Soundtrack to my Life: "Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl

Artist: The Pogues with Kirsty MacColl
Track: Fairytale of New York/Label: Pogue Mahone NY7/Album: If I Should Fall From Grace With God/Release: /Highest Chart Position: 2

Christmas Music. It’s all meant to be a bit crap and something to laugh at on the Christmas Day Top of the Pops, isn’t it?

It’s designed to be annoying, catchy but more importantly leave an imprint, in hope that you will rush down to your local Our Price and buy a copy in a vein attempt purchasing the record and cancelling out the monotonous and constant melody banging away in your head. This is usually acheived by taking whatever repetitive dirge in its purest of singular forms and over producing it within a hair’s breath of banality. This will make me sound like a very old man indeed but they don’t even attempt to be festive nowadays, not like the 70’s and 80’s when they at least shook some jingle bells or got some flamboyant, overset guy from Birmingham to shout “It’s Christmas!” at the end, not to mention having the word Christmas in the actual title.

In a world where the music industry and the charts in particular are controlled by people like Simon Cowell and Louis Walsh, who turn average Janes and Joe’s into popstars with an annual goal that is their new Patsy becoming the Christmas number one. For the last two years, they have succeeded with their request newest acts Shayne Ward and Leona Lewis. Both songs are ballads but are in no way festive. They lack a certain warmth and quality the Christmas charts used to bring along with the novelty. The X Factor show also took the top spot in 2002 with the even more non-festive and watered down Prodigy effort, Sound of the Underground, complete with its video shot in a disused warehouse.

Ballads are good and definately sell records at Christmas but the people who make an effort and do a novelty Christmas number get nudged to one side these days by some reality contestant with the shelf life of a couple of years. The Spice Girls scored three Chistmas number ones in a row, during the mid 90’s, again not festive ballads but at least one of them was accompanied by a suitably shot video of the girls... wrapped up... in the SNOW.
Yes, Goodbye wasn’t festive, it was a bitter sweet about losing a member of their band, but at least we got snow. So saying this, I am under the firm belief that the last festive number one this country had was in 1994 and as it pains me to say, Stay Another Day by East 17. It was a great song and had bells chiming along with the backing singers. It was heartfelt, it was poignant, chavs all over the country fell in love with band who secured themselves a nice little earner from future seasonal compilations and festive airplay. Yes, there was a Band Aid a couple of years ago and also one in 1989 but neither of them were very festive, just taking off the original and not very well. Just a load of minor chart acts looking for exposure rather than signing for the cause.

Christmas time for me as a teenager was always a time for broken promises and disappointment. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t lose out in terms of love or affection or support or new shiny things that played music very loudly, but I was bereft for most of my teenage years of my absconded male parental unit. My father, Pedro or Kenneth (his real name), once my hero and jack boot wearing compadre and then, after one night’s edition of Top of the Pop’s and one too many arguements, he who became forever absent.

The last Christmas in Redcar was pretty awful. My parents put up with each other long enough for the charade that was the family Christmas morning, if not for anyone but my youngest sister and her large plastic sack of presents.
I wasn’t in the mood at all and the oldest of my two sisters complained that I was making it a crappy Christmas for her. I was confused and frightened about my father who had continued to take the strap to me “for being naughty” where I was just frustrated and angry myself at living in the shitty atmosphere. My parents bickered throughout the dinner and what was Christmas lunch, which he never attended choosing to spend it with someone else. The same someone else that he had spent the majority of his time with that year no doubt. I was under no delusion that he was cheating on my mother on a regular occasion. I even visited her to when he had no choice but to take me. She lived in a flat above the chippy in the square and gave me fizzy green pop to drink.

I was too naive to protest, I didn’t know what was going on. I withdrew into myself and stayed in my room for the most, coming out for meals or to go to school. I took the scissors to the old Argos catalogues and cut out the pictures of the Transformers and the He-Man toys and tried to make like they were as good as the real thing which we couldn’t afford. I used to spend hours with my little paper figures in my own little world. I used to list them all and write fictitious stories about them and designed movie posters featuring me and my friends. When I wasn’t writing lists about things to avoid all the other things on my mind, I would ferociously type out basic game programming on a beat up computer my father had acquired. There was this book that came with it that listed computer coding that you could copy out and create the most simple of games onto your computer. I used to type out my feelings on that computer too but in those days there was no way of saving what you created and at the end of the day, I just turned it off and destoyed it.

The soundtrack of that final Christmas of 1987 and the following troublesome few months was a poignant and melodic Irish folk ballad about a bickering couple on Christmas Eve, Fairytale of New York by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl. In the lyrics, he’s been released from the cells after a drunken night out after winning money on a horse and she’s giving a hard time for it despite being a drug addict who’s been laid up in hospital. They both seem down on their luck and just about surviving each day and you wonder whether they will stay together despite feeling a sense that deep down they love each other. It really is a beautiful song with a great melody that I never really appreciated at the time, despite the sombre tone resonating with our family atmosphere which was very tense and violent.

I remember one particular time after taking me along to The Pig and Whistle in town whilst he was left to watch me (something he had been told countless times not to do) and we both returned to my angry, frustrated mother. She shouted the same things at him that Kirsty MacColl would accuse Shane McGowan of and they would both push each other around the kitchen for a bit until he got pissed off enough and left again. I tried to get between them many times and find myself pushed to one side and tried to reason with her that I was fine. I was with my dad and there was no way that I would come to harm but my mother (and rightly so at the time) took a different position. I was too young to be going to pubs.

In the mean time though and despite my mother’s objections, I loved going down to The Pig and Whistle with him and my dad liked taking me there, first through necessity but then more often after he discovered he could make money out of me. I was a pretty good pool player. This wasn’t through his wise teachings or paid classes or anything, I just had a natural ability at a young age and my dad soon discovered that as I started beating all of his friends and the other passing locals who thought nothing of going up against some kid only to be beaten instead, that perhaps there was some angle here he could take advantage of. The pub was a real characters place and had that worn in sense of tradition and respect and some of these characters didn’t take to kindly being beaten at their precious pub game by a pre-teen but they were hardly going to complain with my dad there and if they did, he always had a fair few people to back him up when some local skin got upset when he was humiliated by an opponent who was smaller than the queue he was carrying.

Despite this new found income, he was always a careful betting man around me. We went through a period when he would let me pick the horses to place money on in Ladbrokes when most of his other tote reading methods had failed and through sheer boredom while I was kicking my heels in the smoky office with the TVs playing live racing from Doncaster and Loughborough, I took his newspaper and one of those little red pens with the white ends and ticked a horse in each of the five races I liked the sound of. As each of his came in third and fourth and he cursed to himself when each of my horses romped in with three lengths of the rest of the field. He took me down the next day and got me to do the same but I didn’t have as much luck and lost him even more money than he had the day before so because of this he was never quite sure how long my lucky streak was going to last. He would always wait until I had warmed up after a few games, but to be honest, by the time we got down there on a Sunday afternoon, most of them already had a good skinful inside them so it wasn’t hard beating the seasoned drinkers in The Pig and Whistle, the only skill I had on my side was the fact that I hadn’t drank eight pints.
The guy from next door was there and figured out quite early on that he wasn’t coming near the table when I was there, because he and most of the others in the bar, were ever in any fit state to play. It wasn’t just the pool table either. I was their secret weapon during the pub quiz and like the pool, I had an advantage over them too. The quiz was always simple (because so were the people) and about the news during the week before, news that they all more or less missed because they were here and I always watched sat at home. If it wasn’t covered in The Sun, which more or less just hounded paedophiles next to pictures of naked ladies back then too, it was a guaranteed point for our team, which consisted of me, my dad, the guy next door and Mickey, the dole cheating painter.

Looking back, I realise that it was wrong that he was taking me to pubs and associating me with foul mouthed, violent drunks, especially to make money for him. I was ten years old and not setting a very good example or contributing to a good relationship with my mother but I was a kid and I was spending time with my father and having fun with it and my house wasn’t fun around this time. All the guys in the pub thought their mate Ken had a pool shark/boy genius on their hands (hardly) and more to the point, it made my father proud of me knowing that Pedro Delgado won the Tour de France in 1988 and won our team a couple of rounds of drinks and all the pork scratchings I could eat until I was sick.

But the Kirsty MacColl in my mother back home saw it different and the whole ‘taking the son to the pub to fleece the men of Redcar out of their pensions’ plan gave the couple yet another to call each other the names they had called each other in the song or similar in my case. Although it was fair to describe my father as a “You scumbag, you maggot, you cheap lousy faggot”, my mother was never an “a slut on junk” or any of the horrible names he called her in that last year, to be fair.

Surprisingly to all at the time, Fairytale of New York didn’t quite capture the mood and the awful music taste of the general public that Christmas enough as Always on my Mind by The Pet Shop Boys who prevented them the Top Spot, forcing them to peak at number two, making Shane McGowan to comment that they were beaten by “two queens and a drum machine” and VH1 voted the song the best Christmas song ever recently in a poll, even beating Band Aid’s epic charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas?, the best-selling Christmas single of all time.