A special Glasgow version of a very special Christmas song has just been released. But should we worry about the f-word, asks Mark Smith

I know the song’s going to get me because it always does, but not like this. It begins with the sound of the Barras, the sound of the crowd, packed-in, buzzing. Someone starts a chant – Kirsty, Kirsty, Kirsty, Kirsty – and you can tell it’s Glasgow by the raucous, beery Rs and the way they sing her name, loud and with love; then the piano starts, the plaintive, drunken notes, and you think not for the first time: this song has special power. I lose it a bit, I must admit.

It gets to me so much, I think, because this newly-released live version of Fairytale of New York by The Pogues comes with extra power, extra poignancy. It is 25 years ago this week that the woman the Barras crowd was calling for, the singer Kirsty MacColl, was killed in a terrible accident, aged 41. Shane MacGowan, who swaggers in to the song with his famous opening line “It was Christmas Eve, Babe”, is also gone, so this version of the song, revived from scratchy old tapes from a live recording in Glasgow in 1987, is recovering four minutes and 55 seconds of something that’s lost.

Then you have the song itself, about a couple who fall in to each other at Christmas, then drunkenly lash out at each other, then end up clinging to each in a kind of bitter togetherness. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing about potential lost in a thousand beer glasses but it’s about how we cling to wreckage and bits of hope and so manages to be anti-Christmas and pro-Christmas. I’m trying to find the right word for what it does – melancholia? the Portuguese would call it saudade – but no word fits exactly. Best to just listen and feel it.........

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