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The song is an Irish folk-style ballad and was written as a duet, with The Pogues' singer MacGowan taking the role of the male character and MacColl the female character.
It was originally released as a single on 23 November 1987 and later featured on The Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God. Originally begun in 1985, the song had a troubled two-year development history, undergoing rewrites and aborted attempts at recording, and losing its original female vocalist along the way, before finally being completed in August 1987.
Although the single has never been the UK Christmas number one, being kept at number two on its original release in 1987 by the Pet Shop Boys' cover of Always on My Mind, it has proved enduringly popular with both music critics and the public: to date the song has reached the UK Top 20 on 18 separate occasions since its original release in 1987, including every year at Christmas since 2005.
As of September 2017, it had sold 1.2 million copies in the UK, with an additional 249,626 streaming equivalent sales, for a total of 1.5 million combined sales.
In December 2020, the song was certified quadruple platinum in the UK for 2.4 million combined sales.
More information: Pogues
In the UK, Fairytale of New York is the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century. It is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time in various television, radio and magazine related polls in the UK and Ireland, including the UK television special on ITV in December 2012 where it was voted The Nation's Favourite Christmas Song.
The song follows an Irish immigrant's Christmas Eve reverie about holidays past while sleeping off a binge in a New York City drunk tank. When an inebriated old man also in the cell sings a passage from the Irish ballad The Rare Old Mountain Dew, the narrator (MacGowan) begins to dream of a former lover.
The remainder of the song (which may be an internal monologue) takes the form of a call and response between the couple, their youthful hopes crushed by alcoholism and drug addiction, as they reminisce and bicker on Christmas Eve. The lyrics Sinatra was swinging and cars big as bars seem to place the song in the late 1940s, although the music video clearly depicts a contemporary 1980s New York.
The video for the song was directed by Peter Dougherty and filmed in New York during a bitterly cold week in November 1987.
The video opens with MacGowan sitting at a piano as if playing the song's opening refrain: however, as MacGowan could not actually play the instrument, the close-up shot featured the hands of the band's pianist Fearnley wearing MacGowan's rings on his fingers. Fearnley later said that he found the experience humiliating but accepted the idea that it looked better in the video to show MacGowan seated at the piano.
More information: Twitter-The Pogues
Part of the video was filmed inside a real police station on the Lower East Side. Actor Matt Dillon plays a police officer who arrests MacGowan and takes him to the cells. Dillon recalled that he had been afraid to handle MacGowan roughly, and had to be encouraged by Dougherty and MacGowan to use force.
MacGowan and the rest of the band were drinking throughout the shoot, and the police became concerned about their increasingly rowdy behaviour in the cells. Dillon, who was sober, had to intervene and reassure the police that there would be no problems.
The chorus of the song includes the line The boys of the NYPD choir still singing Galway Bay. In reality, the NYPD (New York City Police Department) does not have a choir, the closest thing being the NYPD Pipes and Drums who are featured in the video for the song.
The NYPD Pipes and Drums did not know Galway Bay and so sang a song that all of them knew the words to -the Mickey Mouse March, the theme tune for The Mickey Mouse Club television series.
The footage was then slowed down and shown in brief sections to disguise the fact the Pipes and Drums were singing a different song. Murray recalled that the Pipes and Drums had been drinking on the coach that brought them to the video shoot, and by the time they arrived they were more drunk than the band, refusing to work unless they were supplied with more alcohol.
More information: Shane MacGowan
Still singing Galway Bay
And the bells are ringing out
For Christmas day.
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