It is a mark of a certain kind of good song that it sounds good when sung drunk. I Will Survive, in spite of being a good song of a different sort, does not fall into this privileged category, as many veterans of pub karaoke have yet to learn. Some songs, the baleful Chelsea Dagger being an example lodged in my medium-term memory, not only do not sound good when sung drunk, but are also simply bad songs. Such is this vale of tears we inhabit that these songs none the less reverberate down many a high street on a Friday night. The Pogues and Kirsty Maccoll's Fairytale of New York, a song that is very much of the moment, it being both a week from Christmas and the fifteenth anniversary of Maccoll's death, meanwhile occupies an elite position. It is a good song, that sounds good when drunk, and is often sung drunk.
At this point I should apologise to an Irish friend who nurtures an impressive loathing of the song, the result of years of over-exposure, confirmation if it were needed that familiarity sometimes really does breed contempt. I think there are things to be said in favour of Fairytale's greatness, since I am unfashionable enough to think that one can actually argue about the worth of art, as well as being sufficiently non-elitist to think that a song's retaining its poignancy when sung by a bunch of forty-something blokes with a blood alcohol content that would make even its author wince counts in favour of that worth.
At this point a nervous critic of a certain sort will catch a whiff of sentimentality. The accusation of sentimentality is one that needs to be handled with care. Its use is shot through with a patrician disdain of popular affect. On this usage, it is sentimental to set up a roadside shrine to the victim of a traffic accident, whereas shuddering in one's seat at the unfolding of a sophoclean tragedy is magnificent. It is a creed for refined monsters. There is, however, a more cutting, and less problematic way of criticising a work's sentimentality. This was at play in Oscar Wilde's barb that 'one must have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without laughing'. There is a type of sentimentality that is undesirable because it occludes the truth, summoning our emotions to its aid in this task. In the case of Dickens' novel the untruthfulness resides in the character of little Nell herself, a child who is too diabolically saintly to have inhabited this planet. Rather more damaging is the sentimentality that arises around war. The first casualty of this is, notoriously, truth, but it is patriotic fervour, pride, tears for our boys, and cheers for our heroes that do the killing.
Fairytale is emphatically not sentimental in this latter sense. It is brutally truthful about human failure and fractured relationships. The fake snow at the beginning of the music video in no way prepares us for the lyrical horror that follows. MacGowan's lyrics do not romanticise the characters whose drink-sodden, hate-filled relationship they narrate, even though they portray them sympathetically. Words and music cohere beautifully, the upbeat accordion-backed call and response carries an exchange between a couple whose contempt for one another is real, but who seem to be unable to shake the need to tell one another this. It is perhaps surprising that large numbers of people quite so readily sing along with lyrics like: 'you're a bum/ you're a punk/ you're an old slut on junk': a point to which I'll return.The strings towards the end, far from being festive musical chintz, add an ironic underlining to the male protagonist's insistence that things might be looking up. He is, we are left in no doubt, a deluded idiot, and yet we cannot help rooting for him.
It is for this reason that Fairytale's popularity gives us some reason for hope. I do not want to try to convince my friend to change his mind about the song, but I do want to suggest that there is something interesting about its continued appeal. What I've just described is a track soaked in moral complexity, charting the sheer mess of human existence. These themes are no more approved of in contemporary society than the cigarettes and alcohol prominent on MacGowan's piano throughout the video. Ours is an age of censure, of a law from on high that does not negotiate with mortal frailty: the profound moralism that has near ruined the contemporary activist left echoes a broader love affair with the super-ego. There are, it is thought, saints and sinners with no middle ground; whether the mark of sin is having insufficiently checked your privilege, not being a member of a hard-working family, or having consumed more than your daily units of alcohol is a secondary matter. Yet, in spite of the odd predictable complaint about some of the language in the song ('slut', 'faggot') from people constitutionally unable to understand the concept of narration, Fairytale remains widely loved. Large numbers of people recognise that its anti-heroes are in many respects clearly complete bastards, they would certainly be judged unsafe by the standards operative in New Statesman columns, whilst also seeing where they are coming from and wishing them well. This reveals a recalcitrant ethical sophistication that the times have yet to kill; as art can sometimes do, it reminds a society of truths they would rather forget.
That, in any case, is something I think that deserves noticing about this song. And, at the very least, nobody is foolish enough to ask if they know it's Christmas. Of course they know it's Christmas, and that's the problem.
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