The Greatest Christmas Song Ever -by Alyson Camus

It’s Christmas, and we need a Christmas song, what about the best one ever… what about ‘Fairytale of New York’ by the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl?

It’s a powerful song, so sad and fierce at the same time, which starts like a melancholic piano ballad and bursts into soaring vocals and strings that tells an Irish love story/a broken dream drama.

It’s no fairytale, not a Christmas fairytale,… rather an anti-Christmas tale, like real life, like let’s get real and let’s get lost.

In a few lines you get a more heartbreaking tragic story than most long novels can come up with, and these following lines sum up so well the destruction of a hollow dream as well as the best and the worst of what love can offer.

‘I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can’t make it all alone
I’ve built my dreams around you’

The song was released in 1987 as a single, and then on the ‘If I should fall from Grace with God’ album, and sadly Kirsty MacColl was killed pushing her son away from a speeding race boat. Here is the video, and it’s really Matt Dillon at the beginning, as a NYPD arresting Shane MacGowan.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HwHyuraau4Q