Nick Cave has accused the BBC of “mutilating” Fairytale of New York, following the broadcaster’s recent decision to play a censored version of the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl’s festive classic on Radio 1.
The BBC recently announced that the 1987 hit would still be played in its original form on Radio 2, while 6 Music DJs would be able to choose either version. The inconsistency of the policy has dredged up what is becoming a well-flogged pantomime horse.
Writing on the Red Hand Files, the website through which he answers questions submitted by fans, Cave said he could not comment on how offensive the word “faggot” is deemed, particularly by the young. “It may be deeply offensive, I don’t know,” he said. “In which case Radio 1 should have made the decision to simply ban the song, and allow it to retain its outlaw spirit and its dignity.”
The Australian rock star said that the decision to swap the epithet for “haggard” was a notion “that can only be upheld by those that know nothing about the fragile nature of songwriting”.
The substitution, he wrote, “[deflates] it right at its essential and most reckless moment, stripping it of its value”, and meant that Fairytale could “no longer be called a great song”. Instead, he said, it “has lost its truth, its honour and integrity – a song that has knelt down and allowed the BBC to do its grim and sticky business”.
Cave characterised “haggard” as a “nonsense word”. MacColl, however, substituted it herself during a 1992 performance of the song on Top of the Pops.
Speaking in 2007, when the BBC briefly banned and then reinstated the song from Radio 1, Pogues songwriter Shane MacGowan said he was fine with the word being bleeped, but that it was in keeping with the “down on her luck and desperate” character played by MacColl.
“Not all characters in songs and stories are angels or even decent and respectable, sometimes characters in songs and stories have to be evil or nasty to tell the story effectively,” he said.
This year, however, MacGowan said he found the censorship of the song “ridiculous” in a brief interview with the Metro.
A friend of MacGowan, Cave said the Irish songwriter’s creation spoke with “profound compassion to the marginalised and the dispossessed”. He wrote:
It does not patronise, but speaks its truth, clear and unadorned. It is a magnificent gift to the outcast, the unlucky and the broken-hearted. We empathise with the plight of the two fractious characters, who live their lonely, desperate lives against all that Christmas promises – home and hearth, cheer, bounty and goodwill.
He said the BBC – “that gatekeeper of our brittle sensibilities, forever acting in our best interests” – “continue to mutilate an artefact of immense cultural value and in doing so takes something from us this Christmas, impossible to measure or replace”.
