Bells ringing out for Christmas Day

Sunday musical excursion #49

Dec 20, 2025

If you’ve ever been to a rip-roaring Irish seisún, whilst you might not know the words to the songs, or, even if you do, you can’t keep up with the speed at which they are sung, your foot will rarely have been idle. Nailing your feet to the floor would be about the only means of preventing them from tapping. Seisún (se-shoon, it’s pronounced) is an import word into the Irish Gaelic language for an event that had long since been known by another word, by which it’s still known in Scots Gaelic: ceilidh (kay-lí). It comes, surprisingly, from English and, unsurprisingly, it stems from the word session. As in jam session, which is more or less what a seisún is.

Invoking the atmosphere of an ancient tradition stretching back into the mists of time like the wafting aromas of an old Irish whiskey, the truth is miles removed from that. The first recorded instance of a seisún was in 1946. In Kentish Town, London—The Devonshire Arms. Where musicians and singers and revellers assembled to revive memories of the old country, of the pain of Irish history, and of the joys of its alcohol (only a small drop of which was ever known to the men at Customs and Excise). The Devonshire Arms was run by a Sligo man, who pined for his homeland, as did many of his countrymen who had come to London after the war to seek a new life in the brave new world of the later 1940s.

At the bottom of this blog is one of the most celebrated of all Irish songs for playing at such events: The Irish Rover, about a fabled mighty Irish ship. It is sung here by the combined forces of The Dubliners and The Pogues, whose Shane MacGowan was a regular performer at The Devonshire Arms. I have introduced you to the Dubliners previously, here:

and to the lead singer of The Pogues, here:

In November 1987, The Pogues teamed up with English singer Kirsty MacColl for their single Fairytale of New York, which has now become a Christmas classic, although it is in some regards an non-Christmas song (like Cold as Christmas by Elton John, which even explicitly contains the line It’s July, but it’s cold as Christmas in the middle of the year. He’s singing about the middle of the year.)

My purpose here is obviously not to introduce you to Fairytale of New York. However, if you haven’t ever heard the most-played Christmas song of the 21st century, then now’s your chance. What I would like you to perhaps dwell on is the lyric, which is hard to discern in Shane MacGowan’s thick brogue, which, for all he was born in England, he acquired in his early youth in Tipperary, where he also acquired the drug addictions to which I allude in the article about him above, which relates my only encounter with the man.

The lyric of Fairytale of New York references two other songs, and there are links to them also below. They are The Rare Old Mountain Dew, which The Pogues also released, and Galway Bay, for which I’ve selected the version sung by Johnny Cash.

It took two years to perfect Fairytale of New York. Originally with a lyric based on a sailor in that city gazing out at the Atlantic and yearning for his home in County Clare, and with the tune we hear today, another version had the lyric we know, but with a less favourable tune. MacGowan put the two together and gave us this snarling argument of a love song, a process that, from a gestation in 1985 had, by Christmas 1986, still not been completed. Philip Chevron, a member of the band, described it thus: “It was not quite there. It needed to have a full-on, confident performance from the band, which it lacked.” In August 1987, the band gave it the full-on effect that we heard at Christmas that year and have been hearing ever since: the sound of a seisún.

Shane MacGowan may not have had great teeth. But he had a heart to beat most.