A LUCKY ONE (profanity alert):

When The Pogues teamed up with Kirsty MacColl to create "Fairytale of New York," they made one of the only Christmas songs composed in the last 30 years that is likely to be heard and covered and beloved in another 50 or 100. If "Fairtytale" isn't in your Christmas playlist, you're doing something wrong.

It is a masterpiece of compact storytelling:

It was Christmas Eve babe

In the drunk tank

An old man said to me

Won't see another one

Five words to tell us it's a Christmas song and a love song. Four more and you know it's unlike every other Christmas song you've ever heard and discover what kind of man the protagonist is. Ten more and an old man evokes the ghost of Christmas future, summoning death to the whole proceeding.

It continues:

And then he sang a song

The Rare Old Mountain Dew

I turned my face away

And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one

Came in eighteen to one

I've got a feeling

This year's for me and you

So happy Christmas

I love you baby

I can see a better time

When all our dreams come true

"When all our dreams come true" would be, in any other song's context, dismissed as unendurably saccharine. But put in the mouth of a man who sees providence in a very lucky longshot, we forgive it. Even an absurd hope is still hope. And it's this balance between the down-and-out situation and insults in the song that allow Shane MacGown and his co-singer Kirsty MacColl to earn those moments of soaring emotion. He calls her a slut and junkie. She calls him a punk and scumbag. This makes their remembrances of their first moments of Manhattan and their hope for the future all the more poignant.

Sonically, it is very different from the usual Manchester-Irish, auto-crash sound of The Pogues. The piano and string intro sounds like what Alan Menken might have written for a Disney movie in the early 90s. In fact it was influenced by Ennio Merricone's score from Once Upon a Time in America. And for its charm, it leans heavily on an appoggiatura. Terry Woods' mandolin part, which gives the song its Irish brogue, is doubled and trebled to a heroic scale.

The story springs forth from the character of the two performers. 

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