La mia Recensione: The Pogues (Featuring Kirsty MacColl) Fairytale of New York

 The Pogues - Fairytale of New York

Ci sono ricorrenze che avanzano, si mostrano, hanno dei desideri e già tutto questo farebbe pensare alla fortuna…

Poi vi sono cuori più profondi, attenti, che passano, in silenziosa parata, a perlustrare quei lati dell’esistenza senza fari. Non sono favole, poesie e tantomeno dei bei sogni, bensì il pavimento di rapporti in difficoltà, in cui la precarietà fa bruciare la pelle del cuore, e non solo.

In quei luoghi gli stenti, le lacrime, i disagi e le ambasce sono un abbraccio poco voluto ma esistente. E chi ci mette lo sguardo ha la saggezza dell’intimità giudiziosa, in generosa empatia e solidarietà. Il Natale è ormai una festività corrotta e va corretta con canzoni come questa, che per il Vecchio Scriba è l’unica che mostra davvero interesse per vicende che sono terremoti e che vengono, disgraziatamente, nascoste sotto gli addobbi, le luci e il chiasso di gente senza rispetto nei confronti di chi invece ha un autobus pieno di strazianti e complesse tragedie.

Ma anche da un litigio può nascere un arcobaleno a irradiare la corteccia cerebrale di nuove panoramiche visive.

Sia benedetta la modalità del duetto narrativo, di una melodia folk irlandese, della valigia e della visione di strade strette, senza cielo, a New York. Un pianoforte e una tastiera sono i semi di un prato immaginifico che pian piano copre la storia di dolcezza e malinconia, in un teatro punk dentro una pellicola cinematografica, mentre perlustra lati umani che paiono banditi in cerca di una resa…

L’epica e la nostalgia compiono passi di valzer mentre la band prende Shane e Kirsty e li mette uno di fronte all’altro sul ring, in un match di pugilato nel quale nessuno getta la spugna sino a quando il clima non conosce la ragione per modificare il tutto.

Il brano ha un’alternanza micidiale, su piani emotivi e razionali, e pure musicali, che induce alle riflessioni ma solo come successione a lacrime, emozioni e urla lanciate tutte sul vento di un dramma che illumina anche chi è avaro di tutto ciò: eccovi il vero miracolo di Natale…

I contrasti trovano spazio nei nuovi sogni e nelle delusioni che il testo riassume ma con garbata gentilezza, pur non mancando anche espressioni volgari, tuttavia necessarie.

La sincerità in musica non può avere il bavaglio e FONY lo dimostra pienamente, senza indugi.

Tutto parte da una prigione, con l’alcol a segnare il respiro del protagonista (MacGowan), qui con l’unica voce che sembra far apparire davanti ai nostri occhi ettolitri di amarezze e sogni.

E, mentre ascolta un vecchio brano (The Rare Old Mountain), la tristezza della memoria si condensa, straziandolo, con l’amore per una donna che ricompare, scatenando l’ardore di un sentimento mai sopito. I due battagliano, lottano, mettono barriere sino a quando la resa arriva grazie ai sogni di lui, mai pronto a rinunziare a chi gli fa battere forte il cuore e che dimentica i problemi e va oltre.

Nell’autodistruzione amorosa vi sono petali e raggi che si muovono tra bestemmie e insulti, ma con il progetto di silenziare il tutto.

Ecco che la disillusione del sogno americano trova i suoi confini, i limiti e il pressappochismo di una democrazia che ha causato nuove povertà. Per risolvere questo problema non rimane che l’amore, che unisce.

Nei ricordi l’Irlanda diventa un balcone, un bisogno di panorami mai inquinati, dove ogni cosa scorre senza  gli inganni della modernità. Non è un caso che molti suoi cittadini negli anni Ottanta siano andati negli States sbagliando il momento: Reagan stava distruggendo senza impedimenti e la profonda umanità di questi nuovi emigranti trovava, improvvisamente, un semaforo rosso, un calcio ai sogni, subendo una serie di mortificazioni tremende, finendo in una gabbia inimmaginabile.

In tutto questo la composizione riesce a far compiere alla nostra visione dei fatti raccontati un’analisi dettagliata di chi, in una guerra non vista e mai evidenziata, si trova tra alcol, rabbia e la consolazione di amori impossibili…

La voce rauca e alienata, piena di nebbia e brividi di Shane, ci porta nei canali di una mente sensibile e quindi vulnerabile, con ampie falcate nelle pareti di desideri a cui a fatica riesce a obiettare. In questa stupefacente credibilità, lo affianca una fata con le gote arrossate (come la sua ugola) che scalcia e dichiara guerra al suo amato. Un duetto/duello che esplora la fiumana di differenze tra il cantante nato a Pembury e poi divenuto irlandese e la ragazza di Croydon, trasportati come per non magia in un luogo distante dalle loro radici. La canzone assembla tutto con meticolosità, puntando i fari dell’energetica pulsione Celtic Rock di una formazione che, partendo da basi storiche conclamate, sa aggiungere novità a un matrimonio che si rivela perfetto. Si danza, lentamente prima (abbracciati) e poi velocemente, come in uno scalmanato rituale fisico che contempla lo spostamento e la distribuzione di un sudore vero.

Ed ecco l’evidente opposizione al Natale, come un libro di saggistica non contemplato, ma ritenuto dagli artisti in questione assolutamente necessario. Apparentemente leggera, la composizione è una delicata operazione chirurgica, un valore aggiunto inaspettato, un insieme di linguaggi da strada, di chi nel niente ha un tutto da improvvisare e un nulla da perdere…

I Pogues offrono la mano, una coperta per fare della speranza e dello scambio dei doni una possibilità di arricchimento, che non passa attraverso la mediocrità di regali, i quali sono possibili solo per chi ha avuto fortune e capacità che non gravitano di certo nella strada di coloro che la povertà la vivono con tutti i suoi shock.

Fairytale of New York è una ciminiera, un porto del cuore, un sussulto, con la capacità innegabile di fare della canzone un riscatto, un progetto, un ricordo, un bacio, una bevuta infinita con chilometri di battiti piovigginosi, un delirio silente nella dinamica di armonie musicali che, tra muscoli e carezze, riesce a far planare un racconto che fa del mondo tenuto segregato un paradiso dove la dignità non viene misurata con la ricchezza, la posizione sociale e l’arroganza del dominio, e in cui l’unica, discutibile, sete, è quella del potere e non quella di una sana Guinness…

Il testo fa sentire la schiuma di un’escoriazione causata da una caduta (fisica e morale), per poi disinfettare il tutto e ristabilire equilibrio e forza. Molto più di una metafora, questo episodio passa attraverso realtà, mitologia, tradizioni antiche per dare al cuore irlandese una bandiera che sventola e che sempre lo farà con una fierezza indiscutibile. Quando offre al passato la possibilità di consolare, non smette di creare il presente e nuovi ricordi, confezionando perfettamente la vera identità della terra del trifoglio.

E, quando allude al gioco d’azzardo (per poter cambiare le sorti dei protagonisti) si nota che nel baratro avanzano ancora scelte criticabili ma necessarie. Ed è apoteosi: passa attraverso una ingenuità che diventa poesia, una forma altissima di ironia, con petali amari che cadono nel cuore della vicenda… 

Quando la città della mela si mostra inospitale e crudele con chi non ha la fortuna sulle spalle, ecco che il testo sfodera un’amara constatazione che diviene, però, motivo di forza e di distinzione di un’identità che non teme di evidenziare le differenze. 

Viene voglia di spogliarsi, di andare a Dublino e dintorni, di avere un sacco di iuta vuoto e la propensione a metterci dentro i visi e le storie di chi, in questo brano, ci ha fatto piangere e sentire orgogliosi di voler raggiungere una nuova meta… 

Alex Dematteis (Vecchio Scriba)

Musicshockworld

Salford

24 12 2025

My Review : The Pogues (Featuring Kirsty MacColl) Fairytale of New York

 

The Pogues - Fairytale of New York

There are anniversaries that advance, reveal themselves, have desires, and all this would already suggest good fortune...

Then there are deeper, more attentive hearts that pass by, in silent parade, to explore those sides of existence without headlights. These are not fairy tales, poems, or even beautiful dreams, but rather the foundation of troubled relationships, where precariousness burns the skin of the heart, and more.

In those places, hardship, tears, discomfort, and anguish are an unwanted but ever-present embrace. And those who look upon them have the wisdom of judicious intimacy, in generous empathy and solidarity. Christmas has become a corrupt holiday and needs to be corrected with songs like this one, which for the Old Scribe is the only one that truly shows interest in events that are earth-shattering and which are, unfortunately, hidden under the decorations, lights and noise of people who have no respect for those who instead have a bus full of heartbreaking and complex tragedies.

But even an argument can give rise to a rainbow that illuminates the cerebral cortex with new visual perspectives.

Blessed be the narrative duet, the Irish folk melody, the suitcase and the vision of narrow, sky-less streets in New York. A piano and a keyboard are the seeds of an imaginative meadow that slowly covers the story of sweetness and melancholy, in a punk theatre inside a film, while exploring human sides that seem like bandits in search of surrender...

Epic and nostalgia take waltz steps as the band takes Shane and Kirsty and puts them face to face in the ring, in a boxing match in which no one throws in the towel until the climate knows the reason to change everything.

The song has a deadly alternation, on emotional and rational levels, as well as musical ones, which leads to reflection but only as a succession of tears, emotions and screams thrown into the wind of a drama that illuminates even those who are stingy with all of this: here is the true miracle of Christmas...

Contrasts find space in the new dreams and disappointments that the lyrics summarise, but with gentle kindness, while not lacking vulgar expressions, which are nevertheless necessary.

Sincerity in music cannot be silenced, and FONY proves this fully, without hesitation.

It all starts in a prison, with alcohol marking the breath of the protagonist (MacGowan), here with the only voice that seems to bring before our eyes one hundred litres of bitterness and dreams.

And, while listening to an old song (The Rare Old Mountain), the sadness of memory condenses, tormenting him, with the love for a woman who reappears, unleashing the ardour of a feeling that has never been dormant. The two battle, struggle, put up barriers until surrender comes thanks to his dreams, never ready to give up on the one who makes his heart beat fast and who forgets his problems and moves on.

In the self-destruction of love, there are petals and rays that move between curses and insults, but with the intention of silencing everything.

Here, the disillusionment of the American dream finds its boundaries, the limits and the sloppiness of a democracy that has caused new poverty. To solve this problem, all that remains is love, which unites.

In memories, Ireland becomes a balcony, a need for unspoilt views, where everything flows without the deception of modernity. It is no coincidence that many of its citizens went to the United States in the 1980s at the wrong time: Reagan was destroying without hindrance and the profound humanity of these new emigrants suddenly found itself facing a red light, a kick in the teeth to their dreams, suffering a series of terrible humiliations and ending up in an unimaginable cage.

In all this, the composition manages to give our vision of the events recounted in a detailed analysis of those who, in a war unseen and never highlighted, find themselves between alcohol, anger and the consolation of impossible loves...

Shane's hoarse, alienated voice, full of fog and shivers, takes us into the channels of a sensitive and therefore vulnerable mind, with wide strides into the walls of desires that he struggles to resist. In this astonishing credibility, he is accompanied by a fairy with red cheeks (like his voice) who kicks and declares war on her beloved. A duet/duel that explores the flood of differences between the singer born in Pembury and then became Irish and the girl from Croydon, transported as if by magic to a place far from their roots. The song meticulously brings everything together, spotlighting the energetic Celtic rock drive of a band that, starting from well-established historical foundations, knows how to add something new to a marriage that proves to be perfect. They dance, slowly at first (embracing) and then quickly, as if in a rowdy physical ritual that involves movement and the distribution of real sweat.

And here is the obvious opposition to Christmas, like a non-fiction book that is not contemplated but considered absolutely necessary by the artists in question. Seemingly light, the composition is a delicate surgical operation, an unexpected added value, a combination of street languages, of those who have nothing to improvise and nothing to lose...

The Pogues offer a helping hand, a blanket to make hope and the exchange of gifts a chance for enrichment, which does not pass through the mediocrity of gifts, which are only possible for those who have had fortunes and abilities that certainly do not gravitate towards those who experience poverty with all its shocks.

Fairytale of New York is a chimney, a harbour of the heart, a gasp, with the undeniable ability to turn the song into redemption, a project, a memory, a kiss, an endless drink with miles of drizzly beats, a silent delirium in the dynamics of musical harmonies which, between muscles and caresses, manages to glide through a story that makes the segregated world a paradise where dignity is not measured by wealth, social position and the arrogance of domination, and where the only, questionable thirst is that of power and not that of a healthy Guinness...

The text evokes the sting of an abrasion caused by a fall (both physical and moral), then disinfects the wound and restores balance and strength. Much more than a metaphor, this episode passes through reality, mythology and ancient traditions to give the Irish heart a flag that flies and will always fly with unquestionable pride. When it offers the past the chance to console, it never stops creating the present and new memories, perfectly encapsulating the true identity of the land of the shamrock.

And when it alludes to gambling (in order to change the protagonists' fortunes), we see that in the abyss, questionable but necessary choices still lie ahead. And it is apotheosis: it passes through a naivety that becomes poetry, a very high form of irony, with bitter petals falling into the heart of the story... 

When the city of apples shows itself to be inhospitable and cruel to those who are not lucky, the text reveals a bitter observation that becomes, however, a source of strength and distinction for an identity that is not afraid to highlight differences. 

It makes you want to strip down, go to Dublin and its surroundings, have an empty jute bag and the inclination to put in it the faces and stories of those who, in this song, made us cry and feel proud to want to reach a new goal... 

Alex Dematteis (Vecchio Scriba)

Musicshockworld

Salford

24 12 2025

My Review: Perry Blake - Death Of A Society Girl

 Perry Blake - Death Of A Society Girl DONE

How beautiful and useful it is to lose oneself in sweetness, to step out of the grey and blackness of these times and find a tree under which the notes that fall are angelic voices with truly captivating melodies, a soft plunge into the benevolent side of an hourglass that protects the compositions to bless the landscapes filled with love, of that poetry that passes over and protects everything. The atmospheres, the inclinations seem to lean towards the Sixties, Seventies, with a psychedelic approach devoid of exaggeration, under the banner of coloured brushstrokes as a fixative that leads to the reservoirs of sadness. Impressive is the thrill one feels thanks to compositions that have nothing to do with sadness, which, however, always seems to be ready to manifest itself: this factor alone would be enough to call this album a precious miracle!

Together with Perry we find the actor from the film so adored by the Old Scribe (Withnail & I): Paul McGann is a heart-warming stove ...  The other creative part is Graham Murphy, a fine chiseller, a creative mind who knows how to fit in perfectly with Perry. They are flowers that seek out cuddles in the compositions, all in an almost silent way, like a music box of pleasure delivered to the childlike souls of our dreams, to enter the paths of a surreal that attracts, with winking phrasing, one temptation after another to exclude phrases and poisons. We seem to escape without running, with the breath entirely in our lungs as our eyes and ears swell with emotion, in a reproductive chain that ends up establishing how immense is the apotheosis of a chaos finally frozen by the delicate feathers of these songs

One strolls between new age trails and petals of world music, with trip hop echoes only hinted at, as if dying on the tip of brushes. Throughout the album, the voice remains the thermometer, the scales, the comet that guides the listener into an emotional world map sealed with one gem after another: among the most sensual works of the last ten years, it cannot but be adopted by your listeners...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

20 Giugno 2024

https://moochinaboutltd.bandcamp.com/album/death-of-a-society-girl-2

My Review: Sinéad O’Connor - The Lion and the Cobra

 

Sinéad O’Connor - Lion and the Cobra

In a world that seeks perfection, masterpieces, guaranteed amazement without having to make an effort, I would prefer to say that at least in music one should take a humble approach, ending up even feeling embarrassed at not knowing how to handle beauty and depth, diversity and the inner climate created.

Then there are the moments when it becomes upheaval, torment, avalanches of freewheeling questions, landslides of the senses with the security of creating and experiencing an earthly bond, ready to become eternal. And when the notes, the words, the voices, the instruments make us experience all this, we become intimate, complicit, grateful, effervescent, seagulls in flight without a perimeter in the sky.

In 1987 an album was released that was capable of doing this, a door slammed in your face, with splendid pains colouring the walls of your heart with asbestos, with an energy that has never known exhaustion because perfection exists only in the way it rides time without going astray: Lion and the Cobra does this very well, like an eternal kiss from Apollo, God of music and art, who gave her approval to make this record the soundtrack to the days of a parallel paradise, which is specified in the possibility of giving space to torments, follies, exaggerations, multiple streams of propulsive consciousness.

These songs are dowsing arrows that seek to enter the listener's heart, without the need to find concord, but rather a new place to experience the effects caused by these nine different new drugs, in an afternoon that forgets itself and experiences effects: in the heart of the Old Scribe they still last today, thirty-nine years later. 

Like a boat that rents out the history of an entire country and takes it on a voyage to faces that speak different languages, so does this work, a thunderous and deadly debut, an absurdity that creates devices for a chewing that will never give total joy, because this is not necessary: Sinéad does not heal wounds, she causes them in a delightful way, she shows us our naive, unconscious motions while we sleep and she takes care to wake us up, with tactics and planning that succeed in the objective.

She battles with herself, with demons, angels, real and fictitious characters, in an extraordinary crescendo for the craftsmanship of the writing and interpretation, within a truly vast apparatus, which bypasses the genes of musical genres and tunes into experimentation, with the resumption of attitudinal concepts from the past, shaking everything in the centre of her belly, the place of departure and distribution of her enormous sensitivity. Nothing is left to hypothesis, to calculation, everything is instead recorded to be put into the wind, the only way to ensure the possibility of a journey that can touch consciences. Her young age, at the time of writing the songs, did not prevent her from showing strength, compact ideas, multiple qualities, of succeeding in defining the missing, what in 1987, unconsciously, was expected, and this is precisely the greatest capacity: to give what one does not yet know one desires

A fairy disguised as a witch, fairy tales as the nightmare for crime news, psychological analysis that rush into memory, multiple extravaganzas capable of settling in the conscious, the unconscious that is stimulated to take a path: it is only the beginning, an infinitesimal part of what happens while what pulses, in listening, becomes a root, capable of descending into the depths, rebelling against conventions, using the direct language of sincerity, increasingly unbecoming for those who like to hide. She finds this mass and turns it upside down, with songs: what wonderful power is this?

We find the pelvic romanticism of an Ireland that knows how to escape the wear and tear of time, to remain unscathed and to be able to tell the stories that are passed down in a splendid habit, to accompany the days inside a green labyrinth, always fresh, bombastic, rotating, on a perpetual patrol, and does so through a folk sensibility that kisses rock, with sprinkles of electronics, contemplating petals of world music scattered under the skin, not renouncing to make people dance, with a head that is a smiling beehive, in search of space, creating and defining it. Adolescence, in the record, is a true, purposeful vibration, which settles well in the directions that continually move dreams and reality, always a metre further ahead. 

She shouts, she whispers, she barks at the pentagram, she twists in her motions, she never lingers, she does not limp, she walks on notes as if in her DNA this was not a date but her home, always. Moving with ease, she dispenses pills of wisdom, contemplates a rebellion of the senses, overwhelms boredom with her freshness and colours the mind with many-feathered claws: she scratches and knocks our established habits out of our skin.

A prophetic, poetic, melancholic record, never wait-and-see, never willing to waste time and, with great humility, capable of showing cultural plans in search of a landing place, of new departures that with these tracks become obligatory. She does not allow indifference with this album, she drags us into the abyss by deceiving falsehood with her total sincerity. She disarms, putting flowers, ideas, strips of rebellion in the arms of our minds to contemplate, like a homework assignment never to be denied.

Lioness, cobra, but also chameleon, reindeer, cat, gazelle, golden eagle, dolphin, brown bear, ferret, in an endless list that shows the many souls walking among the verses, the ever-visible characters that fill the mental terrain full of grips, in a framework that defines the human jungle as the list goes on, making exchange with the animal world possible. And then there are mobile spirits, pressing in, authoritatively engaging, a reservoir of thoughts ready to spring to its feet. 

And then her, the voice, a continuous miracle, a vibrant cascade of drops between the sweet and the bitter, which, injecting unquestionable technical skills, mould themselves in an extraordinary way in her feeling, in her outlining of words with continuous thrusts, in fascinating, touching ups and downs, ending up embellishing our mediocrity. A promenade, a procession of quality that knows no weakness, vivid, fulminating, sensual, an earthquake that shakes the eardrums and makes them useful in understanding that beyond the form there is an indisputable substance.

When she screams, groans, she seems to show us her childbirth at the moment when she can no longer hold back the body she has had inside her for a lifetime: a continuous birth, with sweat resting on her vocal cords trained to sweep away indifference and nourish astonishment.

Her nature is overflowing, she advances, she seizes, she blesses, she asks for help, she turns her back on stupidity, she confronts cruelty, she plunges her devotion into the love that has wounded her and she, like a wise angel, knows how to transform it, how to erect it on a meritocratic plane. 

She sows, she ignites, she pulverises, she waits, she shows disenchantment and mistrust, she nurtures doubts, and she gets on the chariot of commitment by tackling urgent issues, she paralyses the useless and becomes Goddess without fear, christening winged experiments to teach us new flights. 

It sounds, this incredible debut, like a classic that attaches itself to modernity, often announcing a future that will not be long in coming, in order to converse (dutifully not always in a positive way) with a reality that does not realise that it is also the task of art to act as a metronome, a pointer, an advisor, a paperwork, so as not to waste time. The personal dissatisfaction of her first recordings allowed her to take total control, like a necessary anti-democratic flux: cunning, skill, a furious temperament, the shrewdness of a gauge to measure tensions, spasms and sweetnesses always lurking, in search of a timbre that would make all opposition crumble. It was a battle for her that time but she won it, she took the songs and nailed them, along with those who did not understand them, in the part where victory always has a fiercely satisfied grin. 

And when the voice visualises the images, with the support of music that overrides any reluctance, we find ourselves enveloped in a mantle full of slippery moss, like the result of a rainy day fast-acting on our beats. When she sings the caves feel dismay: she has uncovered them and plunged electric wires into them, disrupting the walls. Often rejecting traditions that she deems superfluous, she puts slush into her thoughts like soft balls of wool, but one gets the impression that the explosions of Nagasaki and Hiroshima are always present in her. Tranquillity absolutely does not live in her head, which sprouts and scatters neuroses without fear of contradiction.

Her passion for music becomes an electric chair. She kills what pop uses to embellish a ridiculous and superfluous space, and drags it into the exercise of songs built with arrangements that alone would displace the most narcissistic of artists, shining the methodology of a polyvalent writing, attached to the expression that must contain discipline and rules. A punk that does not use punk to oppose but rather imagination, research: the middle finger creeps in the bitter waves of continual travails, with an anger that does not become an outlet but a clod of earth in the sky.

She is a godmother to Lisa Germano, Fiona Apple, Pj Harvey, Tracy Chapman, Liz Phair, Dolores O'Riordan: she teaches them all something, because it is undeniable that Sinéad's freedom has paid a very high personal price, and an imprint capable of spreading in the consciences of these singers, beyond musical styles. The Irish artist has brought as a gift qualities that have compacted in the macroscope of others' consideration, becoming a peasant woman who has sown her seeds in the territories of others.

If we start from the title, from the cover, we are immediately catapulted into history, into religion, into modernity in glittering colours, finding on the way wars, hatred, twisted fairy tales, explosive mixtures of layered consciousnesses, with allegories, phosphorescent images, settings that make convictions creak, attacks on politics in the hands of politicians and not citizens, sentimental relationships where terror and lies do not stop making people shed tears, with the incredible surprise of seeing her handle it all with grace and respect. Far from a masterpiece: here she has gone further, where there are no right words to specify and assert. One can only say Thank you and continually bow one's head to learn, without getting distracted... 

And now we mourn for this record, not for its demise: in this album lies its immortality, which could, as a consequence, also be ours...

Alex Dematteis

Musicshockworld

Salford

25th April 2024