![‘Fairytale of New York’ Isn’t Like Any Other Christmas Song](https://cdn.shortpixel.ai/stsp/to_webp,q_lossy,ret_img/https://static01.nyt.com/images/2023/12/24/opinion/24anderson/24anderson-facebookJumbo.jpg)
I fell in love with “Fairytale of New York,” the indelible Christmas song by the Pogues, before I’d heard a note.
I grew up in the boarded-up, bombed-out Northern Ireland of the Troubles. There wasn’t an abundance of galleries in Derry, where I lived, at the time, and my father would take me to a record store where the sleeves were one of my main early experiences of art. I’d spend hours escaping into the alien worlds of prog rock and heavy metal.
The sleeve of “Fairytale” was different. It was black and white and spare. There was a photograph of a man resting his head on his drink, and his drink on a window. There was a spectacular metropolis outside but he wasn’t looking at it. He seemed impossibly cool, like some wayward, hung-over angel, sick of heaven. I found out later he was Spider Stacy, who played tin whistle in the Pogues.
There was adventure and longing in that image, which was based on a Burt Glinn photograph of Sammy Davis Jr. from 1959. As in the original, there was also hardship, homesickness and awe for a vast, engulfing city. But it also captured something essential about exile that generations of Irish people would understand implicitly.
I grew up hearing migration stories from uncles who’d returned from near fortune and ruin abroad, but it wasn’t until I followed in their footsteps and moved to Britain in my early 20s that I realized how profoundly the Pogues, an Anglo-Irish band, and the frontman Shane MacGowan, who died last month, articulated the experiences of the Irish diaspora.
In Ireland, seeking work has often meant moving to England. The early songs of the Pogues documented what awaited there in the early 1980s — a time when it was, to put it mildly, challenging to be Irish in London. Irish people had been portrayed variously as buffoons, insurrectionists and animals in the British media since Victorian times, and ethnic hate and discrimination were prevalent well into the 1980s. The conflation of all Irish with the Irish Republican Army led to miscarriages of justice like the Guildford Four, the Birmingham Six and the Maguire Seven, who were wrongly imprisoned for I.R.A. bombings in the 1970s.