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Shane MacGowan responds to calls for Fairytale of New York to be censored

The song's lyrics feature a word which is offensive to the LGBT community

VIPIRELAND.COM

Shane MacGowan has responded to calls for Fairytale of New York to be censored.

The Christmas classic, which was written by The Pogues frontman in 1987, has been the subject of debate as of late – as it’s lyrics feature a word which is offensive to the LGBT community.

RTÉ 2fm hosts Stephen Byrne and Eoghan McDermott have publicly called for the word to be censored while being played on the radio, and the controversy was discussed on Virgin Media Television’s The Tonight Show on Thursday night.

When contacted by the show, Shane released a statement explaining why he included the word in the song’s lyrics.

VIPIRELAND.COM

He said, “The word was used by the character because it fitted with the way she would speak and with her character.”

“She is not supposed to be a nice person, or even a wholesome person. She is a woman of a certain generation at a certain time in history and she is down on her luck and desperate.”

“Her dialogue is as accurate as I could make it but she is not intended to offend! She is just supposed to be an authentic character and 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 in order to tell the story effectively,” he continued.

“If people don’t understand that I was trying to accurately portray the character as authentically as possible then I am absolutely fine with them bleeping the word but I don’t want to get into an argument.”

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