Christmas Songs

“Ooh, I like this one...” I thought the checkout girl was commenting on my shopping. They quite often do this, especially if it’s something that they didn’t know that their shop sold. In a worrying parody of Scottish grocery retailing this usually turns out to be some form of fresh fruit and veg. However, her face then looked glum, “… but it’s Elton John next.” She was actually talking about the shop’s piped selection of Christmas songs which is played on an endless loop by the supermarket to torture their employees as if they were Guantanamo Bay inmates. No doubt the staff Christmas night out involves waterboarding.

In fact the song she liked was a little known Kate Bush single, December Will Be Magic Again, which has never appeared on Ms Bush’s albums and only rarely appears on Christmas compilations. It’s rather a shame as it is actually a very good song in its own right:

I can sympathise with shop workers who have piped music inflicted on them. I actually boycotted our local Lidl supermarket earlier this year when they tried to introduce it: they eventually relented. However, there is a general consensus that all Christmas songs are appalling. Not Christmas carols, of course, which exist, quite rightly, in their own context, but songs that have been written specifically for the Christmas market. Essentially commercial music: cashing-in on Christmas. For the most part, I’d agree with this but there are exceptions to this rule. I’d strongly recommend anyone to listen to Phil Spector’s Christmas Album which dates back to when he was an innovative record producer rather than a convicted murderer. As commercial records go that was originally a flop but it captures perfectly the R&B girl group sound from the period.  In a similar vein is Mariah Carey’s All I Want For Christmas Is You. I normally regard Ms Carey as a dreadful, warbling harpy but this record is genuinely uplifting:

I think to make a genuinely good Christmas song they need to be written about Christmas rather than for Christmas. Joni Mitchell’s song, River, is a great example of this: the song is set at Christmas but is about a relationship breakup and the emotional debris that goes with it:

Another song that is seemingly a Christmas tune but is actually something else is John Lennon’s Happy Xmas (War Is Over). Written primarily as an anti-Vietnam war song the Christmas message makes it far more accessible to a wider audience:

The interesting thing with most Christmas songs is they tend to appear as asides, throwaway tracks that don’t appear on the artists albums or in their main repertoire. One of the exceptions to this is Jethro Tull’s Ring Out, Solstice Bells which appeared right in the middle of their Songs from the Wood album. The other interesting thing about this song is that it draws upon the pre-Christian pagan origins of the mid-winter festival rather than the celebration of the birth of Jesus (let alone the worship of money that most “Christmas” celebrations seem to centre on.)

There is of course the anti-Christmas song that protest the commercialisation of Christmas. A gereat example of this is Greg Lake’s I Believe in Father Christmas which not only takes a swipe at the avaricious hijacking of Christmas but also uses a cracking refrain from Sergei Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé:

So is there no place for a commercial Christmas song? Probably the most overplayed song at Christmas is Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody but I still think it’s a brilliant piece of song writing. In the early 1970’s there was a distinct gap between commercial single-orientated pop music and the more album-orientated “serious” music. Slade were definitely a singles orientated band but they were also superb song-writers. I have a greatest hits compilation by Slade and every song is a classic. It is in chronological order for the most part but Merry Xmas Everybody is the closing track which makes for a great party album. Noddy Holder often calls the song his “pension scheme”. Well why not? None of us are getting any younger.