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1987 single by the Pogues featuring Kirsty MacColl
the song

"Fairytale of New York" is a song written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan and recorded by their London based band the Pogues, featuring English singer songwriter Kirsty MacColl on vocals. The song is an Irish folk style ballad and was written as a duet, with the Pogues' singer MacGowan taking the role of the male character and MacColl playing the female character. It was originally released as a single on 23 November 1987 and later featured on the Pogues' 1988 album If I Should Fall from Grace with God. Originally begun in 1985, the song had a troubled two year development history, undergoing rewrites and aborted attempts at recording, and losing its original female vocalist along the way, before finally being completed in August 1987. Although the single has never been the UK Christmas number one, being kept at number two on its original release in 1987 by the Pet Shop Boys' cover of "Always on My Mind", it has proved enduringly popular with both music critics and the public: to date, the song has reached the UK Top 20 on twenty separate occasions since its original release in 1987, including every year at Christmas since 2005. As of September 2017, it had sold 1.2 million copies in the UK, with an additional 249,626 streaming equivalent sales, for a total of 1.5 million combined sales. In December 2023, the song was certified sextuple platinum in the UK for 3.6 million combined sales. It is frequently cited as the best Christmas song of all time in various television, radio, and magazine related polls in the UK and Ireland, including the UK television special on ITV in December 2012 where it was voted The Nation's Favourite Christmas Song.

The song was released in the United Kingdom and Ireland in November 1987 and swiftly became a hit, spending five weeks at Number 1 in the Irish charts. On 17 December 1987, the Pogues and MacColl performed the song on the BBC's television show Top of the Pops, and it was propelled to number two on the official UK Top 75. Although the song finished 1987 as the 48th best seller of the year despite only a month's sales, it was denied the UK Christmas number one by the Pet Shop Boys' synth pop version of "Always on My Mind". MacColl later said that she did not feel they were really in competition with the Pet Shop Boys as they were doing a completely different type of music. The song was re released by the Pogues in the UK in 1991 (reaching No. 36), and again in the UK and Ireland for Christmas 2005, reaching number three in the UK. All proceeds from the latter release were donated towards a mixture of homeless charities and Justice for Kirsty, a campaign to find out the truth behind MacColl's death in 2000. The song is considerably less well known in the US. On hearing the song following the vocalist MacColl's death in 2000, MacGowan stated "for a while it used to depress me. But now I just think it's a tribute to Kirsty." On 13 December 2023, The Pogues reissued the song as a charity 7 inch single in tribute to MacGowan and to benefit the Dublin Simon Community, an organization fighting homelessness, that MacGowan supported.