by Shane MacGowan
“Our idea of New York was based on movies like Once Upon A Time In America, which we were obsessed with,” explains MacGowan. “We borrowed a lot from the soundtrack of that film.
“We were listening to so much other stuff. We were watching for example, the movie Once Upon a Time in America. It was a great band favourite and it had, as with most Sergio Leone movies, a great soundtrack by Ennio Morricone.
“There were elements of that music that we felt we wanted to explore and it influenced the beginning, the ballad part of Fairytale of New York, the sort of crooner section.
“What we essentially did was we wrote a sort of drunk version of an Ennio Morricone thing.”
“We used to watch Once Upon A Time In America on a loop when we were on tour. That must have had some kind of effect somewhere.
