Sat, 2 December 2023
Photograph: Clodagh Kilcoyne/Reuters
The widow of the late Pogues frontman, Shane MacGowan, has said she hopes his song Fairytale of New York will be this year’s Christmas No 1.
The singer died on Thursday with his wife, Victoria Mary Clarke, and family by his side. He was 65.
Fairytale of New York, which also features Kirsty MacColl, has never reached the No 1 spot, peaking at No 2. However, thanks to streaming the song often re-enters the UK singles chart over the festive period and regularly tops polls for the best Christmas song.
In 2007, the BBC censored the song to remove the words “faggot” and “slut”, though it reversed the decision shortly afterwards.
Related: Shane MacGowan obituary
Clarke told Today on BBC Radio 4 on Saturday: “It would be nice, wouldn’t it? It should be the Christmas No 1, it absolutely should. I am very much in favour of that.”
Talking about her life with MacGowan, Clarke said he was a man of contradictions.
Clarke, an Irish writer, first met him when she was 16. She said: “He was the kind of husband that would tell you how beautiful you are every single day. He was always buying flowers. He was just a really, really romantic man.”
She said they both “watched a lot of programmes about royalty”, adding: “But he was an ardent republican. He had a love of England and also of Ireland. Sometimes we would be doing the Telegraph crossword and I would be thinking: Gosh, there are people who would be horrified if they could see you doing the Telegraph crossword!”
MacGowan was plagued by ill health linked to his years of alcohol and substance abuse. He had been discharged from St Vincent’s hospital in Dublin last week.
Clarke said the stormy relationship depicted in the song was like her own with the singer.
Related: Shane MacGowan – a life in pictures
“It’s not [the romance] that’s gone wrong – in the song they still love each other – but life has gone wrong. That’s a bit similar to our story. We were both very affected by his addiction but you can still love, even though you are in that situation, and you can be very desperately unhappy as well as love.”
In 2015 MacGowan fell when leaving a Dublin studio and broke his pelvis, which led to him having to use a wheelchair.
One of his last public appearances was in 2018 at a special 60th birthday celebration at the National Concert Hall in Dublin.
The singer would have celebrated his 66th birthday on Christmas Day.
Naomi Clarke
Updated Sat, 2 December 2023
Shane MacGowan’s wife says his song Fairytale Of New York “absolutely should” be the Christmas number one.
The Pogues’ frontman died “peacefully” at 3am on Thursday with his wife Victoria Mary Clarke and family by his side, weeks before his 66th birthday on Christmas Day.
Originally released in 1987, the band’s gritty festive song has never reached the top spot in the UK charts, peaking at number two and beaten to the Christmas number one spot in the year of its release by the Pet Shop Boys’ Always On My Mind.
The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan was due to celebrate his 66th birthday on Christmas Day (PA)
Following MacGowan’s death, there have been calls for it to finally claim the coveted Christmas title, with Coral bookmakers placing it top of their predictions with 1/5 odds ahead of festive juggernauts Wham!’s Last Christmas and Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You.
Clarke told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on Saturday: “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?
“It should be the Christmas number one, it absolutely should. I’m very much in favour of that.”
The song was written by MacGowan with fellow Pogues founder Jem Finer and later rerecorded to have Kirsty MacColl duet with MacGowan, which led to the best-known version of the track.
It has returned to the UK Christmas top 40 every year since 2005 but never reached the top spot, according to the Official Charts Company.
MacGowan’s wife agreed his lyrics were often “very cynical” but said he was a “really romantic man”.
She said: “He was the kind of person that would tell you how beautiful you are every single day.”
The Irish journalist, 57, also compared the turbulent love story in Fairytale Of New York with her own relationship with MacGowan, who she first met as a teenager.
“It’s not (the romance that’s) gone wrong. In the song, they still love each other but life has gone wrong and I think that’s what’s probably a little bit similar to our story.
“We were both very much affected by his addiction, but you can still love even though you’re in that situation. And you can be very desperately unhappy as well as love.”
MacGowan was discharged last week from St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin after receiving care following another bought of ill-health after revealing last year that he had been diagnosed with encephalitis.
His wife said he died of pneumonia, according to the New York Times.
Discussing his drinking habits, Clarke said: “It was always difficult for me because I knew when I met him that he liked to drink but I didn’t understand that as being something challenging or difficult.”
She said he had not had a drink for the past six months but his previous habits “took a toll on his body”.
Clarke also said MacGowan could be “very contradictory” in that the couple would watch programmes about the royal family and he cried at the deaths of the late Queen, Duke of Edinburgh and Diana, Princess of Wales, despite being an “ardent Republican”.
Later on Saturday, Clarke told the Brendan O’Connor Show on RTE radio that she thought she was going to die after learning MacGowan was coming to the end of his life.
Discussing his last days, she said she had been giving him health drinks and trying alternative therapists, hypnotists and physios to try to help him.
She added: “He was putting up a really strong fight. He was trying very hard to breathe.
“He wasn’t ready to give up. He wasn’t ready to stop fighting – but his body did it for him.”
MacGowan dead - latest: Pogues singer known for Fairytale of New York dies as tributes paid
His death comes one week after he was discharged from hospital
The Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan has died at the age of 65, just a week after he was discharged from hospital.
The news of his death was confirmed by his wife, Irish journalist and author Victoria Mary Clarke, who said in a statement: “Shane will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life”.
Tributes have since flooded in, with Irish premier Leo Varadkar writing he had “beautifully captured the Irish experience”, while his former bandmate shared a black and white image of MacGowan smiling on stage.
Last week, it was announced he was being discharged from hospital ahead of his upcoming birthday on Christmas Day. In a post last Wednesday evening, his wife tweeted an image of him wearing a scarf and bobble hat, thanking the nursing staff for their support.
MacGowan revealed he was diagnosed with encephalitis last year in a video posted to social media on New Year’s Eve.
It is an uncommon but serious condition in which the brain becomes inflamed, according to the NHS website.
From the 1980s, he lead the Irish punk band The Pogues. The band are best known for their 1987 hit, the festive song “Fairytale Of New York”.
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Former The Daily Show host Jon Stewart remembered working with MacGowan early in his career, writing on X/Twitter: “Pogues. City Gardens. 1986. One of the best shows I ever worked. Thank you Shane. RIP.”
Watch MacGowan’s last TV appearance before death
Here’s MacGowan speaking about his musical influences in one of his final television appearances:
Watch Shane MacGowan’s last TV appearance before death
Shane MacGowan spoke of his musical influences in his last TV appearance before his death aged 65. The Pogues star had been receiving hospital care after being diagnosed with viral encephalitis, a condition that causes the brain to swell, in December 2022. MacGowan closed out a special edition of the Late Late Show in 2019 with a performance of Christmas anthem “Fairytale of New York”, with more than 591,000 people tuning in to the programme. In a heartfelt tribute after his death was announced on Thursday 30 November, MacGowan’s wife Victoria Mary Clarke said: “Shane will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life.”
Watch MacGowan’s last TV performance before his death
Here’s MacGowan singing “Dirty Old Town” on Dublin Simon’s Christmas Eve Busk in 2021:
Watch: The Pogues’ Shane MacGowan’s last performance before death aged 65
Watch Shane MacGowan perform “Dirty Old Town” for Dublin Simon’s 2021 Christmas Eve Busk. It was announced on Thursday 30 November that The Pogues frontman has died aged 65. He had been receiving treatment for months for viral encephalitis - a serious condition which leads to brain swelling. “Shane will always be the light that I hold before me and the measure of my dreams and the love of my life,” wife Victoria Mary Clarke said. Featuring on the Christmas Eve Busk two years ago, MacGowan performed “Dirty Old Town” at St Patrick’s Cathedral in aid of Dublin’s Simon Community. Initially written by Ewan MacColl in 1949, the song was made popular by The Dubliners and later, The Pogues.
Tom Morello remembers MacGowan and Sinead O’Connor
Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello remembered MacGowan with a video of his and Sinead O’Connor’s 1995 duet “Haunted”. O’Connor died in July this year at the age of 56.
Shane MacGowan: the shy and complex genius behind The Pogues
For many years, one only had to look at MacGowan’s mouth to get an idea of his intemperate lifestyle. Writing for The Independent in 2015, journalist Richard Jinman described it as “a monument to rock’n’roll excess; a frightening cavity hollowed out by misadventure and misbehaviour”. MacGowan confirmed a longstanding rumour that some of the damage was caused by biting into a vinyl copy of The Beach Boys Greatest Hits, Volume 3: “I was out of my head,” he told The Independent. Convinced he was conducting talks with “the Americans” after World War Three, he declared, “this is what I think of American culture”, and took a bite out of the record.
Read Independent Music Editor Roisin O’Connor’s MacGowan obituary here:
The night Kiefer Sutherland met Shane MacGowan
Among the clips doing the rounds on social media is an interview Canadian actor Kiefer Sutherland gave on Ireland’s The Late Late Show in 2019.
In it, the 24 star recalled meeting MacGowan for the first time while he was out to dinner with Ronnie Wood and Sinéad O’Connor.
The pair apparently had a disagreement over politics and ended up “rolling around on the floor” fighting.
“Shane MacGowan at that time had a cast on his right arm that looked as well lived in as anything I’ve ever seen,” Sutherland said, “and he did not have a lot of teeth at the time either, so fighting just seemed unfair.”
Hours later, the actor said MacGowan tapped him on the shoulder and said he needed a place to stay that night.
“I was so impressed with his directness that I said, ‘well do you want a drink?’”
The two went back to Sutherland’s hotel and when he got up early the next day, “all the blankets were perfectly folded... [and] there was a note that he had written on hotel stationery and it was the most beautiful letter I’d ever read.
“It was like poetry. It was just a thank you note but it was so generous, the things he had to say about me and our night and humanity, and it was quite long. And I’ve still got this letter to this day, because it changed my perspective - don’t judge a book by its cover and very rarely trust first encounters.”
The Shane MacGowan I knew was so much more than a Christmas song
The last time I listened to the Pogues’ debut album, I thought I heard a ghost. In the fade-out on side one, a Corkman recites a Gaelic phrase that translates as “There’s no place like home”, and performs a brief, solo lilt.
This was my uncle, Tom O’Grady, whose voice I had not heard in the decade since he died – his contribution appears only on the vinyl LP, if you let the needle run out. Tom was no singer, much less a musician. His appearance on the record was down to his friendship with Shane MacGowan, the band’s frontman and chief songwriter, who has sadly died today aged 65.
The pair met in the early 1980s at Rocks Off, the record shop on Hanway Street, an alley off Tottenham Court Road in central London, where Tom shopped and Shane worked before The Pogues took off. They bonded over a mutual passion for music, film and general carousing, though their shared ethnicity was doubtless important to the friendship, too. As was the case with most migrants to Britain in this period, you gravitated to your own.
Read the full article from Robert Dineen here
Shane MacGowan was so much more than a Christmas song | Robert Dineen
The Pogues frontman was a witty, curious man with an affinity for Irish history and culture, writes journalist Robert Dineen
Sinn Fein president describes MacGowan as a ‘poet'
Sinn Fein President Mary Lou McDonald has described Shane MacGowan as “a poet” who was unique in how he told “the Irish story”.
She said that Ireland “has lost one of its most beloved icons and the world one of its greatest songwriters”.
“Shane was a poet, a dreamer and a champion of social justice. He was a dedicated Republican and a proud Irishman.
“Nobody told the Irish story like Shane – stories of emigration, heartache, dislocation, redemption, love and joy.
“Shane brought his musical unique style to all corners of the world, and his music will continue to be enjoyed for generations to come.
“Today we mourn his passing. He was one of the best of us. Ni bheidh a leitheid aris ann.
“I want to extend my deepest condolences to his wife Victoria, his sister Siobhan, his extended family and very wide circle of friends.”
Fairytale of New York: How The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl made the Christmas classic
“Fairytale of New York” is a drunken hymn for people with broken dreams and abandoned hopes. It is, therefore, a perfect contrast to some of the perkier perennial favourites we wheel out each Christmas.
The song begins with its narrator, an Irish immigrant, being thrown into a drunk tank to sleep off his Christmas Eve binge.
Hearing an old man sing the Irish ballad “The Rare Old Mountain Dew”, he begins to dream about his memories of the female character in the song, and so begins the story of two people who fell in love in America, only to see their plans of a bright future dashed.
Read the full story here
The story behind ‘Fairytale of New York’ by The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl
A drunken hymn for those with broken dreams and abandoned hope
