Fairytales can come true

24 December 2025

A few Christmases ago, there was a great article by music journalist Dorian Lynskey about one of the greatest Christmas songs ever written. A song that feels like the result of pure inspiration, divine or otherwise, was actually the product of failure, hard work and luck.

The failure was an aborted first version that was about a sailor who missed his wife. The story changed, but the maritime reel is still there in the chorus. Shane MacGowan worked on it for two years but couldn’t quite get there. For a while, it began "It was a wild Christmas Eve on the West coast of Clare," and though the West Coast of Clare is definitely preferable to a drunk tank, it just doesn’t work as a lyric. And on the subject of the drunk tank, one of the band’s producers, Elvis Costello, wanted to call the song Christmas Day in the Drunk Tank, which might have been accurate but was definitely not magical or romantic. Anyway, as you will have guessed, after a couple of years of redrafts and near-misses, the band were all happy with the song’s name, lyrics and music and were ready to record it.

That was when the luck was required, though maybe not an 18-1 shot. The band’s female singer, Cait O’Riordan, had left the band and they couldn’t agree who they wanted to sing the female part of the duet. While they were deliberating, the producer, Steve Lilywhite, recorded his wife, Kirsty MacColl, singing the part in their home studio. The band loved it and used that recording. In fact, despite how good the chemistry between them sounds, the two singers never recorded their duet together in the studio.

It would be too perfect an end to the story for it to go to number one in the charts. The Pet Shop Boys stopped that happening in 1987 and it’s never made it since. However, that hasn’t stopped it becoming a modern standard and a Christmas classic and spending a massive 138 weeks in the charts in the process.

A touch of genius won’t do you any harm, but the moral of this particular Christmas story is that hard work, perseverance and luck all have at least as big a part to play. Here’s to a productive, successful and lucky 2026 in all your personal and professional endeavours, but before that, ‘It was Christmas Eve, babe…!’