryonic Christmas duets, the first of which the melodies survive from, and the second of which the storyline survives from. So the first one I played to Marcia, my wife, and she was always a very good critic and sounding board, and she basically told me she saw it as a load of rubbish lyrically certainly. So I guess I was quite defensive about that and upset, but you know, I said, “Okay, well, or are you suggest, you know, you suggest something better.” And so she told me a story. I think Marcia's story was, yeah, I think she was thinking about some people who lived in our street, which I then wrote a second song around, which is the story that's in “Fairytale of New York,” the song as we know it now. You know, it's of a couple down on their luck and Christmas is coming and the pressures of Christmas and the guy goes and gambles away the money, but ultimately they find a sort of chink of light and there's this sort of partial redemption she would call it, where they are together and dancing and who knows what happens after or happened before. So it's just like this moment in a sort of long story of two people. What I first wrote certainly was far too sentimental. It was rubbish and you know, that's pretty much what Marcia said. She said, you know, “That is not a Pogues song that you've written.” She was totally right.

James Fearnley: And Maricia said, “No, no, you can't write a song like that about, but just have a look around you. Look over like our neighbors who row every Christmas and Christmas is a difficult time because the expectation is that everybody gets on and is happy and everything has got tinsel on it. And, and there's Carols everywhere and people are generous, but no, like lots of things go to shit over Christmas, write a song about that.”

Jem Finer: And Shane told that story and he transposed it from London to New York and wrote it in a very beautiful, brilliant way, which I think really brought out the whole sort of cinematic scope of potential of that story, you know, it alluded to, to how they got there in that moment and left you wondering what happened next. So, you know, Marcia's, you know, vision in that was crucial. I mean, really, she's like a third writer of that song. So, and then Shane had written the slow introduction bit, and then we just started to put it all together.

James Fearnley: He and Shane got together and I think maybe Shane came up with the kind of basic building blocks of it, you know, the no hope that goes to, takes his girlfriend to New York City or finds himself there or, you know, some fuckup who gets himself locked in the jail on Christmas Eve and maybe has a dream about how things could have gone.

Jem Finer: And it went through so many iterations, you know. At one point, quite early on it was like, it had a bit of Bing Crosby in it. It had far more lyrics. I mean its genesis is partially documented, I think, in outtakes that appear on various book sets and stuff. But I think, yeah, we first tried to record it when we were making the Poguetry in Motion EP with Elvis Costello, with Cait singing it. It just never seemed to quite work and we'd come back to it periodically. Shane would edit the lyrics, we'd work on arrangements until it got to the point where, you know, it sounded pretty much like it does now, but we still couldn't, recording it still didn't really work. It didn't work until we tried it with Steve.

Steve Lillywhite: I think I'd heard the version with Cait that Elvis had done. And to be honest, I thought it was good. You know, I, I didn't think it was a record. I knew it could be better, you know, but so I was very glad that they didn't blow it and release it the year before, and that they waited and waited to just tweak the writing. And also, you know, I mean, one of the things that was quite amazing was they said to me, “Steve, we have a terrible problem transitioning from the early part of the song to when the band comes in.” And I said, “What do you mean?” He says, “We can never do, you know, we get the intro right and then we fuck up the main bit.” And I said, “Well, can't we just do it in two sections and I'll chop the tape together?” And they said, “Oh, that's a good idea.” No one had ever thought about doing that. You know, it's very obvious. So we went in and just did piano and Shane.

James Fearnley: The opening stanza of the thing is just the piano and Shane's voice, which is a thrill to do, I have to say, just me and him. But in the studio, just to have Shane there in my ears and then to play this thing on the piano that I practiced and practiced and practiced. I just know that there are movements in it, in the actual piano playing that I was really proud of. And I did not, not, not, not want to fuck it up. I did, you know, a few times. But the one take that Steve Lillywhite would not step away from was the one where I hit a fucking note above the one that I was heading for and I said, “I'm gonna have to do it again.” He says, “No, that was the one that we gotta keep cause everything else was perfect. You're not changing it.” So I was, got to live with it sounding like that.

Steve Lillywhite: And because of the way we were, we were recording it, it had to be either the piano and the voice together, or we do another take because there was bleed in between the two and it, we couldn't have redone the vocal or redone the piano because you'd have heard a ghost because it was so empty at the front. So we actually did six takes of that intro and we listened back to them and we all decided take four was the one.

James Fearnley: Yeah, it was a huge challenge to play the piano along with Shane because I felt it was like my job to stick with him. I think he was never likely to try and stick with me. I don't think it was a balance there at all. Yeah, I wonder if one could extrapolate from that, you know, a relationship in life that, but I think you probably, I think you probably could. Oh God, yeah, no, it was, it is like one of the high points of a career was to do that and something that, something I'm really, really proud of. Even though I can remember all the anxiety and the implications and everything else that went along with that experience, as I say, you know, extrapolatable, if you know what I mean. There was a relationship being played out there as well, not just a musical passage sort of thing.

We were having difficulty with trying to get the whole song to be a whole song. It seems like it was a question of finding ourselves with Steve at RAK Recording Studios and when it come to recording “Fairytale of New York,” it felt like such a new set of eyes, ears. Yeah, that he just said, “Oh, this is easy. It's easy. You just, you to record this verse and you record this second, then we're gonna splice it together.” Fine. And then once you've got that, it ceased to become a problem playing it live. I mean, my concern was to come away from the piano and then start playing the accordion.

Steve Lillywhite: And then literally the band went in and counted in the main parts of the song. And once we got that, I went and got the razor blade out and chopped the tape together. And that's how it worked.

Jem Finer: I remember that very clearly cause really it was a no brainer. And I don't know why no one had ever thought of it before, but he was very good at splicing tape together. I mean, it seems so crazy now in this sort of digital world of cutting and pasting stuff. But you know, I mean, that was always a real thrill to watch engineers and producers cutting up tape. It was so sort of precise and it sort of boggling that it didn't sort of make a little click, I suppose, if you did it wrong, it did. But yeah, it was a kind of no brainer, I suppose, that we'd never thought of. I guess we'd tried it, playing the whole thing through and he just saw, you know, there was something in trying to get from the transition and maybe people anxious about, you know, coming in or dropping out, whatever. So he very sensibly said, “Okay, well let's, we'll do it in two bits.” We recorded it then really quickly and like, you know, a matter of an hour or two, we'd done both parts and there was this beautiful moment of watching the tape splicing, and then there it was. It was really exciting and a huge kinda relief in a way as well because there's quite an anxiety in, you know, writing something and it never working and this feeling that will it ever work. You know, will people lose interest in it? You know, a lot of good songs never made it, not because there are bad songs, but because we could never really get, you know, a good enough version.

James Fearnley: I think maybe narratively speaking, the opening piano and voice sequence is an introduction to what might be real or might be not. Cause it's been put to me that the next part of everything is actually a dream and the reality is the piano and the voice singing about being in a prison cell, much like Once Upon a Time in America where. Robert De Niro takes the blast of opium and then is the rest of the film real or not? So narratively speaking, that could be the lead up to Robert De Niro in the opium den. And then he just goes off into a revery about what could have happened or didn't happen. And one wonders if the opening bit of “Fairytale in New York” is the reality and the rest of it is just made up.

Jem Finer: A film we watched a lot at the time was Once Upon a Time in America. Shane in particular, it was quite an obsession. I think Shane was someone who would watch, he'd get obsessed with a film and he would watch it endlessly in those days, he had to go to the cinema to do that. You couldn't watch it on a VHS tape or stream it or anything. I don’t know how many times he went to see it, but yeah, it was a big film for him. That piece of music obviously is really kind of iconic. I was found a few lines of it in Mozart, some piece by Mozart, that introduction, the Ennio Morricone introduction, which ours alludes to, you know, that Shane wrote that piece. Beautiful. So obviously, you know, has a long sort of history, those few notes.

James Fearnley: I'm thinking of Ennio Morricone as well for particularly when it came to Jem's writing. I suppose the first sort of sounds that kind of coalesced into “Fairytale of New York,” I would say, because we listened to Ennio Morricone's music a lot and I do think that strands in “Fairytale of New York” do come on a direct sort of line from Ennio Morricone’s kind of sonic palette as it were. If they're not directly lifted (laughs). I was just trying to skirt the subject.

Jem Finer: It was actually written before we'd ever been to New York. It was a New York of his imagination and a New York sort of relayed to him through, you know, what other people told him about New York or their experiences in New York. So that's quite an interesting thing. So maybe that's why it also feels a bit cinematic, possibly because he's seeing it in his imagination, like a film.

James Fearnley: 1986 was the first time we went there and I remember it being cold as fuck. Our first visit to New York, I think we were just sort of open mouthed at the place. So it held a lot of charm and awe and everything for all of us and certainly to Shane. Yeah, I think so, I mean, the whole New York thing and whether it's a romanticized view of New York, well, I think it is, I think musically it's maybe romanticized on my part. And of course it's romanticized on the protagonist's part as well, you know, the rivers of gold and indeed, you know, the images that we saw going there of the trees that have been sort of decked in, you know, wrapped in fairy lights and stuff, it was a really, you know, visually enchanting place to go to, but with a kind of danger in the background.

Originally it had, you know, before, Cait O’Riordan was going to do the female part in “Fairytale of New York.” But obviously with her jumping ship and going to be with Costello. Yeah, I suppose we were a bit stuck as to who was gonna do the girl part.

Jem Finer: Well, no one was really sure who the female singer was gonna be, to be honest. And, well, Steve was married to Kirsty and went home with the master tape after we'd just recorded it. I think we must have recorded it on a Friday. And he said, “Okay, we'll see you on a Monday.” And he came back on the Monday and he said, “Well, I just took the tapes home and I just asked Kirsty to sing a guide vocal on it so you could get a feel of what it sounded like as a duet.”

Steve Lillywhite: They said it's a duet. And I think it may have been Frank Murray again who was their manager at the time, who had also managed Kirsty said, “Do you think Kirsty might be good?” And I think the band had slightly higher, I mean, Kirsty was a pop star, but she wasn't like really well known in the UK and I think they were very ambitious. They were talking about maybe Chrissie Hynde to sing the girl’s vocals. So, because Kirsty was a huge fan of the Pogues and she was like, family anyway. And I had a studio at home because I worked on her songs. I said, “Look guys, I'll take the tape home at the weekend. Let me record it with Kirsty.” And we had two young kids, so we spent the weekend doing one vocal with her, but just going in and redoing bits and then having a break and then going, listening going, “Ooh, that line,” you know? So we really sort of sewed her vocal together and, but it, I think it's a pretty flawless vocal and because, you know, no one else has come close to singing it as well as Kirsty did. I honestly believe that, you know, and so we did the vocal with her at home and then I took it back in. She didn't come in with me on Monday when I played it to the band. But Monday morning, took it in and the band heard it and they were pretty floored. And Chrissie Hynde wasn't mentioned again.

James Fearnley: You know, very casually, Steve said, “Oh, I'll take it home and see what Kirsty could do with it after the weekend.” Come back with sort of vocal layers and everything and harmonies up the wazoo. No, it wasn't, no, it wasn't harmonies up the wazoo, they were very, it was a very nicely put together vocal take on something, and it was just like, “Well, damn. All right, well let's stop worrying about that then. Can she sing it?” And she can, well she could and she did. It was really, really fantastic. Yeah it's to sitting in that control room at RAK, just sort of like staring at the floor thinking, “Oh, fuck yeah” (laughs).

Jem Finer: And we were all going, “okay, well let's hear it Steve.” And well, obviously it was like amazing. It was like, “Hang on, this isn't a guide vocal, this is,” it wasn't a guide vocal. There's all sorts of harmonies on it and stuff. It obviously, Kirsty was very like, good at sort of very quickly inventing parts for herself. I imagine when she imagined singing something, she didn't hear just one melody line. She heard a whole sort of choral piece, performed by her exclusively, all the harmonies. So, you know, it wasn't just like a guide vocal just knocked out. It was something worked on and considered and brilliant. So it then is a fait accompli, a beautiful fait accompli. We didn't have to think anymore about who was gonna sing it because she'd already done the job.

Steve Lillywhite: You know, it's like this is the vocal that we want. I don't like the term rough mix, and I don't like the term guide vocal, because that implies complacency. That implies that you are not really trying your best, and I think throughout the whole recording process, you should always try your best. I never do a rough mix. I do a mix where it is at that point in time, and sometimes that mix can become the record because you never quite get it back, especially in those days, you see, because it was all done by hand and you know, the faders were pulled down and there may have been some magic there. So I would always, whenever I did a mix of the song, it might not be finished, but I never called it a rough mix because even down to the time when the band would play and then come in and listen to it, I would be mixing it so that they could hear it. I was starting to, from the very moment they would played it, I would start to work how I wanted it to be, you know? So I would often say to bands, I said, “Look, if you expect that your record's gonna be very different from how it is sounding.” I remember you see Tom Bailey from the Thompson Twins once said to me, “Steve, it seems weird to me, but seems to me that as you make a record, the amount of choices you make as you go on should become less and less and less until you have the record.” And I went, “God, that makes sense.” But you know, with multi-track now and the hundred tracks, the amount of choices goes outwards. You know, and then you have to bring it in later. But that whole idea of doing things and being bold, I mean, you know, we had 24 tracks, so it was like, there was pretty much a safety net. What the Beatles did was incredible 'cause they had to bounce things together. So if they made a mistake, they were fucked, you know? But I would always try and make things sound as best as possible throughout the process cause complacency is something I don't like.

James Fearnley: Really brilliant because yeah, she had just the right tone to do it cause her tone is unmistakable and as indeed Shane's is. So it was kind of, it matched it pretty much up and down. The who's who, not just because it's a girl and a boy or anything, but there's like a, there's a whole attitude stance, you know, the stuff underneath the surface of the water, iceberg thing that “she's Kirsty McColl and he's Shane McGowan. And here they are singing something here that you'll never hear again.” Fantastic. Really fantastic.

Steve Lillywhite: Well, what happened was I brought the song back to the studio and in fact Shane heard Kirsty’s vocal and said, “hmm, I think I have to do mine again.” And yeah, we all said, “Yeah, I think you should, Shane.” Because he was like, “ah, mine's,” you know, he thought he'd done his vocal, but in fact Shane did it, Kirsty did it to, you know, to Shane's vocal. And then Shane did it to Kirsty’s vocal because he knew he had to be more on the, you know, more snappy. Not the front part, the front part was a duet between piano and voice, you know, so we couldn't change that. But it was from the, and it's not a hell of a lot of singing, but it's very important to get every bit right, I thought. Yeah, so I was very proud. Very proud. And she was very proud because, you know, she had a lot of stage fright at the time. Although the live version does not indicate she had stage fright because her vocal on the live version is really good. I met her actually when I was producing Simple Minds, an album called Sparkle in the Rain, and she came down to do some, some sort of atmospheric backing vocals for them. And I remember thinking, “Ooh, I'm gonna marry that girl.” I took her number on the pretext that I was going to use her for session work, you know? But no, I mean, my whole thought was, “Yeah, you are the girl for me.” So, you know, that led to a sort of eighties, 10 years of marriage and two kids and a pretty good time of, you know, ups and downs. But then, you know, our lives started drifting away and I went on to another life and she went on to another life. And unfortunately, you know, she was killed in 2000, at Christmas as well, which was very, very sad. 25 years ago this year actually. So it's the 25th anniversary of her death. But you know, she left behind some great music and, you know, you leave behind a legacy of your art.

James Fearnley: It deserved strings, that kind of song. I do think, to go along with all the other instruments that are perhaps a bit silly, put against an orchestra. They have like their own silliness, like, what's more silly than a fucking accordion? You know what I mean? It's like a bag with a harmonica on the end. It's like a stupid instrument, but given the right context and given the right story to tell and the right friends, you know, musical friends to sound with. Yeah, it's, I think it's amazing really.

Jem Finer: The strings came later. Not an afterthought as such, but, you know, once we had the track recorded, then discussion turned to arranging strings, what kind of strings, what kind of orchestra. A guy called Fiachra Trench who we'd worked with before on “Rainy Nights in Soho,” was to arrange it. And James Fernley had a huge input as well. I think he wrote some of the parts.

James Fearnley: I really wanted to be the string arranger guy. I don't have the chops for that. But I thought, “Wouldn't it be great to be able to arrange these strings?” And I'd just been listening to, On the Waterfront, Leonard Bernstein's film music for that. And I think it's Eva Marie Saint’s theme music, but it's like a canon. You get a tune and then this other tune comes underneath it and these notes kind of sit uncomfortably for a bit and then they break up into like proper harmonies and whatnot. So I listened to that over and over and over and over and over again. “I'm just gonna get whoever arranges the strings, I'm gonna get him to get some of that into ‘Fairytale of New York.’” I went to Steve Lillywhite’s house one day, over one night cause he has a home studio and kind of roughed something out on a synthesizer or something. And one or two people in the band sort of thought, “What the fuck's that?” But I made it work with, Fiachra Trench, the string arrangement guy, who was very, very helpful towards me. Lovely bloke. So that's as far as I got with the string arrangements. I'm so proud to be able to have worked on something quite as sophisticated as that.

Steve Lillywhite: Well, the strings were the last thing to go on, and as I say, the, Shane was, you know, I think he wanted the outro to be more rollicking and more raucous, and it was a little polite, but, you know, it's still good. But it actually fades out quite quickly because, you know, for the radio we wanted that. But the live version goes on for about another 20 seconds, 25 seconds or something. And it's really good cause you've got the, there's a great brass line (sings brass line) that you don't really hear on the record. It’s just beautiful. And that's James Fearnley, the accordion player from the band who does a brilliant job. That's his line. You know, it's, it's like a Gershwin sort of thing, you know? Wonderful.

James Fearnley: And then you get this counter melody coming in, which is basically me trying to channel Leonard Bernstein in On the Waterfront into this things because it's an American kinda story and everything and add those kind of sonorities in it, which I was really keen on getting to come out in this song.

Dan Nordheim (interviewer): So, one question about that is, you mentioned On the Waterfront, were you also thinking about the, “I could have been someone line” that Shane has, that's kind of the, “I could have been a contender” sort of line?

James Fearnley: Oh, that's so interesting! Oh my God, that's hit me in a very deep place actually, that has. No, never gave it a consideration unless I was being spoken to on a level that I wasn't aware. I'm pretty sure that, I was not aware of that, but your suggestion has reached me on a level that I wasn't expecting. So, I don’t know. It makes me want to be tearful actually, to hear something like that. I think that's really, really amazing.

Steve Lillywhite: “I could have been someone. Well, so could anyone.” And I think that's the best lyric I've ever been involved in. You know, because it says so much with so little. I mean, God, I was very lucky to be asked to do the record. Again, yeah, my favorite lyric of anything I've ever recorded. So I wanted to make that little bit as good as I could.

Jem Finer: That line obviously is a classic line, which has a long sort of history to it itself. I mean, I know where it came from originally, a conversation on a bus between Shane and Marcia, my wife, where she was telling him a story. That's like the punchline of the story.

James Fearnley: Well, that line, “I could have been someone,” I do know came from a conversation between Marcia Farquhar and Shane at a bus stop, but they happened to encounter one another at a bus stop where she'd had an experience that was fairly unpleasant. And I imagined them in the dark at nighttime, them coming across one another. And she said to him, “I could have been someone,” and Shane says, “Well, so could anyone.”

Jem Finer: Shane, like a lot of great writers, always had his ear open for what people, you know, for conversation around him and would weave piece of literature and conversation into his songs. I mean, that line, it is a classic line. It sounds like something from an old, it's like a, “I could have been a contender” kind of line. I think so, you know, it's a very beautiful and true thing and the way it works with the music gives it, yeah. It's like you say, it's a beautiful moment. So but it, you know, it wasn't like worked on and worked on, it was just part of the song. It's like, it sort of had to be, I mean, there's a sort of strange thing when you're writing stuff or making, creating anything, I guess, where you look at them and you think, “Well, this is so amazing. It's so kind of almost like, perfect. How did it happen?” It's like it always was there in the first place. You're just waiting to discover it or shine a light on it.

Steve Lillywhite: I hadn't even realized that the (sings) “I could have been someone, well, so could any,” I didn't realize that was exactly the same as the, (sings) “it was Christmas Eve babe in the drunk,” It was exact, you know? I thought, “Oh, that's a new section,” because it's so different how it, you know, cause it's done at a different tempo and it's, you know, it was great. We didn't use a click track on that song. I mean, I have a love-hate relationship with a click track that is really, really confusing. You know, because a click track can be your savior and it can also be your devil. And actually with the Pogues, I find that Andrew, the drummer, his natural groove in a way, he's like Stewart Copeland, you know, he's at the front end of the beat always.

So with a click track, it's not his natural thing. So when Andrew does a fill, it's very exciting, but in fact it's not completely in time to the click. And so he races, when he does a fill, he races and then he has to pull back to a click and it doesn't sound good like that. But, you know, I love drummers who dance to their own click track, you know? Cause you've got the Stewart Copeland who is always at the front and, and Andrew who is like that. You have other drummers like the Marotta brothers, you know, who are so laid back and so on the back end of the beat, they're both in time. But then of course with click tracks, you get, you get drummers like Questlove, who is brilliant, but you know, he plays like a drum machine. Exactly like that. And, and sometimes I think for a band, using a click track always gives you a 7 out of 10. But without using a click track, you might get a 10 out of 10.

Jem Finer: It was just one of a list of songs, you know, we had to record and it wasn't necessarily gonna be a single. So, I don't know, maybe it was, maybe, we always thought it'd be a single. I suppose it, probably we did because initially the idea had been, “Let's record a Christmas duet and put it out for Christmas.” So I guess we probably had thought it was gonna be a single in that sense. I guess we generally, when we started recording, we'd record a few things that we knew we could bash out really quickly before getting onto, you know, “Fairytale” is quite daunting because we'd tried it before and then there's this fear that, “Shit, you know, we can do it this time.” You know, the anxiety kicks in, I suppose. So, no, we probably did it in the middle somewhere.

James Fearnley: We recorded the damn song in the middle of the summer, and I remember going into RAK recording studios and the air conditioning had gone down and there, Steve Lillywhite standing in front of a fridge in the control room. What's a fridge doing in the control room? Anyway, there's a fridge in the control room with a fan in the open door blowing what he hoped would be cold air over the fridge towards him. And this is, we’re doing a Christmas song in the height of July. Yeah, bonkers.

Steve Lillywhite: It's one of those songs that, I mean, for me anyway, I didn't realize how brilliant it was until I'd heard it a few times, you know? And I think most people, they like it, but it's like a fine wine, you know? It does improve with age, especially as people don't really hear it during the year, you know? So it's like, beginning of December, “Ooh, I hear ‘Fairytale.’” And it's such an emotional entry, you know, when the piano comes in and it just takes you to Christmas. Certainly in the UK and you know, in America more and more that song is, cause I look at the streaming numbers over Christmas, you know, and it's sort of sneaking in the top 200 now in America, which is interesting. You know, it's not up there with Mariah Carey, but there you go (laughs).

Jem Finer: It was our most sort of ambitious piece of music at that time certainly, maybe in all times, you know, with its different parts. And that's why it took so long. And for a while we couldn't even really play it, didn't really have the right sort of feel or something, I don't know. But it did all come together there. I mean, I remember that, you know, after, you know, after we'd first recorded the successful backing track, having a real strong feeling like, “This is really something.” And Shane and I went to, I remember I gave him a lift down the road. I was driving home and dropped him in Camden. But on the way we were like really thrilled like that, it finally worked out. It's like giving birth to something, a very difficult, long labor of years to get it together. We both believed in it. You know, we both had a real feeling for it. And you know, it was a song that he really wanted to see work. I know he definitely, he would worry too, you know, “Maybe this won't happen. How's it gonna happen? It has to happen.” And it did. So, yeah, it was a great feeling.

Steve Lillywhite: And I think we mixed it pretty much after the strings went on cause we had to rush it out. So we sort of did the strings and then mixed it at the Townhouse just then. Yeah, they all, it's probably, “We need more whistle,” because I always mixed the whistle too quiet. But they were right. We needed more whistle. It's just, I'd never recorded a whistle before. So, you know, Spider (laughs), well, this is my story. I would always be mixing the song because I'd send the band out. You know, because it was always a bit crazy, “Give me, give me an hour, come back in an hour or I'll tell you when to come and listen to the mix so you've got fresh ears.” So I'd be mixing it and every time I'd mix it, I'd go, “That fucking whistle is too loud.” So I'd turn it down a little bit and my ear would always go, the frequency of it. Every time I'd go back, I'd play it again. “Oh, bloody whistle's too loud.” And I turn it, “That's better.” Anyway, so I get the mix right, what I think, and I bring the band in, they listen to it and go, “I can't hear the whistle.” And I go, “Yeah, it's that. Oh my God, no.” So I then realized the best way for me to mix the song was to not listen to the whistle at all until I got the mix done, and then put the whistle in. “Oh, that whistle sounds good,” (laughs), you know, because it was not a natural thing for me. And then I would be able to get the right volume of it. Otherwise, it was just something that I wasn't used to. But I fixed my problem and I think, you know, Spider sounds great on the album and he sounds great on the record, but yeah, everyone seemed very pleased. And then it was released and it was like, “Oh, it's doing well.”

Jem Finer: You know, cause then everything was so different. You had the hit parade. I mean, it's not like the world we live in now. Once something's put out, it exists forever. Whether anyone wants it to or not, you know, it's there for people to find or not. So, but then to kinda get attention, you seem to have to, your record had to get into the top 40. And once it was in the top 40, you would get played more on the radio and you know, the snowball could start to sort of roll downhill, gather momentum as it were. So, I seem to remember that when it was released, there's a great fear that, you know, cause they had chart projections and stuff like that, that it wasn't quite gonna scrape into the top 40, which could have meant that it would've just disappeared. But it did, I think it got to number 39. So, and then, you know, it started to get played more and obviously it started going up the chart and then it got, it did, it got to this point where it sort of poised to possibly be the number one at Christmas.

Steve Lillywhite: I don’t know if you know, but in England, in Britain, the Christmas number one is a hallowed position. You know, every single artist wants to be in the history books as having a Christmas number one. You know, even if you are, you are in The Beatles, Paul McCartney wanted a Christmas number one, so he wrote a Christmas song, Elton John, everyone as well as the lesser known bands like Slade and Wizzard did, and George Michael. So everyone wanted, you know, wanted the Christmas number one because it wasn't so much the money, it was the kudos of having the number one song at Christmas was so, you know, it was fantastic. So we have some brilliant, brilliant Christmas songs in the UK. They're not all schmaltzy and, you know, cheesy like the American ones, although you also have, but they're not countrywide well known. You know, like so many bands have done Christmas songs, but they're not known by everyone in the country.

Jem Finer: And I remember, you know, listening to the radio. I think it was on Sunday evenings they'd have this sort of chart show. And no one would know before that was over what number one was. Well obviously the people on the show would, but they weren't telling anyone we didn't know. You know, and it goes to number three and it's still not “Fairytale of New York,” so this is going very well. And then so, and number two is, and you're hoping they're gonna say the Pet Shop Boys, but he said the Pogues. And it was in that instant, a great disappointment and seemed really stupid that the Pet Shop Boys with their version of some Elvis song were number one and we weren't. But that feeling passed very quickly. I really, in a way, I am rather glad it never got to number one. I think there's something marvelous about its longevity and you know, it seems to get more popular as time goes by, and that to me is a much more important thing than a number in a chart. The world's full of a lot of really rubbish Christmas number ones, so let's forget numbers. You know, it's what endures through, you know, time and generations. And that was always a hope for a lot of our music, you know, that it had something timeless about it as it should have because it sort of initially comes from a tradition, an old tradition. And that it should sort of in time become part of that tradition carrying on. So that's the wonderful thing. To me, what its number was, is irrelevant. Its longevity is the reward.

James Fearnley: I forget what the gig was from tour that we were doing and, and “Fairytale of New York” had come out and so there's a kind of detachment from, at least for me there was, between what's going on in chart BBC world or record buying world, cause you, you're just working and getting on with people. I was on my way back to Manchester actually on a day off or something to where my folks lived and I stopped off at, I think it might have been Preston Railway Station. And I remember calling my brother from a phone box there and he said, “Do you know that you're number two in the chats?” And that really, really hit me. You know, from a family member on some deserted, though it seemed to me in my memory, deserted railway station. I remember crossing a bridge to go to a pub to go have a pint in there before my train to Manchester came. That was, I'm glad I had that moment to myself.

Steve Lillywhite: You know, it's a song about losers and actually the whole story that it never got to number one in the UK is part of the thing of the song as well. You know, the fact that it's the underdog and the song is still the underdog. It still hasn't made number one. When it came out, it was only at number two and apparently it was not so close. It wasn't like, you know, the Pet Shop Boys beat us by not a country mile, but it was not like, it wasn't a matter of 10 records more and we would've been number one. No, it was a few thousand, but you know, is that Pet Shop Boys song in the charts anymore? No, it's not. I've made some records that sound very eighties, I have to tell you, but no “Fairytale of New York” is timeless.

Jem Finer: We certainly had high points after, but I'd say this was a very focused and relatively straightforward, well executed recording session. Yeah, probably things got a bit more complicated after that, is one way of putting it.

Steve Lillywhite: I love “Rainy Night in Soho” is a brilliant song. I mean, I love a lot of Shane's songs, but I love a lot of Kirsty songs as well, you know, cause I did an album with her called “Kite.” I love a song called “Free World” is brilliant and “Tread Lightly.” I mean, it's all personal, you know, because I was married to her and we were very happy at the time. But, “Fairytale of New York,” you know, it's, it's fantastic to be up there with both of their best work for sure.

James Fearnley: With Kirsty's voice, that's always a shock to hear her voice, but it's got a place in my heart that's a safe one with me. She was a lovely person to hang out with. Funny as all get out. When my gram died, I found myself sitting on a bed in a hotel room, just me and her, talking about my gram. And she was really, really kind with me. Very, very, very lovely person. And then with Shane gone now nearly, well, just stays away from two years now. That's had a bit more complicated, I would say, for me, just because of what I went through with him, you know, with everybody else. But yeah, he has a completely, utterly special place in my life. I, well Spider actually suggested that I write him a letter when he was in hospital in Dublin, because I just couldn't make it over to see him. And it would've been a bit weird if I had, I think, so Spider said, “Why don’t you write him a letter?” so I did. And I said, you know, “Thanks for taking me on such a ride.” My life, I don't know what it would've been, but nothing, nothing, nothing like the experiences that I've had and all, all pretty much due to him. So I'm gonna be forever grateful for him being around.

Jem Finer: Yeah, I mean, I hear it differently at different times. Sometimes just sort of hear it in the background somewhere and think, “Oh, it's lovely, someone's playing ‘Fairytale.’” And sometimes I really listen to it. And sometimes I just, yeah I do, I hear the voices and depending on how I'm feeling, it can make me feel really sad or really sort of, it makes me feel very emotional for sure. Not always sad sometimes, you know, I just think, you know, think of them as, you know, these radiant beings somewhere. And sometimes I just really miss them and wish they're around still. So yeah, the response takes different forms at different times, but for sure it can be a very emotional one, yeah.

James Fearnley: My daughter, oldest daughter, Martha, when she was going to school, there was carpool to take her there. And at the beginning of the year, the parent who's doing the carpool likes to get to know the children in her car on the way to school. And so I think it was Martha's turn that week at the beginning of the school year for the parent to turn around to say, “and Martha, what does your father do?” (laughs). So she says, “He goes to England to play the accordion at Christmas” (laughs). But to be identified as like the Christmas band, and this is where my work is, as if I'm some sort of weird Santa Claus that travels to London in the cold of winter with his accordion to entertain the huddled freezing people of the United Kingdom. I think that's really charming to be associated with that time of the year. And then we, when we do the tree trimming thing at our house, it's the first record that we put on. We've been talking about “Fairytale of New York,” which has featured in my life for, well since we recorded it in 1987. And hopefully it will always feature in my life as we trim the tree as a family.

Jem Finer: You know, it's a bit like what I said about, you know, if you, if in that first week it hadn't been in the top 40, everything could be very different. So I'm always very grateful that, you know, that it had the opportunity to find its way into the world and people's ears and hearts and everything. And from then on it's just down to, you know, it's out of one's control. It's just out there, out there with all this other stuff. But the fact that it rings and resonates for people is wonderful. And it, yeah, I mean, I think it's, there's something in it that, you know, in the story really, it all boils down to the story in the end. Well, no, it's not all boiling down to the story, it's down to the music too, cause the music is obviously a huge part of it. But you know the story. I think it's not one of these glitzy consumer packaged songs about some idealistic, sort of ridiculous festive going and buying things for people and then forgetting about them for the rest of the year. It's about something deeper than that about lives and difficulties and love and overcoming difficulties. And it feels to me that there's a sort of genuine feeling and emotion and story in there that rings with people. “Fairytale of New York” sort of confounds all my expectations, I guess, and I'm very happy that people still want to hear it.

Outro:

Dan Nordheim: Visit lifeoftherecord.com for more information about the Pogues. You’ll also find a full transcript and a link to purchase “Fairytale of New York,” including the recent EP. Instrumental music by Ninotchka. Thanks for listening.

Credits:

“Fairytale of New York”

featuring Kirsty MacColl

(McGowan/Finer) Stiff Music Ltd.

℗ 1987 Stiff Records Ltd.

Produced by Steve Lillywhite

Engineered by Chris Dickie

Strings arranged by Fiachra Trench and James Fearnley

Andrew Ranken: drums

Spider Stacy: tin whistle

James Fearnley: accordion, piano

Shane MacGowan: vocals

Darryl Hunt: bass

Philip Chevron: guitar

Jem Finer: banjo

Terry Woods: cittern, mandola

Episode Credits:

Intro/Outro Music:

“Fairytale of New York” cover by Ninotchka

Episode produced, edited and mixed by Dan Nordheim

Additional mixing and mastering by Jeremy Whitwam