"Fairytale of New York" by The Pogues: Everything You Didn't Know

Showing up fashionably late to the party, your punks of pedantry bring you a drunk tank-full of minutiae behind this timeless duet between reluctant lead-Pogue Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl. The boys of the TMI Choir rummage through the two year (!!!) gestational period for the song to be written and recorded, through the tumultuous lives of the two who gave it voice, the repeated controversies over the song's language, and much much more. We wish you a belated happy holidays and the most merciful of new years.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:09):
Hello everyone, and welcome to Too Much Information, the show
that brings you the secret histories and little known fascinating
facts and figures behind your favorite TV shows, movies, music,
and more. We are your two cogues of head and try.
I'm Alex Sigel.

Speaker 1 (00:25):
Your bums of banality, your punks of pedantry, your old
slots of just too much trivia.

Speaker 2 (00:32):
That's good on anyway, the last one was good.

Speaker 1 (00:35):
I forgot my name is Jordan, and.

Speaker 2 (00:38):
Jordan, as you may have suspected from that intro, today
we're talking about my favorite Christmas song of all time.
An episode dedicated to the dearly departed Shane McGowan, the
mastermind behind one of the greatest Irish punk bands bands period,
the Friggin' Pogues. Shane McGowan defied just about every odd
in the book to live until the relatively ripe age

(01:00):
sixty five, and died this November, having cast an enormous
shadow in the worlds of Irish and punk music and
music in general. Tell me about your relationship with the Pogues,
or more generally Irish Irish reship with the Irish.

Speaker 1 (01:19):
I can see you feeling quite a kinship with the Irish.
I know you and I are both of Italian Sicilian heritage,
and in some ways I see them as related cultures
in that they both surrender to emotions and have a
sense of fatalism that I almost find noble in the
same way that I find toxic male stoicism noble. There's
a certain I know it's probably not healthy for the soul,

(01:41):
but for some reason, I can't shake the sense that
it's admirable.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
I love that. I can't shake the sense that it's admirable.

Speaker 1 (01:51):
There's a reverence towards pain and depression. And was it
a Freud who said that the Irish were the only
people in pervious.

Speaker 2 (01:59):
The same pervious to it?

Speaker 1 (02:00):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, And I just think that that whole
sense extends to their view on self destruction and death,
the Irish. And there's a perfect overlap with this song
and the performance at Shane McGowan's funeral earlier this week,
which hurt. It was so deeply sad but so incredibly joyous.
It's the only funeral I've seen where people were literally

(02:22):
dancing in the aisles, which says a lot for the
Irish and Shane McGowan and this amazing song.

Speaker 2 (02:28):
Yeah, I was we're talking about first of recording. I
was talking about this dance book came out in nineteen sixty,
I think from Oh Wow mit R seventy sorry mit
Press called Beyond the Melting Pot about the different sociological
and cultural similarities and differences, but more about the focusing

(02:48):
on the similarities about black people, Puerto Rican people, Jewish people,
Italians and the Irish in New York City. And you know,
it is fascinating the different overlaps and does focus a
lot on the particular as you said, if reverence towards
death and sort of combined fatalism and jois de vivra

(03:11):
of the Irish and the Italians. So I grew up
with a few people of Irish descent my extended family,
and we weren't really gathered around the table singing the
rare old Mountain Dew. But I did always love Irish
music and my first gateway into that was Flogging Molly.
Actually the band Flogging Mollie. Well no, because we yeah,

(03:32):
drop Kate Murphy's came up. But I was like this,
this band sucks. I mean, they don't suck at the
risk of angering the Irish, although their best song is
a Woody guthriecover. Yeah they're punk is too dumb and
their Irish is too I'm not going there. I was
going to say, I was going to say racist, because

(03:54):
there's a lot of skinheads that love the drop Kick Murphy's.
But anyway, No, Flogging Mollie takes the whole traditional Irish
thing like much further than drop Y Murphys, and in fact,
probably the biggest knock against them is that they are
kind of just like a tighter Pogues. The best thing
about that band was that the lead singer had been

(04:15):
in two different metal bands before he formed Flogging Molly,
with guys from Motorhead and Crocus, like bigger thrash bands,
and he writes all his lyrics on a typewriter from
nineteen sixteen, which is the year of the Easter Uprising
in Dublin. But then going backwards from them, I discovered
the Pogues and they've just always been at the top

(04:36):
of the heat for me, not just because of Shane's
incredible personal magnetism and ludicrousness, but you know, the guys
hell songwriter man, I mean, he just has this incredibly
deft hand at writing these little thumbnail character sketches that

(04:58):
will just level you. And even though he threatened to
become one of them at many many points, I'm imagining
the dissolute tale of two New York drugs bickering away
their Christmas. Isn't the sort of tune that you enjoy
over a dog. But am I wrong?

Speaker 1 (05:16):
You're not wrong? I mean, I thought it was very
telling that one of the many people who pay their
tribute to Shane McGaw and on social media was Bruce Springsteen,
who a visit recently. And I see a lot of
similarities between their ability to, as you say, paint these
beautiful little portraits, these little capsule portraits of these characters,

(05:38):
usually characters who are trying to hold on to hope
in a fairly hopeless situation. I have to say I
don't know a lot of the poge's music, unfortunately, which
is probably good for me because now I have a
lot to explore. But what I do know of it
that seems to be a major through line, and it's
something you see a lot in Bruce too, and I
think that's why it probably hits a lot of people,

(05:58):
a lot of people in time trouble can relate to
those characters. Yeah, it's a beautiful song. I didn't realize
that was your favorite Christmas song. I can why may
I ask? I mean that's not no, no, no, I'm not.
I'm not challenging you on it. I'm curious though.

Speaker 2 (06:15):
I think it's like the only Christmas song other than
maybe like the original version of Have Yourself with Merry
Little Christmas, which is so damn sad.

Speaker 1 (06:24):
With the post apocalyptic verse about.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
Yeah, yeah it may be our last have yourself merri
litt Christmas. It may be our last. Yeah, It's one
of the only Christmas songs that gets it. There's such
a gloss over, with the exception of your really thuddingly
on the nose stuff like John Lennon. I think that
they are the genre of Christmas music glosses over the

(06:49):
pain of the holiday for so many people. And I
like the fact that there are Christmas songs that, instead
of being neutral on it, let one hundred and eighty
degrees back and make it thoroughly more depressing, like rather
than saying, well, you know, this is hard for a
lot of people, it just swings one hundred eighty degrees

(07:10):
around to get ready to sob. Another great one is
Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis by Tom Waits.

Speaker 1 (07:20):
I mean, okay, you and I are so far around
the circle that we actually are very close to each other,
you know what I mean. But we approach things a
different way. And everyone knows who listens to the show
off And I'm a gigantic Beatles fan, and it's probably
unhealthy how much I view the world through, you know,
through a Beatle lens. But there's a certain dichotomy in
people that I've noticed. You could call it optimists and pessimists,

(07:43):
but I call it Lennon and McCartney, and it's probably
best illustrated through their Christmas songs. You've got John Lennon's
Happy Christmas War Is Over, basically indicting listeners for not
doing anything to help and war and make the world
a better place. And then you've got Paul's Wonderful Christmas Time,
which is the worst song I deep in the tale.

(08:04):
I like it.

Speaker 2 (08:05):
Yeah, you gotta plug in the TikTok.

Speaker 1 (08:06):
Yes, it's Christmas Day, people, dye go you yourself, It's
Christmas time. Get out the wine. Uncle Jim's in his
favorite jumper.

Speaker 2 (08:19):
Uncle John's in his favorite jumper.

Speaker 1 (08:22):
But Yeah, something I find interesting about Lennon McCartney is
that they both endured an incredible tragedy when they were young.
Their mothers died when they were teenagers, and it made
them both into the people they became. John very wounded
and very angry, and I think his music connects with
people for that reason because he was that vulnerable in

(08:44):
that and so in pain. People see their own pain
in that. And also I think there's people listening who,
you know, almost want to comfort him in a way.
And then there's someone like Paul, who is, Okay, I
went through that, I made it through, I survived, and
I'm going to celebrate all the little things in life
now because I know how bad it can be, and

(09:06):
it makes all the good things, even if they see
men's consequential so much more sweet. And that's I mean again,
you can call that pessimism and optimism, you can call
it many number of different things. I think you have
a touch of the John Lennon. I think I have
a touch of the of the of the Paul in
that sense. I just think it's interesting how such a
similar trauma at an early age made those two men

(09:29):
such opposite people, and I think that that's probably true
for a lot of people, how they respond to pain
and grief, and it's something that comes out around Christmas time.

Speaker 2 (09:37):
And the great thing about the Irish is that you
don't need two of them to get that.

Speaker 1 (09:44):
But I mean, to answer your question, I prefer the
Paul McCartney, the Beach Boys, the Phil Spector Christmas album
types of there's a whole cottage industry of like really
sad emotionally Lewde so they're just so sad. There's okay,
there's a list. I was trying to remember some of them.
I mean, the one that immediately comes to mind other

(10:04):
than fairy Tale of New York is Christmas Shoes. I
think it's colled.

Speaker 2 (10:08):
I don't know. I don't know Christmas shoes. Is it
like a for sale Christmas shoes never used?

Speaker 1 (10:13):
Yeah, it's like something about I'm trying to remember.

Speaker 2 (10:15):
There's like, I mean, the first thing that comes up
is the it's the TV movie summary starting Rob Lowe.
It's the first thing that comes up. A young boy
tries to get a pair of Christmas shoes for his dying.

Speaker 1 (10:26):
Mother because she's going to meet Jesus that night. That's right,
She's going to die that she wants Mama to look
good for Jesus that night. So that's that's devastating. There's
Marvin Gaye's I Want to come Home for Christmas, which
is from the point of view of a prisoner of war.

Speaker 2 (10:39):
Oh yeah, because his brother, which inspired what's going on?

Speaker 1 (10:42):
I'll be going for Christmas? What you mentioned? Do they
know it's Christmas Time? By band Aid? Is super depressing?
What else we got? What else we got? The Everly
Brothers Christmas Eve can kill You? Do you know the song?

Speaker 2 (10:54):
No? I don't, but that sounds incredible.

Speaker 1 (10:56):
It's a hitchhiker warning about freezing to death while looking
for a ride on Christmas Eve.

Speaker 2 (11:02):
Jesus, I know this is good. This is good fodder
for for my playlist.

Speaker 1 (11:07):
Yeah, there's that King Cole's the Little Boy that Santa
Claus forgot. Ah. Let's see what else we got. There's
Amy Man's I was thinking I could clean up for Christmas.
H Dwight Yoakum has a song called Santa Can't Stay
where kids are seeing their drunk father dressed to Santa,
fighting with their mom and her new boyfriend.

Speaker 2 (11:27):
But that's country music. That doesn't count. They're already like
so just predisposed to Maudlin Horse.

Speaker 1 (11:35):
I could see you looking John Prin's Christmas in Prison.

Speaker 2 (11:37):
Yeah, I mean anything by John Pran. I'm sold. You
just had to say that Prince Christmas. Yes, because of
the because of the very deft Shane McGowan esque touch,
of the fact that the guy gets tanked on banana
Dakery's that's so Prince, It's so amazing, because that it

(12:00):
was her favorite drink, right so he yes? Yeah, oh
so good. All right, well, folks add all those to
your playlists. Why you listen to us talk about fairy
Telle New York for however long from the song's origins,
is a duet between a soon to be departed member
of the Pogues to the actually literally Christmas in July
recording session of the quasi mysterious death of Kirsty McCole.

(12:24):
He is everything you didn't know about the Pogues and
Kirsty mccole's fairy Tale of New York. Wow. Sadly we
don't have time to get into the biographies of every
single Pogues member, but in honor of Shane. We're gonna
do a quick thumbnail sketch of him. McGowan was fittingly

(12:45):
born on Christmas Day in nineteen fifty seven, although it
is a massive irony that one of the greatest Irish
songwriters of all time was actually born in Kent, in
English while his parents were English of cities. Yeah, and
the other way. It could be better if it was
one of those like stokewell upon Trentain's places.

Speaker 1 (13:02):
Beings upon toast, his parents were their.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
Visiting relatives, and and Shane just had the poor luck
to be born in England, the place he despised all
his adult life. Was it?

Speaker 1 (13:15):
Churchill born in America in a similar reason, like his
mom happened to be traveling and was born.

Speaker 2 (13:21):
For all my like middle aged man tendencies like World
War two historianism is not one of them. I don't
know a single damn thing about Winston Churchill other than
his grossness in terms of like cigar and alcohol intake.

Speaker 1 (13:35):
And so that is incorrect. Yeah, I am incurred.

Speaker 2 (13:37):
Oh he wasn't born in Okay, Well McGowan, how dare
you bring up Winston Churchill episode of Irish music?

Speaker 1 (13:45):
You you do later? Yeah, you're right an album after
it was quotes that's true.

Speaker 2 (13:52):
That's true, an apocryphal quote anyway. McGowan subsequently spent his
early childhood in Tipperary, Ireland, where he was it was
the drinking two bottles of guinness each night to help
him sleep. By the time he was five or six
years Jesus, his parents moved the family back to England
when he was six, and he was apparently a tremendously
smart kid, at least as far as literature was concerned.

(14:15):
His dad was a very literate man and was talking
about how Shane was reading like James Joyce and Dostoyevsky
by the time that he was eleven. And I still
haven't made it for any Dostoyevsky. I'll let you know
if I do, maybe in the new year. But he
won a literature scholarship to this very prestigious school called

(14:38):
the Westminster School, and he was expelled during his second
year for possession of drugs at the age of seventeen.
He was institutionalized for six months in a psychiatric hospital
and then in short order he found himself working at
a record shop in London during the initial early wave
of the UK punk He wrote a fanzine, and much
like Forrest Gump, you can pick out Shane mcowan in

(15:00):
a lot of like historical photos from the time. He's
like in the front row at clash gigs or something,
and the most famous one is there was coverage of
a Clash show in nineteen seventy six where the basis
of another of a soon to be basis of another
punk band named Jane Crockford bit him in the ear
or on the ear, and this picture of McGowan all

(15:24):
bloody made the papers the next day with the headline
cannibalism at Clash gig. And probably the only bad thing
that Sweet Shane ever did in his life was form
a band called the Nipple Erectors. Just the worst band
choice all that does they ask you came.

Speaker 1 (15:45):
Up with that.

Speaker 2 (15:45):
It's awful. It was shortened to the Nips. It's sort
of like pub rock. It's a little more like rhythm
and blues influence than than post Swart. Yes exactly. Yeah,
we'll never talk about that again. Like so many bands
of their the Pokes came together via the Ramones. Specifically
McGowan met Peter Spider Stacy who played tin whistle, and

(16:09):
also everyone of the popes sang. So it's like they're
all kind of pro vocalists.

Speaker 1 (16:14):
Tin whistle.

Speaker 2 (16:15):
Oh yeah, dude, tin whistles like it's like lead guitar
in Irish music.

Speaker 1 (16:19):
You know, for all my chuckle.

Speaker 2 (16:22):
No, it's so fast. Like the stuff that they have
to play on that little tiny thing size of a
drinking straw is crazy.

Speaker 1 (16:30):
I mean, I'm sure it takes skill, but still I
play the tin whistle.

Speaker 2 (16:33):
Like buddy, don't go from I'm going off. Yeah, I
was gonna say, don't go home to Boston, just smirching
the tin whistle. So they he met Spider Stacy Shane
in the bathroom at a Ramones gig in London in
nineteen seventy seven.

Speaker 1 (16:50):
Famous meetings and bathrooms.

Speaker 2 (16:51):
Let's right, yeah, man, that's a good one.

Speaker 1 (16:55):
Marvin Gay and Barry Gordy. I think I think Marv
Gaelic approached them in the toilet.

Speaker 2 (17:02):
We don't have time to keep pitching listicals. You have
a disease good.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
And I only have the conference from the twelve thirty.

Speaker 3 (17:10):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:11):
So they the two of them formed an ad hoc
band with the excellent name the Millwall Chainsaws, with a
banjo player named Jem Finer, and then when the Nips
broke up, McCowan brought that band's guitarist James Fearnley into
the Pogues as an accordionist. By nineteen eighty two, the
band's core lineup came together with bassist Kate O'Riordan and
drummer al Andrew Rankin. The band's name comes from an

(17:33):
anglicization of the Gaelic phrase or kiss my ass, poke
mahoney of pokee mahone. I think I gave it the
Italian pronunciation its spider. Stacy read in James Joyce's spinningen's weight,
and they pluralized the first word after complaints came up
around their early coverage from Gaelic speakers who recognized the

(17:55):
profanity of that name.

Speaker 1 (18:00):
We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back with more too much information in just a moment.
The Poets hit the London club scene hard and made
a name for themselves by infusing traditional Irish music with
the intensity of punk. One early TV appearance, for instance,

(18:23):
featured Stacy hitting himself on the head with the drink
tray as quote percussion. They opened for the Clash on
a tour in nineteen eighty four, and released their debut,
Red Roses for Me on the important early punk label
Stiff Records that same year, which Elvis Costello has an
association with. Wasn't there there was like a great T

(18:47):
shirt or slogan.

Speaker 2 (18:48):
If it ain't Stiff, it ain't worth or something.

Speaker 1 (18:51):
Yeah, yes, yes, yes yes. The Poges follow up nineteen
eighty five's Rum Sodomy and the Lash Is. As you
mentioned earlier, an apocryphal quote from Winston Churchill about the
traditions of the British Navy really brought them into their
own as songwriters. So the seeds of the dissolution of
their core line up when producer Elvis Costello married Bassis

(19:12):
Kate Riordan and left the band. Another blow was dealt
in nineteen eighty seven when Stiff Records folded, which brings
us up to fairy Tale. It's strange to be this
all occurred, like maybe, I say, a solid ten years
after I thought it would, because I always think of
Stiff Records as being like a late seventies thing.

Speaker 2 (19:30):
Yeah yeah, I mean they lived on until again around
that until that year, mostly anchored.

Speaker 1 (19:37):
You know.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
It's the accounting for the record labels was so crazy
back then because they would just lose bleed money until
one person had like a big hit, and then they
would just limp off for another year. But the pogues
are really I mean, I want to highlight how important
it was for sort of a national identity of the
Irish to have the folks hit when they did, because

(19:58):
there's a big thing in Ireland about people leaving, right Shane,
at what point has quote about like in Ireland you're
either dead or you're in America or something like that,
and oh wow. And in the around the time, you know,
obviously the UK was going through this horrible wave of
economic downturn and there were a lot of Irish people,

(20:20):
both in Britain and elsewhere who were affected by this,
and it was so important for not just them but
the British to see a band that was defiantly and
very proudly Irish bringing the kind of punk energy and
fatality into traditional Irish music, you know, I mean, the

(20:40):
biggest bands of the early UK Hunk Guard, so damn British.
I mean, like God Saved the Queen, Sex Pistols and
the Clash, they're very British bands. I mean, even though
the clash brought into a lot of different world music
influences and stuff, but you know, to have a band
like the Pogues out there with a named after as
in Gaelic that means kiss my ass, that must have

(21:02):
been so powerful for Irish people in and out of
the diaspora who were struggling with their identity in the
midst of this economic counter anyway, so there are competing
accounts of how Fairytale got written. Jane McGowan has suggested
that Elvis Costello made a bet with him that he
wouldn't be able to write Christmas duet to sing with
Kato Jordan, while Aquardian player James Fearley claimed that their

(21:26):
manager Frank Murray suggested that they cover the band's nineteen
seventy seven song Christmas Must Be Tonight, which is a
dog song.

Speaker 1 (21:36):
Yeah, that's on blows.

Speaker 2 (21:38):
And then the worst one is have you heard I
sent you the Robbie Robertson one from Scrooge right where
he's doing it. He re recorded it himself in this
like Quasi Dylan nasally Gravelly Wheeze with just the worst
eighties production ever anyway, horrible song. It was an awful song.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
Don't take our word for it.

Speaker 2 (22:01):
Yeah, Accordion player James Spearley writes in his memoir Here
Comes Everybody, the Story of the Pogues. We probably said
that we'll do our own. This is mind you in
nineteen eighty five, when conversations about a poke's Christmas song started,
because Fairytale ultimately took two years to write and record,
it fits and starts.

Speaker 1 (22:22):
Sorry, I just had a awful bit in my head
of Shane, responding to Elvis Costella's bet to write a
Christmas du it with a song to the tune of Baby.
It's called Outside about Northern Ireland. I really can't stay baby.
There's bombs outside, probably just for you. A badge of
player Jim Finer's version is that the song started as

(22:42):
a more distinctly maritime feeling, real as in the traditional
Irish dance, and not the fishing device about a sailor
missing his wife at Christmas. His wife, Jim Finder's wife,
Marcia Farquhar, decided it was corny, and Finer said, fine,
you give me an eye and I'll write a new song.
He gave a more on the nose reading of her

(23:04):
reaction to the outlet The Irish Music Daily. She said
her main point was that it was sentimental twaddle Toddle
street word.

Speaker 2 (23:10):
I love twaddle.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
Yeah, So we redrafted the song from her basic plot
line of quote a couple falling on hard times and
coming eventually to some redemption. Although supposedly the song is
quote a true story of some mutual friends living in
New York. Do you not know who that could possibly be?

Speaker 2 (23:27):
I don't know. I mean perhaps wisely they never yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:30):
Yeah. Shane McGowan took Finer song and honed in on
the dialogue elements. Okate or Reardon's recollection was that McGowan
wanted to sing it as a duet with a female
studio engineer. Shane was courting her, Oriardon said in March
twenty twenty three, talking to the Irish Broadcasting Company RT.

Speaker 2 (23:51):
Yeah, I don't know it's the full name is in Gaelic,
which is not going to happen, Yeah, to try to pronounce.

Speaker 1 (23:58):
When Shane's courtship with the few email studio engineer failed
to pan out, Jim Finer suggested that Kato Riardon sing it.
She would later recall that she was trying to sing
it like ethel Merman, which, needless to say, uh, didn't
really fit the tambo and tone of the song. Then,
of course she left the band to be with Elvis Costello,

(24:18):
and their relationship lasted sixteen years, though she maintains they
were never formally married. With the engineer and Kato Reardon
out of the picture, the band pursued Chrissy Hind, who'd
been part of the initial punk wave in London and
was currently riding high as the lead singer of the Pretenders.
That would have been wild if she duetit on Fairtale
in New York.

Speaker 2 (24:38):
Yeah, I'm not sure she could have summoned the the irishness.

Speaker 1 (24:43):
Well, yeah, she's from Cleveland, right, Yeah, are.

Speaker 2 (24:48):
The Irish in Cleveland?

Speaker 1 (24:49):
They have to be, you know, the Christy Hine after
I think it was after David Bowie made his American
debut in Cleveland, which was, you know, the capitol of
rock and roll in America. It's where the rock where
a Hall of Fame is and where Alan Freed did
his moondog shows or whatever they were. Christy Hines somehow
met him at the stage door and she and her

(25:09):
friends took him out to like a diner late at
night After.

Speaker 2 (25:12):
Oh yeah, yeah, in the Bowie episode, one of the
Bowie episodes.

Speaker 1 (25:17):
Yeah, I think that's so cute.

Speaker 2 (25:19):
Yeah, I love that. I mean, she's she's obviously incredible,
and at this point she was riding high Pretenders. But yeah,
I think I think because she's more I can't imagine, well,
I think because she's more associated with the kind of
new wave stuff to forget that she was like, you know,
on the ground floor of punk.

Speaker 1 (25:34):
You know, I think I really realized that.

Speaker 2 (25:37):
Yeah, she was living. I think she was living in
London as early as.

Speaker 1 (25:42):
I think she was there early, but I guess I'm
not familiar with super early Pretenders.

Speaker 2 (25:47):
Or Yeah, she formed the Pretenders in seventy eight, so wow,
a year or maybe after punk broke in the UK.
She moved to London in seventy three, oh damn. And
then she worked actually at theol mclary and Pathan Westbix store. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (26:02):
Yeah. I always kind of thought of the Pretender's as
like the British blondie. Yeah, more of a new way
of than punk, even though they started in the punk era.
That's really interesting.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
It's really fascinating how in mess she was with that scene.
I mean, she she knew the sex Pistols and supposedly
wanted to it. Was involved in like a marriage scheme
to get her green card with members of the Sex Pistols.
She auditioned for a band called that would become this

(26:32):
British punk band nine ninety nine, she tried to start
a group with Dick Jones from The Clash. You know,
she was in the band that went on to become
The Damned Like. She's really very much like a kind
of Forrest Gump figure in that she had all these
connections to these first wave British punk bands and then
went on to have her own incredible band. You know,

(26:54):
that's so cool.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
I need to know more about her. I don't know
as much as I should, but she was not a
good fit for fairy Tale of New York. Ultimately, serendipity
and nepotism collided in the form of singer Kirsty McColl,
who was married to veteran British producer Steve Lilly White
and was also managed by the Pogues manager who you
just wrote in Capitol letters as the Pogues.

Speaker 2 (27:17):
Manager that was air. His name was Frank Murray. Yeah,
Kirsty McColl was fascinating and she has a big blind
spot for me admittedly, but her life is fairly unique.
She was born to the British folk singer You and Nicole,
who was one of the prime movers and shakers of
the sixties, spoke Boom not just as a writer but
as an archivist collector of traditional English, Irish and Scottish ballads.

(27:42):
For instance, you know the version of Scarboroughffair that Simon
and Garfunkle got famous for came from his collection. I mean.
He also wrote First Time I Ever Saw Your Face,
which were flash she turned into a huge hit, and
he also wrote Dirty Old Town, which was covered by
the Pogues. Who was also an ardent communist and socialist

(28:03):
and in his last published interview noted that he'd left
the Communist Party because it was insufficiently communist, or the
Soviet Union had become insufficiently communist in his eyes, and
he caused a scandal when Pete Seeger's half sister Peggy
went over to the UK to help transcribe stuff for
the Alan Lomacks Folk Song Archive, and You and Nicole

(28:26):
fell in love with her, and despite being twenty years
older at the time they got together, and also he
was still married to Kirsty's mother, so Checkered passed for him,
and this obviously impacted Kirsty's worldview and a lot of
her writing. Mark Nevin, who wrote and performed with Nicole
in the late eighties and early nineties, told The Guardian,
if you took most songwriters, put all their lyrics into

(28:48):
a computer and pressed equals, you'd get two lines that
sum up everything they'd written in a nutshell. Kirsty's would
be all blokes are gonna lie, cheat and let you down.
Adding to this was the fact that her father, who
was an ardent folk musician and comi, hated pop music,
which was the route that she kind of went down.
Billy Bragg, who Kirsty recorded a famous cover of his

(29:12):
song A New England, said her dad was very scornful
of pop music. He really didn't like it at all,
not just her doing it, but anyone doing it. So
in spite or perhaps because of this parental disapproval, some
of Nicole's early experiences were in punk bands in London
with names like Drug Addicts with an X Yeah It's

(29:33):
pretty good. Stiff Records caught one of their early shows
and hilariously declined to sign the band but picked up Kirsty.
But you know, she just seemed to be struck by
bad luck and through most of her career. A distributor
strike prevented copies of her first single from getting into
record stores, and she also had powerful cases of stage

(29:55):
fright that prevented her from being as heavy a live
performers a lot of other people. She had a number
fourteen UK hit off her debut album on Paulador. I
think that was the one that is called There's a
Bloke down at the chip Shop thinks He's Elvis or
something like that, but the label dropped her just as
she was finishing her second album for them, so she

(30:17):
went back to Stiff Records and her brag cover a
New England with extra verses that Billy Bragg wrote just
for her and that he now performs when he does
the song in her honor. That was a number seven
hit in the UK.

Speaker 1 (30:28):
In the United States, Kissy McCole achieves success when Tracy
Olman recorded her song they Don't Know, which reached number
eight on the US Hot one hundred and April nineteen
eighty four and number two in the UK. I love
this song. Do you know the song?

Speaker 2 (30:42):
No? I don't.

Speaker 1 (30:43):
Well, first of all, it sounds like I have to say,
I don't know Churiosy's version if she has one, but
Tracy Ullman version. It sounds almost like a like a
Supreme song or a Cherelle song or something. It's so
it's this wall of sound production. And the video features
my beloved Paul McCartney in it, because Tracy Allman appeared
in Paul's movie is sort of ill fated screenwriting debut,

(31:06):
give my regards to The broad Street, which no one liked,
so he returned the favor and appeared in her music video,
which I think is really cute. But yeah, check out
that song.

Speaker 2 (31:14):
It's great.

Speaker 3 (31:15):
It's really catchy.

Speaker 1 (31:36):
McCole is on the track, singing which I didn't realize,
singing notes that Tracy couldn't hit. But this became something
of an unfortunate lot for her when Stiff Records went
bankrupt in nineteen eighty six and no one picked up
her contract, leaving her unable to record under her own name.

Speaker 2 (31:54):
Why the music industry, the music industry.

Speaker 1 (31:58):
What's the hunter? S? Thompson quot out the industry?

Speaker 2 (32:01):
Khallow cruel and shallow trench where trashs get rich and
good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side.

Speaker 1 (32:12):
Wow, God, all that bad luck and then the way
she died, which we'll talk about later, but yeah, what
a tragic figure.

Speaker 2 (32:19):
Yeah. Uh.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
By the time Fair Tale of New York became a hit,
Christy mccoley contributed backing vocals for The Smiths, Simple Minds,
The Rolling Stones, Robert Plant, Talking Heads, Big Country, and
Anni fring Lingenstad of Abba presumably just to live because
she couldn't record under her own name. I'm guessing.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
Yeah, she's a session in vocalist.

Speaker 1 (32:41):
That's a hell of a lineup. And also because she
was married to producer Steve lily White. She even set
the track sequence on You Two's The Joshua Tree, which
lily White produced.

Speaker 2 (32:50):
I love that. She was just like, you know, here's
how this should be ordered. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
All that work contributed to mcole's strengths as a vocalist.
She supposedly had perfect pitch and learn the vocal harmonies
to The Beach Boys Good Vibrations when she was just
seven years old, and that became one of her trademark
party tricks. She would sing like a keyboard. Lily White
told The Guardian of her layering technique. She sang without vibrato,
and when you don't have vibrato, you have this wonderful

(33:16):
glassy sound, which is how you can get that Beach
Boys thing. That's incredible. That means arguably the most complex
song the Beach Boys ever did in the seven year
old parts depart those harmonies which god knows how many
double tracks and triple tracks. Wow, Billy brad recalled. She
telled the engineer where to put the mics, and she'd
tell the producer what she was going to do.

Speaker 2 (33:35):
Next.

Speaker 1 (33:35):
She did some amazing thing where she'd do a take,
then go round into a different position and do another
take to layer up this amazing sound. Then that's all,
Let's go to the pub.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
Yeah, so she's such a blind spot for me. I
really over a deep dive after during this episode. But
so anyway, as I mentioned, Christa McCall Steve lily White
were married and she was being managed by the Pokes
manager Frank Murray. One weekend they took a stab at
doing fairy Tale with her singing the female lines. Took
the whole weekend. They really worked on it, especially at

(34:10):
the phrasing of the song, which is already difficult because
of just the way that it's written at scansion and
so forth, but they were made considerably harder by Shane
McGowan's delivery, which is so back on the beat as
to almost be unusable. And then they sent it off
to the band.

Speaker 1 (34:25):
The band had already attempted Fairytale sessions in nineteen eighty six,
during which McGowan was attempting to craft songs out of
his love for Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland. I love
when these punk guys have a soft spot for the
old timers, didn't. I mean, it's like the sex pistol's
doing my way.

Speaker 2 (34:42):
Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 (34:43):
And Jim Morrison also wanted to sound like Frank Sinatra
on the Bridge to Touch Me. I love that. I
guess calling Jim Morrison a punk will probably mean that
I'm banished for me punk.

Speaker 2 (34:54):
It was probably it was probably the most he was. Yeah,
he's probably the most punk out of all those. Laurel
Canyon Ssya. I'm holding I'm holding on to that. I'm
holding on to that theory.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
We're gonna, We're gonna do it. We're gonna make a
show out of that.

Speaker 2 (35:09):
I told my parents about that the other night. My
dad was like he compared it to cuban on. I
was like, yeah, there's a there's an instagram I can
I follow that. Their Their slogan is loyal to the foil,
as in tinfoil hats I am.

Speaker 1 (35:27):
For those of you have no idea what we're talking about,
this is it's just its third appearance in the as
many weeks on.

Speaker 2 (35:33):
The Yeah, it keeps coming up.

Speaker 1 (35:35):
Yeah. Dave McGowan, a h the late Dave McGowan, a
journalist who I don't mind saying trafficked and conspiracy theory is,
wrote a very compelling and interesting book called Strange Scenes
in the Canyon about his theory that the Laurel Canyon
music scene was a psy op to basically undermined uh

(35:57):
meaningful change in radicalism in America. Interesting stuff, m and
all true. Sorry I didn't realize this. This makes me
love this song so much more. Shan mcgallan had never
been to New York when he wrote the lyrics to
this song. Yeah band had taken a copy of Sergio
Leoni's epic Once Upon a Time in America on tour

(36:19):
with them in nineteen eighty five, which influenced the lyrics.
The majority of the words had been written while McGowan
was recovering from double pneumonia in Sweden during a late
nineteen eighty five Scandinavian tour, and he later told the BBC,
you get a lot of delirium and stuff, so I
got quite a few good images out of that. That
makes so much sense.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (36:38):
He would also say, at one point of the writing,
I sat down, opened the sherry, got the peanuts out
and pretended it was Christmas the peanuts. Is that a
Christmas thing? Is an Irish Christmas thing? Or is that
a bar?

Speaker 2 (36:49):
He was trying to get in the mood of being
at a bar of barqetots or something, and McGowan would
later tell The Guardian every night I used to have
another batch nailing the lyrics, but I knew they weren't right.
It is far the most complicated song that I've ever
been involved in writing and performing. The beauty of it
is that it sounds really simple, And he would add
I identified with the man because I was a hustler,

(37:09):
and I identified with the woman because I was a
heavy drinker and a singer. I have been in hospitals
on morphine drips, and I have been in drug tanks
on Christmas Eve. Jem Feiner would tell the Guardian, I
don't think the band was capable of playing the song
as it needed to be played at that point. Shane
and I batted arrangements around for ages, and we periodically
try and record it. He's a tireless and meticulous editor,

(37:33):
so at the first go round, a practically minded Elvis
Costello suggested that the band just called the song Christmas
Day in the Drunk Tank, which McGowan hilariously also pointed
out would limit the singles chances of success.

Speaker 1 (37:46):
So it's just such a great title though, it's so.

Speaker 2 (37:48):
Good it is. Yeah, so according player Jim Finer or
arew anyway, jem Feiner was reading JP don Levy's nineteen
seventy three novel fairy Tale of New York, concerning a
grieving Irish Americans return home from Ireland to Manhattan, and
McGowan actually went to him in person to ask if

(38:09):
they could borrow the title. And I keep seeing this
quote circulated on your lower tier trivia aggregation sites that
suggests Don Levy was gonna he said something like I
could have sued the pose, but I, you know, shame
as a friend, so I decided not to. I was
never able to verify it. And also all the places

(38:30):
that aggregated that attributed it to the garbage paper, the
Daily Mail. So I don't really I'm inclining. But if
you see that out there, this wasn't me. Yeah, I'm
not giving it any more Oxygen. Also, in early nineteen
eighty six, the band actually made it to New York,
which McGowan cheerfully enthused was even more like New York

(38:53):
than the movies. It's so yeah, it's very sweet, just
like a Kidney Candy story. The funniest thing about One
of the funniest things about this song to me is
that the chorus the boys in the NYPD choir were
singing Galway Bay. That is false. Galway Bay is a
beloved Irish American tune that enemy of the pod Bing

(39:14):
Crosby had a hit Brick in nineteen forty eight. But
the NYPD doesn't actually have a choir. The closest thing
that they have is a pipe and drum group which
plays at funerals and marches and parades and such, and
They would later appear in the music video for Fairytale
of New York, but they were miming and mouthing the
words to the Mickey mouse Club song, the theme song

(39:35):
to the Mickey mouse Club because it was the only
song that they all knew. They went, okay, do you
guys know Galway Bay? And they all the pipers and
drummers and stuff are like no, They're like, do you
know Danny Boy? You all know Danny Boy? And they're
like no. They're like, all right, what song do you
all know the words to? And they're like the Mickey
mouse Club that was arrived at So they sang that

(39:56):
during the record or filming, and then it was slowed
down and playback to actually match the tempo of the
song and in the video to actually match the tempos.
There was a great bit. The New York Times caught
up with the one of the guys who was in
there this year and interviewed him about that, and he said,
when they met the band for the first time, Shane
McGowan went up to the conductor or the leader who

(40:18):
duck with his Greek big staff to kind of mark
the tempo, and he asked if he could see it
and then immediately threw it thirty feet up in the
air and everyone kind of went, oh God, and then
he caught it before it hit the ground. It's just
like the thing you do to an NYPD cop is like, hey,

(40:39):
can I see that thing, and then just fulling it
up in the air. But at long last, this year,
the Epic Museum in Dublin formed an NYPD choir out
of retired NYPD cops to record a version of a
Galway Bay in tribute to McGowan.

Speaker 1 (40:56):
Oh that's really sweet, as somebody who really wasn't all
that familiar with the Pogues aside from Seane McGowan as
a colorful musical figure, and then obviously this song at
Christmas time. I was really blown away by the outpouring
of tributes in the wake of his death and the

(41:17):
really you know, I mean, just like that, like you
just mentioned about forming a group of a choir out
of retired New York Police officers to record a song
and tribute to them. I mean, that is wild to me.
The esteem in which he's held by so many. I
know that's for fans of the Pogues. I know that's
the most obvious thing in the world. It's like someone saying, Wow,
I can't believe people love John Lennon that much.

Speaker 2 (41:39):
Yeah, like I know that, but they never really hit
big in the US. Is the thing. I think they
they're they're If your casual listener knows them, it's from
this song, you know they and that's why they're sort
of been signed or shuffled into the pump category more
than more than anything. As you meditate on that, we'll

(42:01):
be right back with more too much information after these messages.

Speaker 1 (42:13):
We mentioned earlier that this song took something like two
years to come together, and part of this was because
band member Kato Ridon left the band and Steve Lillie
White took over from Elvis Costello as the producer of
the song. I'm sad that Elvis Costella didn't get to
produce of the song. That would have been amazing.

Speaker 2 (42:28):
Did you ever mention Kate when you were interviewing him, No,
or like any of the folks. Yeah, I mean they know.

Speaker 1 (42:34):
I don't know about the Pogues. Yeah, I know, I mean, yeah,
I was. Costello. His memoir is incredible. I mean he's
an amazing writer. Obviously, anyone who reads his lyrics knows that,
but yeah, the man is one of the most musically minded.
His musical knowledge is probably the broadest of anyone, certainly
if anyone I've ever interviewed ever, I mean just anyone,

(42:57):
I know, it's pretty amazing. Yeah uh. A new demo,
Fairytale of New York, was recorded at London's Abbey Roads Studios,
my beloved Abbey Roads Studios. It all goes back to
the Beatles in March nineteen eighty seven, with Shane McGowan
singing both the male and female roles, but the master

(43:17):
take would eventually be recorded during a sweltering July session
Christmas in July. The two parts of the song Finer's beautiful,
poignant melodic theme and McGowan's dialogues We're giving the band
as you say hell as they attempted to record them live,
so Lily White made the classic producer decision of just

(43:37):
having them record these two parts separately and join them
with an edit, much like George Martin did for the
Beatles Strawberry Fields Forever, probably in the same studio at
Abbey Road.

Speaker 2 (43:47):
It's I mean, it's tricky. Even the live performance that
we mentioned earlier with Glen Hanson covering the song at
Shamee's funeral, like he is very much dictating tempo and
transitions with his guitar because it's such a weird ching.
It approximates the feeling of a drunken pub sing along. Yeah,
which is great, great for art less, good for practically recording.

Speaker 1 (44:11):
That's funny. I heard the rhythm as like two drunks
out of a bar, arms around each other, patching down
the street, trying to hit each other up.

Speaker 2 (44:20):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (44:21):
Lillie White later told The Guardian it was a beautiful time.
I got the Pogues when they were really firing and
before too much craziness got involved. As long as I
got them early in the day, it was great. There's
a list, yeah right.

Speaker 2 (44:35):
Horns and strings were recorded at Townhouse Studios on the
last day of recording of what would become the band's
third album, If I Should Fall from Grace with God.
That album title track, by the way, is one of
my favorite songs of all time. It is such a
perfect dissolation of the Pogues. It's like this breakneck tempo
country punk song. Ah so good. So James Spearley, the

(44:58):
according player, sketched out of a melodic idea, and then
that was later brought to full arranged fully by Fiachra Tench.
He is credited with string arrangements on the Boomtown Rats,
I Don't like Mondays? Oh yeah, how about that. McGowan
supposedly one of the orchestra to interpolate a chunk of
the melody from Have Yourself on Merry Little Christmas, but
the band's guitarist Phil Chevron talked to him out of it.

(45:20):
Good call, Phil, So the nearly finished track was presented
to Lily Wait for McCole to take a stab at.
She spent hours on the phrasing and the band was
mostly impressed by the result, though Lily Whit would later
tell The Guardian to be honest, they weren't one hundred
percent convinced that Kersey was the right person. McGowan differs,
recalling I was madly in love with Kirsty for the

(45:41):
first time I saw her on Top of the Pops.
She was a genius in her own right, and she
was a better producer than he was. She could make
a song her own, and she made Fairytale her own,
and McAllan was so impressed that he decided to re
record his own vocals, but the pair's chemistry on that
song is entirely artificial. Really, they were never in the
same room together during the recording process.

Speaker 1 (46:02):
Oh that makes me sad. I really don't like that.

Speaker 2 (46:05):
I mean, they performed it live together, but yeah, it
was all remote sessions, at least for their different parts.
And I went through this whole Sound on Sound article
about the making of If I Should Fall from Grace
with God. I was hoping for some really absurd stories,
but actually most of that article was concerned about how
the sort of technical difficulties of recording this band because

(46:25):
of all their instruments. The guy who engineered the session,
Chris Dickey, said that the group was pretty productive. Actually,
he said, during the first week of the Fall from
Grace sessions, we recorded ten backing tracks. On the Saturday night, management,
friends and road crew all showed up to the studio
and we had a bigger party than any end of
album bash we'd ever had there. And that was just
the end of the first week. Yeah. He just talks

(46:47):
about how like they had all these acoustic instruments in
the studio, they all kind of had to be isolated separately,
and the instruments on that record include tin whistle, accordion, piano, mandolin, dulcimer, cello, banjo, saxophone,
a traditional lute in Irish music called a sittern concertina,
assorted percussion instruments ranging from traditional Irish frame drums, hand

(47:09):
drums to spoons. Also, everyone sang, and there is an
additional credit for the Pogue's Choir on the record, which
was made up of everyone from Lily White to the
band's manager Frank Murray to quote Brian Sheridan from the
Off License, which I believe is a reference to a bookie.
And also the man from the Indian Takeaway is credited

(47:31):
with being part of the Pogue's Choir, which I assume
meant they were getting delivery and just invited this guy
into do backing vocals with them. Dicky also noted that
McGowan's headphone mix for recording was the loudest of anyone
I've recorded, and consisted mostly of the kick drum, the
bass guitar, and his own vocals, and it was so
loud that they had to be concerned about the mix

(47:53):
from the headphones bleeding into his vocal mic, particularly when
he was recording to scratch tracks that were going to
be rerecorded later. I just think that's funny.

Speaker 1 (48:01):
Though the full length If I Should Fall from Grace
with God, wouldn't be released until nineteen eighty eight. The
decision was wisely made to release fairy Tale of New
York as a single, and the video was duly drummed
up in New York. Shot during Thanksgiving Week. A young
Matt Dillon plays the NYPD officer who arrests McGowan, but
as a huge fan of the Pogues, who'd actually met

(48:23):
McGowan the year before in nineteen eighty six when the
band first came to the city. Matt Dylon was too
nervous to really give him the old NYPD brutality, and
mcgallan freezing cold and an actual Lower east Side police
station cell snapped at him, just kick the shit out
of me and throw me in the cell and then
we could be warm. What a charmer. The black and

(48:47):
white segments of McGowan and McCall were modeled on a
BBC documentary about Billie Holliday. There was actually a point
of contention though for keyboardists Jim Farnley. Fearily God, I'm
the worst BOSTONI and I can't say any of these
names that I've definitely seen as a kid. Those are

(49:08):
his hands playing the piano, but he's wearing McGowan's rings
to preserve the illusion that it's him, he said. He
told mcguardian years later, I'm the piano player, and I
wanted people to know that. It was absolutely humiliating, but
it looks better. You have to find your proper plays
for the benefit of the project.

Speaker 2 (49:25):
Sad for him, but you know, you gotta find your
proper place. I don't know where's going with that. Fairy
Tale of New York was released on November twenty third,
nineteen eighty seven. The song has never been the UK
number one at Christmas or ever. It was kept at
number two on its original release by the pet Shot
Boys cover of Always on My Mind, causing McGowan to

(49:46):
supposedly quip we were beaten by two queens and a
drum machine, which is going to sound so much worse
after I get to this next bit. The big elephant
in the room that we've been dodging is the hard
f slur that mccole's character calls mcgallan at one point,
and very stupidly. Most of the early controversy of this
song centered around the use of the word arts. Because

(50:08):
the homophobic slur was considered okay, arts was not. Various
channels of the BBC aired censored versions or didn't and
then reversed their censoring. MTV UK bleeped both sports. The
debate about it kicks up annually, seemingly, and one of
the bigger ones was in twenty eighteen when two broadcasters

(50:29):
were working for RTE asked the public company to censor
the song and the company refused, and McGowan made I
think one of his only public statements about it at
the time, saying the word was used by the character
because it fitted with the way she would speak with
and with her character. She is not supposed to be
a nice person or even a wholesome person. She's a
woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history,

(50:51):
and she's down on her luck and desperate. Her dialogue
is as accurate as I could make it, but she
is not intended to offend. She's just supposed to be
an authentic carecharacter. And not all characters and songs and
stories are angels or even decent and respectable. Sometimes characters
and songs and stories have to be evil or nasty
to tell the story effective. If people don't understand that
I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically

(51:13):
as possible, then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping
the word. But I don't want to get into an argument.
I think that is a great nuanced take from him.
What do you think, No.

Speaker 1 (51:24):
I agree, I mean it's funny. Norman Lear died a
few days before recording this, and I was revisiting a
lot of his television work from the seventies, All in
the Family and the Jeffersons specifically, and their takes on
the way that they would portray very offensive characters as
a way to make a point. I know these days

(51:46):
that's seen as such an old, tired trope and we
should be giving more air to these harmful words. But
considering the time that the song was made in the
late eighties, that I think that was probably a more
legitimate excuse then, that you were trying to make a
point about a character. And and yeah, that's interesting to me.
It's an interesting and I think that's makes sense at

(52:07):
the time. I don't think it's something that, Yeah, I
think it cause more of a distraction now I think
that you were to make a song now and put
that word in.

Speaker 2 (52:15):
I mean to me, the debate always comes down to, like,
it's not so much about like, oh, they're a woman
of their time or like whatever, but it comes down
to me, like what would the character? What does this
make sense for the story? And and I think recently
I saw a lot of this come up with Otessa Moshvek,
the novelist who wrote her fam most famous one is
by Year of Rest of Relaxation. That there's a movie

(52:36):
being made of her novel Eileen, or the movie coming out,
I should say. And all of her characters are awful,
awful human beings, and you know, to the point where
it can get a little tiresome. But you know she's
trying to do that as as her literary device and

(52:59):
part of her voice and the stories that she wants
to write. And I do think that there is a
germ of that that has to be protected Otherwise, you know,
you don't get a lot of great books of art.
And someone's probably gonna twist these words and make me
out to be a homophobe. But you know, I think
you got to you got to walk that line and

(53:20):
say I'm trying to paint the character, and this goes
into making them a nuanced, realized vision.

Speaker 1 (53:28):
I mean, it's interesting to me. And this may be
too much of a tangent. I remember in screenwriting school
in like two thousand and six, two thousand and seven,
two thousand and eight, all the professors saying, you know,
you need a likable protagonist, a likable protagonist and need
to do things. You need to have them be flawed
in some way so that they can grow, but you
need them to still be to redeem them somehow and
make them likable. And I and I feel like these days,

(53:51):
especially with shows with prestige dramas, things like mad Men,
Breaking Bad, Yeah, people that And I noticed it really
on Succession, where every single character is unlikable to the
point where well, I mean I loved Succession, but there
were times when it was tiresome because they were so

(54:15):
just detestable all of that. Yeah, and it wasn't like
I mean, I have a whole theory about how Succession
is basically arrested development with the humor dial down. I mean,
they are, It's true. We interviewed Jason Bateman for a
show working on and I wanted to ask him that,
but I chickened out. I know, I know, but think
about it. I mean, you've got like the Jason Bateman character,

(54:37):
Michael is Is Kendall. He's like the good Son that worked.

Speaker 2 (54:41):
I haven't watched the session I worked. I worked for
the Murdocks. I know it's good. I just have no
interest in seeing them fictionalized.

Speaker 1 (54:48):
Okay, no, but it's just interesting to me. And I
don't know if if we as an audience have changed
or if we just become accustomed to it by characters
that went through sort of an evil transfer, like Walter
White and Breaking Pad. But yeah, it's interesting to me
how unlikable characters have been embraced in culture in recent years.
I feel like I have nothing more to I have

(55:10):
nothing else to say about that.

Speaker 2 (55:11):
I yield my time here. This seemingly annual debate kicked
up again in twenty twenty, with the BBC again announced
that Radio one would play censored version while Radio two
would play the original, and presenters for their Channel six
Music would decide each for themselves which version to play.
It was apparently Nick Caves turned to weigh in. Next,

(55:34):
he drew the short straw and he accused the BBC
of mutilating and stripping the song of its value. The
funniest part, though, the only reason I bring this up again,
of the twenty twenty flap was in this British troll
right wing door. An ex actor named Lawrence Fox attempted
to surf the controversy for attention, trying to get the
original version to chart and tweeting defund the BBC, and

(55:55):
the poge's Twitter account responded, off, you little heron.

Speaker 1 (56:02):
Would you like to tell the good listeners what heron
folk means?

Speaker 2 (56:04):
I think in Google that one.

Speaker 1 (56:08):
Fairy Tale New York spent five weeks at the top
of the Irish chart, which McGowan said mattered to him
more than not making number one in England. Various re
releases when as high as number three, and it's re
entered the top seventy five every December since two thousand
and five, making the top twenty on twenty separate occasions,
and the top ten on ten. You made that up.

(56:30):
There's no way those numbers lined up like that. With
its twenty one visits to the chart to date, it's
told one hundred and fourteen weeks on the official UK
Top seventy five, making it the sixth most charted song
of all time. Various polls by various publications named it
the UK's favorite Christmas song at different points. According to

(56:50):
the British music licensing body PPL, it's become the most
popular Christmas song of the twenty first century in the UK.
Following McGowan's death twenty twenty three. The song returned to
number one on the Irish Singles Chart on the same
day as McGowan's funeral, and thirty six years after it
first topped the charts in Ireland. Supposedly, the song was

(57:12):
earning the band about four hundred and seventy thousand pounds
per year in royalties as of twenty sixteen, which was
as you say, pretty pretty, pretty good, wonderful Christmas time.
I'm now contractually obliged to mention earns. Paul McCartney. I
think upwards of three quarters of a million pounds a year,

(57:33):
or maybe three quarters of a million dollars a year.

Speaker 2 (57:35):
How nice for.

Speaker 1 (57:38):
But the song and the pogues, as you mentioned earlier,
never really got it to do in the States. It's
never reached the Hot one hundred, only charting on Billboard's
holiday digital song sales, peaking at number twenty two and
twenty eleven. Though it's possible that maybe McGowan's death will
change that this year Brenda Lee will be blocking the
top spot.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
Yeah, that's true. Damn it.

Speaker 1 (58:02):
There's a good chance that this is the first song
you ever heard. It came out like two weeks after
you were born, in November eighty seven.

Speaker 2 (58:08):
That's true. Yeah. I don't know that I would have
gotten per yeah, yeah, but it would explain a lot. Unfortunately,
the success of Fairytale caused a number of fissures within
the pogue to worsen. For starters, despite the reputation, most
of them were by this point in their career, married
with children, and gasp, no longer drinking through their shows. McGowan, however,

(58:33):
was going the opposite route. He had always abused drugs
along with his heroic intake of Who's There's one famous
story about him being in Wellington, New Zealand, taking much
of speed and hearing the voices of Maori telling him
to paint his face and chest blue and run around
the hotel. But now he was oscillating between heroin and
prodigious amounts of LSD that induced, for example, long conversations

(58:56):
between Shane and one of his heroes, Jimmy Hendrix.

Speaker 1 (59:00):
Those don't really go together.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
LSD. And yeah, I mean it's it's.

Speaker 1 (59:08):
It's twothpaste of orange juice.

Speaker 2 (59:10):
Yeah, and people said that it was like it was
really around it. I think it really was the success
of this that that cracked him, because people said, the
heroin you just got a lot worse. And I read
a lot of very interesting interviews where they were where,
you know, they said that he was essentially a shy
person and kind of made it into the frontman role
against sort of his wishes because they all wrote and

(59:34):
you know, they were all sort of democratically lined up
along the front of the stage together. But because he
was shamed, he sort of was christened to the front
man and he always disagreed with that. And yeah, I
think the drugs were like the bad drugs, the really
bad drugs were an attempt to cope with this, and
particularly the band's touring schedule, which had always been pretty hard,

(59:57):
but then it increased dramatically after success. Fairy Tale and
the book A Drink with Shane McGowan, which is a
series of interviews and Reminiscence that he assembled with his wife,
Victoria Mary Clark. He explained, I was already pissed off
with touring by the time we did Fairytale to New York.
What a wonderful term of phrase. I gradually started hating
for it. I didn't notice it was happening until it

(01:00:19):
was too late, and he continued. I kept asking for
a year off we had to tour after Fairytale, Yeah,
but we didn't have to tour for four years after it.

Speaker 1 (01:00:28):
Jesus McGowan became increasingly unreliable live. He wasn't allowed the
board to flight at Heathrow Airport when the group was
supposed to fly over and open for Bob Dylan in
San Francisco in nineteen eighty nine, and subsequently the band
performed without him. I assume he was too drunk to fly.

Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Yeah, I mean, I think he was just too messed
up and it would have on the plane. He was
supposedly really bad on, really bad on Heroin around this time.
There's a great documentary called Shane McGowan A Crop of
Gold by Julian Temple. I think name Yeah, and everyone
unanimously too much into Heroin.

Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Ultimately The Pogues ended up firing Shane McGowan in nineteen
ninety one during a tour in Tokyo. His response, what
took you so long? Oh that's so honrish Jesus Christ,
so devastatingly self aware. Yeah, so so sad and so resigned.
Oh God, that hurts so much. But he formed a

(01:01:30):
new band, the Popes, which it's really funny. That's a
great name for so many reasons, and turned in some
respectable records, but by and large, the rest of his
life was mostly occupied with just being as you write,
Shane McGowan. And when he finally got his teeth fixed
in twenty fifteen, it was national news. Ye actually I

(01:01:51):
even remember seeing that, and I apparently know he was.
The Pogues reunited a few times, grew to hate each
other again, McGowan quipped, and he spread he made music
or did one off shows. Interestingly enough, Snead O'Connor once
reported him to the police for drug possession after finding
him passed out on his floor. How about pissed it?
O'Connor at first. McAllan later thanked her, saying that the

(01:02:13):
incident helped him kick heroin.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Yeah, I haven't listened to much of the popes. I
think it goes back to that kind of club rock
sort of tradition that his first fame was. Yeah, you know,
I really wanted to talk about how he kept bravely
making music and this, that and the other thing. But
you know, he did record, he did do these little shows.
But it really did seem like he just kind of

(01:02:37):
coasted into legend status throughout the throughout the nineties and
two thousands of kind of parked there, which.

Speaker 1 (01:02:44):
You know, as hard living irishmen of a certain age,
should you know, as they're want to do, Yeah, as
their little legend carries them through their twilight years.

Speaker 2 (01:02:54):
Sadly, he did live to see John bon Jovi's cover
of fairy Tale, in which bon Jovi sings both parts,
although he probably missed Travis and Jason Kelsey's cover entitled
fairy Tale of Philadelphia Jay Lenovoice, do you hear about this?

(01:03:15):
Do you guys hear it?

Speaker 1 (01:03:16):
No?

Speaker 2 (01:03:17):
That's all that's all you get. I guess they there musical.
One of them is musical. I don't care.

Speaker 1 (01:03:27):
They've got cars, biggest bars, they got rivers of gold
with the windows right through. You still plays for the old.

Speaker 2 (01:03:33):
When you first took my hand on a cold Christmas Eve,
you promised me. Brod Street was.

Speaker 1 (01:03:38):
Waiting for me. You were handsome, you were pretty. You're
the king of South Philly.

Speaker 2 (01:03:42):
When the band finished playing, they howled out for more.
The letters were swinging, all the drugs, Day were singing
we are on a corner, and then danced through the night.

Speaker 1 (01:03:53):
I hate that, Yeah, I went on my way. I'm
not allowed to say I hate that, am I? Because
I'm gonna have God knows how many Swift.

Speaker 2 (01:04:00):
I don't know if they'd love for her extends to
protecting him all of his output. He does seem to
be one of the brick dumbest people alive.

Speaker 3 (01:04:08):
Like Twitter.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
His Twitter and the quotes circulating from that podcast that
he has is just like, yeah, man, you picked the
right career. He probably missed that one because he had
been hospitalized fighting viral encephalitis for most of the past year.
He had been wheelchair bounds since twenty fifteen, since he
fell exiting a recording studio and he broke his pelvis.

(01:04:34):
By the way, not the one not travisis not Travis Kelcey.
He broke his knee in twenty twenty one after falling
at his home. There was this running bit that all
the journalists used to mention about how he was just
like constantly injured by fall falls during the folks Heyday,
which if you're stumble drunk for the better part of
a decade, then yeah, you're you're going to fall a lot.

(01:04:54):
But he did. There was an upside to one of these.
He did at least detox completely his two hundred and
fifteen hospitalization, and this supposedly continued for years, and he
died in November.

Speaker 1 (01:05:07):
I was just telling something about this. I just bought
an ash tray with a playing card spade on it,
and I was paying for it, and I started talking
with the cashier about Lemmy from Motorhead, because that was
their symbol. And I remember interviewing him a couple months
before he died, and he he was one of several

(01:05:29):
rock luminaries who, towards the end of their life, in
a nod to health, switched from jack and coke to
orange juice and vodka because it was supposedly healthier. And
I remember let me being very proud telling me that
I don't know there was a reason why that came
into my head.

Speaker 3 (01:05:48):
I don't actually.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
Remember whyforcable detox because hospitalized for falling down and breaking
your knee.

Speaker 1 (01:05:56):
Ye that yeah, that'll do it. I guess that'll do
and let me also died in late twenty fifteen, so
maybe that was what I was say. Hey. Kirsty McCole
had a much stranger postcript to fairy Tale New York.
While she credited performing the single with the Pogues around
this time with helping her temporarily overcome her stage fright,
she continued to have a checkered career, with a few
modest hits but no real consistency. By the mid nineties,

(01:06:18):
she was considering abandoning music altogether, but found herself enamored
of Latin music, particularly Cuban music, after visiting there in
nineteen ninety two, she started taking Spanish lessons and playing
Cuban solidarity concerts. She started living Portuguese as well, eventually
visiting Brazil, and her passion eventually turned into the album
Tropical Brainstorm, which was her last a critical hit that

(01:06:40):
featured the minor hit in These Shoes, which appeared on
an episode of Sex in the City. This is where
it gets Really sad In the year two thousand, McColl.
In the year two thousand, McColl took a holiday to Cosimo,
Mexico with her sons and her boyfriend, musician James Knight,
obstensibly to help one of her recover from the death

(01:07:01):
of his friend. On December eighteenth, two thousand, she and
her sons went diving at a reef in the National
Marine Park of Cosameo, in an area where watercraft were banned.
Surfacing from a dive, McCole saw that a powerboat had
entered the restricted area and was headed towards her fifteen
year old son, Jamie. She was able to push him
out of the way, but was struck and run over

(01:07:21):
by the powerboat, which killed her instantly. Her body was
sent back to the UK, where she was cremated after
a funeral service. Yeah, and it gets worse.

Speaker 2 (01:07:32):
The twist to this is that aboard the power boat
was Germo Gonzales Nova. There was a multimillionaire gasp that
he's the multimillionaire president of the Mexican grocery store chain
from Marsel, Mexicana, along with members of his family. The
power boat was owned by his brother, who founded the chain.

(01:07:53):
A boat hand named jose senjam testified that he was
in control of the boat at the time, but I
witness his few did this, and also said that the
boat was traveling much faster than the one knot he
said he was going at the time. Under what I
considered to be a sort of insane Mexican law, he
was allowed to pay the equivalent of ninety dollars in

(01:08:15):
lieu of serving his nearly three year sentence, and he
also paid about two one hundred and fifty dollars in
restitution to mccole's family, a figure that was decided upon
by his wages. Some people who spoke to him after
this said that he admitted to them that he was
paid by the family to become the fall guy, and

(01:08:37):
mccole's family subsequently launched the Justice for Kirsty campaign, which
re released versions of fairy Tale would benefit and they
repeatedly appealed to the Mexican government and the Inter American
Commission on Human Rights, and the case gained an increasing
amount of public attention over the years. There was a
release of a BBC documentary called Who Killed Kirsty McCole
in two thousand and four, but Son of a Bitch

(01:09:01):
In February of two thousand and six, Bono addressed the
incident at a YouTube concert in Mexico, after which the
Mexican government released a statement saying that it would take action,
and by May of two thousand and six, Emilio Cortes Ramirez,
a federal prosecutor in Cozomo, was found liable for breech

(01:09:22):
of authority in his handling of McColl's case. I can't
believe it took Bono.

Speaker 1 (01:09:28):
You know, Kirsty was Irish, right, Kirsty, she was English.
I was using on them and I was gonna say
it took the biggest Irish musician ever.

Speaker 2 (01:09:37):
Yeah. No, I think it was because the Lily White
thing and because Joshua Tree. But it is just so
funny that, like, the family was putting all this money
towards going through the actually legal actions, and Bono just
went on one of his Bono rants or type tangents
at a concert and then they were like, oh, oh God, okay,
we got to get our stuff together, and they offered
this litigator up as a SA official lamb. In August

(01:10:02):
of two thousand and nine, Carlos Gonzalez Nova, the brother
of Giermo Gonzales Nova died at ninety two. By December
of that year, the Justice for Kirsty campaign issued a
statement that the campaign is being terminated since it was
successful in achieving most of its aims, and its remaining
funds were divided between two charities in Kirsty's Men in

(01:10:22):
the end, as accordions, James Feirley once said, fairy Tale
went off and inhabited its own planet. Is the Christmas
Song for people who may hate Christmas. One of the
only modern classics to be added to the canon, and
people might find it depressing, but I've always loved the
grace note that changes the latter choruses of the song
from the NYPD Choir were singing Galway Bay to the

(01:10:45):
NYPD Choir still singing Galway Bay. Because to me, it
implies the sense of renewal as the holidays churn into
the new year. As long as they're still singing and
the bells keep ringing, there's hope that we can change
for the better. The impetus for me to pitch this
episode was, as Jordan mentioned earlier, video from Shane McGowan's funeral,
where Glenn Hansend sang a version of his song and

(01:11:06):
his family. Shane's family was up dancing in the aisles
the church, and that is the defining takeaway of fairy
Tale of New York for me. The last line, can't
make it all alone. I've built my dreams around you.
I'd like to paraphize that as it's all a bitch

(01:11:27):
in it. But we've got each other.

Speaker 1 (01:11:29):
Don't we, Yes, we do, Heigel.

Speaker 2 (01:11:32):
Folks, thank you for listening. This has been too much information.
I'm Alex Sigel and.

Speaker 1 (01:11:36):
I'm Jordan round Dog. We'll catch you next time. Too

(01:12:08):
Much Information was a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (01:12:10):
The show's executive producers are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
The show's supervising producer is Michael Alder June.

Speaker 2 (01:12:17):
The show was researched, written and hosted by Jordan Runtalk
and Alex Heigel.

Speaker 1 (01:12:21):
With original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost Funk Orchestra.
If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
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