It’s got to be New York (the Fairytale of course)
Composer who added the strings to classic Pogues song is hoping it f inally makes number one spot in the UK Christmas chart
THE composer who added the majestic strings to Fairytale of New York ‘would love’ the track to finally hit the top spot in the UK this Christmas, in honour of the late Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan, whose funeral took place last weekend.
By far the best known work of the Pogues – and co-vocalist Kirsty MacColl – Fairytale has been ‘top of everybody’s list [of favourite Christmas songs] for so long’, said string and brass arranger Fiachra Trench.
But it only made it to number two in the UK singles charts in 1987 (though it got to number one in Ireland), and has never reached the summit across the water, despite re-entering the charts every Christmas since 2005 when downloads started being counted.
Mr Trench – and Shane MacGowan fans across Ireland and abroad – are hoping that the iconic festive tune will go one better when this
‘Some might describe it as an anti-Christmas song’
year’s UK Christmas number one is confirmed this week. It’s currently at number five.
He told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘[MacGowan’s widow] Victoria Clarke is saying she hopes that this Christmas it will be number one, in Shane’s honour. I’d love it, for Shane and for Victoria as much as anything.’
It would scratch a 36-year itch for the Trench family too – the 82-year-old composer and arranger remembers his then three-year-old son was ‘very much with us on the excitement’ of whether it would reach the top spot in 1987.
Though MacGowan and Pogues banjo player Jem Finer came up with the main parts of the song and receive songwriting credits and all royalties, Trench remembers his meeting with the band to discuss the string part (through mutual collaborator Elvis Costello) as ‘really a collective thing, to the best of my memory’.
‘I think most of the band were there. They had been listening to Ennio Morricone’s score for Once Upon A Time in America and they gave me that as a reference.’
The influence can indeed be heard in Fairytale, most explicitly in MacGowan’s ‘It was Christmas Eve babe…’ introduction line, the melody borrowed from a section of the Once Upon A Time score called Deborah’s Theme.
‘There’s no conscious plagiarism there,’ Trench said. ‘I mean, there’s nothing new under the sun and all of those cliches.
‘And if there was plagiarism, it wasn’t my plagiarism,’ he added, laughing.
There was no to-and-fro with the band after that initial meeting, Mr Trench said.
‘However, [Pogues multi-instrumentalist] James Fearnley, who plays the piano on it, was the one who probably had the most input as to what the strings might be – he very much put his stamp on it.’
Fearnley receives a co-credit with Trench for the song’s string arrangement and came up with the piano introduction (he would later have to wear MacGowan’s rings for the close-up shots when the singer is ‘playing’ the piano in the music video).
Contributors to a recording get ‘residual’ payments, but it is ‘probably small potatoes’, said Co. Wicklow-based Trench, compared to the estimated €450,000 a year the track makes its two co-writers in royalties.
‘I was given a blank canvas, but really the credits are correct. The song was written by Shane MacGowan and Jem Finer.’
Trench worked from more or less the final version – sans strings of course – which had been produced by Kirsty MacColl’s husband, Steve Lillywhite.
When it came to putting the strings to tape, Mr Trench remembers the ‘whole thing was rehearsed, recorded, thank you and good night in just over an hour’.
‘I remember Steve Lillywhite was absolutely amazed because he had never had that experience before of working with a live string section. “My God, you did it so quickly!”’
Though the arranger admits he didn’t hear it back and immediately think, ‘classic’.
‘I don’t know if anyone ever really knows that, to be quite honest.’
And he isn’t sure if the song would have taken off in the same way had the lyrics been less acerbic.
‘I think some might describe it as an anti-Christmas song, so maybe that is part of its appeal,’ he said.
‘It really does stand out. There’s an awful lot of anodyne, saccharine Christmas music out there.’
The band had struggled through a few iterations over the previous two years and demos available on YouTube – recorded by Costello and co-sung by his future wife, Pogues bass player Cait O’Riordan – illustrate how crucial the strings, piano and MacColl’s soaring voice are to its lush final sound.
MacGowan later called it ‘by far the most complicated song that I have ever been involved in writing and performing,’ adding: ‘The beauty of it is that it sounds really simple.’
Drogheda-born Trench, who has more recently recorded three albums with his wife Carmel McCreagh, contributed arrangements to other Pogues favourites such as Rainy Night In Soho and Misty Morning, Albert Bridge, as well as Irish classics such as I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats and Old Town by Phil Lynott.
‘The very first thing I did for Thin Lizzy was A Song For While I’m Away [from 1973’s Vagabonds of the Western World],’ he recalled fondly. ‘It’s very early in the 40 or 50 years that I’ve been doing this but I’m still rather partial to it.’
And he still gets ‘goosebumps’ thinking about the recording session for Van Morrison’s Coney Island and gets ‘a kick’ from hearing Have I Told You Lately – two of many orchestrations Mr Trench created for the Belfast man.
He has also written the scores for a number of films and TV series and contributed to such mega-pictures as Pearl Harbor and Die Hard – both overseen by Hans Zimmer.
Again, though, he is understated about the role of the arranger.
‘The tunes or the themes are all Hans,’ Mr Trench said. ‘And I would have been one of quite a number of people who would be arranging, orchestrating, or taking that tune and making it work in that particular scene or whatever. But the intellectual property is Hans’.
‘I’d love it, for Shane and for Victoria’