Annie Lennox’s favourite Christmas song: “The best, most poignant festive song”
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(Credit: Library of Congress Life)
I’m a man of deep conflict during Christmas time. Torn between unrelenting enthusiasm for some traditions and an abhorrent dislike for others, I can never work out how to position myself. Do I lean firmly into my love of all things pub-related, at risk of displaying outright degeneracy or do I turn my nose up to the whole festive period, and wear the label of being a scrooge with pride?
Because Christmas for me is a time of great socialising, banding around a fire-lit pub, sipping on Guinness and eating exclusively pastry-wrapped foods is one of the great pleasures of the festive period. It’s almost an excuse to transport to a time gone by, a simpler time where the constructs of modern life don’t exist, and so having a genuine conversation with a warm pint of ale doesn’t feel like a sort of satirical joke.
But the nonsense that exists around those moments disillusioned me to a point where I lost my love for the purity of Christmas socialising. Needless over-consumption, general financial strain and an incessant need to play some of the very worst music known to man, all play a part in souring the festivities for most of us.
The latter in particular has a real way of rubbing many of us up. Many of us who genuinely listen to music for most of our lives have to watch as the art form gets defaced by music drenched in bells and with painfully corny chorus lines about finding presents under a tree or worse, reuniting with an ex-partner for Christmas.
But there is one song that comes back out of the woodwork every December to defy all cynicism and prove that at least one great Christmas song does, in fact, exist. It is of course, The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of New York’, which only feels festive given its reference to Christmas day, but other than that, is yet another deeply poetic and tragic ballad delivered to us by the voice of Shane MacGowan and Kirsty MacColl.
Their hit extends beyond the simple use of bells and sing-along hooks; it tells a story of the humanity that exists beneath the wrapping paper of the holidays and, in turn, serves as something confronting that many of us try to avoid during this time of year.
It’s no wonder then that Annie Lennox remarks it as her favourite Christmas song of all, citing its realism as the source of her admiration. She said, “This raucous Irish American ballad sums up visions of drunken fights, shattered dreams, and Christmas dysphoria. Down and out in Tinseltown, where white glistening snow turns to filthy slush. Sad Christmas trees upended in garbage cans. Homeless lost souls comatose in the gutter. A nativity tale with a really bad ending. The best, most poignant festive song of all time.”
Christmas is perhaps as good a time as any to see just how lost society has become, and without ‘Fairytale Of New York’ there is a chance we may have completely ignored that. While good Christmas songs provide an ample soundtrack, great art offers some truth about society and somehow, ‘Fairytale Of New York’ does both. ]
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