12 December 1987 and 8 December 2023
Kirsty MacColl herself sings “you’re cheap and you’re haggard” in the version of ‘Fairytale Of New York’ in the video below. You’ll also hear her sing that line in what we can call an alternative official version posted on The Pogues’ own YouTube channel. So, “you’re cheap and you’re haggard” is canon. The video below also blurs the female sexual slur that Shane MacGowan uses a few lines before; that word remains in the alternative official version on The Pogues’ channel, which is a pity.
Still, it’s the original version that went to number one in Ireland and, famously, only number two in the UK, so that’s what I must consider here. Those two original lines were nasty and indefensible in 1987—to say otherwise is a delusion or a lie—and are nasty and indefensible now. If you used or heard those two terms in any other setting it would be unacceptable, so how come they’re considered acceptable here? Because Shane MacGowan conforms to our stereotype of the male creative genius making Art and is therefore beyond our question? Get real. Other well-known oldies, like ‘Brown Sugar’ and ‘Oliver’s Army’, have also faced such reconsideration, including from their own writers. As noted above, The Pogues themselves have given their imprimatur to a non-f-slur version of their song. And if you call this ‘censoring The Pogues’ or bowdlerising great art or what have you, how about this: in my secondary school in the 1990s the novel chosen for our Junior Cert English cycle was The Adventures Of Huckleberry Finn. No school would consider setting that novel now, and rightly so. Huck Finn wasn’t ‘cancelled’; we progressed as a society—as a community—and left it behind.
If the story of a maudlin, belligerent Irish drunk in a New York police cell at Christmas is still worth telling, then it can progress with us or get left behind too. Art should always interrogate the worst of us, but it must represent the best of us. Otherwise it’s just exploitation, bullying, propaganda, stupidity or, like the original 1987 version of ‘Fairytale Of New York’, a cheap, lousy ballad.
Irish Number Ones 