If you're going to cover a song, I realised years ago, you have to own the song for yourself. You have to make it your own. And the way you do that is to find a way of singing the song in a way the original artist hasn't even thought about. Find a unique way of entering the song. That's exactly what Christy Moore does with this song.
So as part of my tribute here and elsewhere to Shane McGowan, here's Christy Moore singing Fairytale of New York.
There's a great documentary about the making of Fairytale of New York but I haven't been able to post the complete documentary. However here's a link to take you to it.
Click here for the link to the full documentary, The Story Of The Pogues & Kirsty McColl Fairytale of New York The full Story.
I hope you enjoy it.
We watched him perform at the Hay Festival in 2018. We managed to buy a couple of the last tickets for the gig. We were right up in the front. When he started with the band, the place erupted. People who were politely sitting in rows behind us, suddenly got up off their seats and rushed to the stage.
It was a great gig!
from Bloodaxe Books
After prison he turned from crime to music and poetry. In 1989 he was nominated for Oxford Professor of Poetry, and has since received honorary doctorates from several English universities, but famously refused to accept a nomination for an OBE in 2003. He was voted Britain's third favourite poet of all time (after T.S. Eliot and John Donne) in a BBC poll in 2009. In 2011 he was poet-in-residence at Keats House in 2011, and then made a radical career change by taking up his first ever academic position as a chair in Creative Writing at Brunel University in West London.
He appeared in a number of television programmes, including Peaky Blinders, Eastenders, The Bill, Live and Kicking, Blue Peter and Wise Up, and played Gower in a BBC Radio 3 production of Shakespeare’s Pericles in 2005.
Best known for his performance poetry with a political edge for adults – and his poetry with attitude for children – he had his own rap/reggae band. He produced numerous recordings, including Dub Ranting (1982), Rasta (1983), Us and Dem (1990), Back to Roots (1995), Belly of de Beast (1996) and Naked (2004). He was the first person to record with the Wailers after the death of Bob Marley, in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela, which Mandela heard while in prison on Robben Island. Their later meetings led to Zephaniah working with children in South African townships and hosting the President’s Two Nations Concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 1996.
His first book of poems, Pen Rhythm, was produced in 1980 by a small East London publishing cooperative, Page One Books. His second collection, The Dread Affair, was published by Hutchinson’s short-lived Arena imprint in 1985. He published three collections with Bloodaxe, City Psalms (1992), Propa Propaganda (1996) and Too Black, Too Strong (2001), the latter including poems written while working with Michael Mansfield QC and other Tooks barristers on the Stephen Lawrence case. His DVD-book To Do Wid Me: Benjamin Zephaniah live and direct (filmed by Pamela Robertson-Pearce) followed from Bloodaxe in 2013, including poems drawn from all his collections.
His other titles include his poetry books for children, Talking Turkeys (1994), Funky Chickens (1996) and Wicked World (2000), all from Puffin/Penguin; his novels for teenagers, Face (1999), Refugee Boy (2001), Gangsta Rap (2004) and Teacher’s Dead (2007), all from Bloomsbury; The Bloomsbury Book of Love Poems (1999); Schools Out: Poems Not for School (1997) and The Little Book of Vegan Poems (2001) from AK Press; and We Are Britain (Frances Lincoln, 2003). He published his autobiography, The Life and Rhymes and Benjamin Zephaniah, with Simon & Schuster in 2018.
Click here for an obituary from The Guardian
Click here to listen to Dog Eats Dog. It's the fifth episode of the Radio 4 documentary, Legend, The Life of Joni Mitchell.
