in nearby RAK Studios that it was suggested that Lillywhite take the track back to his home studio and let his wife Kirsty MacColl lay down a new guide vocal for the song. Having worked on her vocals meticulously, Lillywhite brought the recording back to the studio where the Pogues were impressed with MacColl's singing and realised she would be the ideal voice for the female character in the song. MacGowan later said, "Kirsty knew exactly the right measure of viciousness and femininity and romance to put into it and she had a very strong character and it came across in a big way... In operas, if you have a double aria, it's what the woman does that really matters. The man lies, the woman tells the truth." MacGowan re-recorded his vocals alongside the tape of MacColl's contribution (the duo never recorded the song together in the studio) and the song was duly completed with the addition of a harp played by Siobhan Sheahan and horns and a string section. The French horns and strings were recorded at Townhouse Studios on the last day of recording If I Should Fall from Grace with God, arranged by Fiachra Trench after band member James Fearnley had mocked up an arrangement on a keyboard. Composition The song follows an Irish immigrant's Christmas Eve reverie about holidays past while sleeping off a binge in a New York City drunk tank. When an inebriated old man also in the cell sings a passage from the Irish ballad "The Rare Old Mountain Dew", the narrator (MacGowan) begins to dream of a former lover. The remainder of the song (which may be an internal monologue) takes the form of a call and response between the couple, their youthful hopes crushed by alcoholism and drug addiction, as they reminisce and bicker on Christmas Eve. The lyrics "Sinatra was swinging" and "cars big as bars" seem to place the song in the late 1940s, although the music video clearly depicts a contemporary 1980s New York. On the impact of the lyrics, Helen Brown of The Daily Telegraph writes, Music video The video for the song was directed by Peter Dougherty and filmed in New York during a bitterly cold week in November 1987. The video opens with MacGowan sitting at a piano as if playing the song's opening refrain: however, as MacGowan could not actually play the instrument, the