A Very British Christmas

by Rhodri Marsden

  J. L., London

  In keeping with oral tradition, carols find themselves morphing and changing as we mishear words and get things wrong. For example, in ‘Silent Night’, Mary is not a ‘round, young virgin’; no, everything just happened to be ‘calm and bright’ around ‘yon virgin’, i.e. that virgin who’s sitting over there. In ‘Good King Wenceslas’, Wenceslas has three syllables, so he didn’t ‘last’ look out, he just looked out. (Bear with me, I’ll stop being angry in a second.) It’s not your ‘king’ you’re wishing a Merry Christmas, it’s your ‘kin’, i.e. your family, and in ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’, they’re not merry gentlemen you’re asking to have a rest,13 they’re gentlemen who ideally would ‘rest merry’, i.e. take it easy, have a good time, chill out, because after all, in the words of Noddy Holder, it’s Chriiiiiiiistmas.

  “Unprotected sex with strangers, fa la la la la la la la la…”

  More deliberate liberties are taken with other carols. A friend of mine tells me the story of her former headmistress who, for some reason, decided that the three verses of ‘Away In A Manger’ were insufficient and wrote a fourth for the school to sing. It ended thus: ‘the mouse squeaked in wonder and jumped from the corn, and lay by the manger where Jesus was born.’ (No, I’ve no idea either.) Words get changed for the purposes of mild amusement: the late 1930s saw kids address the weighty topic of the abdication crisis with ‘Hark the herald angels sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our king’; there’s the perennial favourite of ‘While shepherds washed their socks’, and in one version of ‘We Three Kings’ the Magi travel to Bethlehem in a taxi, a car, and on a scooter while beeping a hooter and either wearing a Playtex bra, or smoking a big cigar. That’s one hell of a welcoming committee for a baby boy.

  Guildford, Christmas 1978

  My mum was big on rituals at Christmas. We had a crib we set up every year, and there were candles, and we loved it. And every year we’d sing carols at home. All six kids together, with mum and dad, often around the piano. But the crib was weird. My mum was Anglo-Indian, born and brought up in what’s now Pakistan, to an English father and mixed-race mother. Urdu was her first language. Then after she married my dad they lived in Bombay for years. And the figures in our crib were… well, they weren’t ‘traditionally Christian’. In fact, they were a set of wooden decorated dolls from India. Hindu figurines. All men. Mary was a bloke.

  I can’t think how these dolls became the Holy Family. But the ones I liked best were the three Kings. Not only were they beautiful, but their heads were on springs and wobbled about. The tradition was that during the singing of ‘We Three Kings’, whoever was holding one of the kings (a hard-fought battle) would bang their heads in time to the music. I’d love to know where those three Kings of Orient are now… in Dad’s attic, I suppose? It seemed pretty normal at the time, but looking back I think, ‘What on earth were we doing?’

  M. H.

  Carols aren’t the only Christmas songs to receive disrespectful treatment. ‘Jingle Bells’, written in 1850 by an American chap called James Lord Pierpont, and acknowledged as the oldest secular Christmas song,14 was adapted by British kids in the 1970s to incorporate Batman (‘Jingle Bells, Batman smells, Robin flew away, Kojak lost his lollipop and didn’t know what to say’), with regional variations such as ‘Father Christmas wet his knickers on the motorway’, or, if you were from Kent, ‘Batmobile lost its wheel on the Thanet Way’.

  Those of you reeling in indignation at this musical vandalism would be advised to steer clear of Barbra Streisand’s version of ‘Jingle Bells’, which takes pole position on her imaginatively titled 1967 Christmas album, A Christmas Album. Babs dashes through the snow in a variety of time signatures and keys, making spirits regret their decision to come along for the bumpy ride. As an acknowledgement of her impertinence, she even titles it ‘Jingle Bells?’ – to which the answer is, ‘All right, but one moment while I brace myself’. Another notable version is by The Singing Dogs, who reached #13 in the British charts in 1955 with a medley of barked tunes including Pierpont’s much-loved classic. These days, turning noises such as dog barks into musical notes can be done with a cheap keyboard in a matter of seconds, but in the 1950s it involved hours of tape splicing in a Copenhagen studio to create the mesmeric effect of four dogs barking festively. (The Singing Dogs medley was the last record by a Danish performer to appear in the British Christmas top 20 until Whigfield in 1994, to the best of my knowledge. I just spent a stupidly long time searching the Internet to verify this.)

  From the 1930s until the emergence of rock ’n’ roll in the mid 1950s, American songwriters penned a collection of secular Christmas tunes which are still recognised as stone cold classics, regardless of what Michael Bublé might have done to them since. ‘Winter Wonderland’ and ‘Santa Claus is Coming to Town’ were among the first in 1934, ‘White Christmas’ and ‘Little Drummer Boy’ in the early 40s, and then a flurry in 1944, with ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’, ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’ and ‘The Christmas Song’, which is the one that recommends roasting chestnuts on an open fire in a flagrant breach of health and safety regulations. Realising the financial potential of a Christmas hit, American singer Gene Autry then styled himself as ‘The Christmas Cowboy’ and recorded three humdingers in three successive years: 1948’s ‘Here Comes Santa Claus (Down Santa Claus Lane)’, 1949’s ‘Rudolf The Red Nosed Reindeer’ and, in 1950, ‘Frosty The Snowman’.

  The British equivalent of Autry, in terms of his attempts to capitalise on Christmas, was Dickie Valentine. He would have observed our national crisis of 1953, when confused British consumers put three different versions of ‘I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus’ into the Christmas top 20, by the Beverley Sisters, Jimmy Boyd and Billy Cotton; Dickie thought, ‘I’ll have a bit of that, but let’s make it a bit more British, shall we?’ In 1955, he scored the first ever Christmas-themed Christmas number one in the UK, with ‘Christmas Alphabet’:

  C is for the candy trimmed around the Christmas tree,

  H is for the happiness with all the family,

  R is for the reindeer prancing by the window pane,

  I is for the icing on the cake as sweet as sugar cane,

  S is for the stocking hanging on the chimney wall,

  T is for the toys beneath the tree so tall,

  M is for the mistletoe where everyone is kissed,

  A is for the angels who make up the Christmas list,

  S is for the Santa who makes every kid his pet,

  Be good and he’ll bring you everything in your Christmas alphabet!

  It’s a recognisable Christmas scenario that Dickie portrays here, but the following year he changed things up to describe an exotic Christmas in a faraway land: ‘How’d ya like to spend Christmas on Christmas Island? How’d ya like to spend the holiday away across the sea? How’d ya like to hang a stocking on a great big coconut tree?’ The answer to these questions was evidently ‘not very much’, as ‘Christmas Island’ stalled at number eight. When the slightly creepy ‘Snowbound For Christmas’15 failed to reach the top 20 in 1957, Dickie gave up on his Christmas ambitions. That same year, a version of the song ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ by Harry Belafonte spent Christmas at number one, but for the next decade and a half our interest in Christmas-themed pop singles waned; we didn’t have another Christmassy Christmas number one until Slade’s face-off with Wizzard in 1973.

  That period did, however, give the British a luxury assortment of Christmas holiday albums from across the Atlantic. They’re generally a mix of Christmas carols, secular tunes and the odd original composition to get a few royalties flowing, but a handful of them stand out. Elvis’ Christmas Album (1957) caused a kerfuffle when composer Irving Berlin sought to have Elvis’s innocuous recording of his song ‘White Christmas’ banned from the radio as a ‘profane parody’. In 1960, Nat King Cole’s The Magic Of Christmas stuck mainly to carols, while Ella Fitzgerald’s Ella Wishes You A Swinging Christmas steered clear of the Jesus
stuff, but this made them a perfect complement to one another. The Beach Boys’ Christmas Album (1964) is full of cheerful (and accurate) observations such as ‘Christmas comes this time each year’, while 1965 brought us The Supremes’ Merry Christmas and the magnificent Charlie Brown Christmas by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi.

  Astride them all, however, sits A Christmas Gift for You (1963) by record producer turned murderer Phil Spector, listed at #142 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. That record, featuring The Crystals, Darlene Love, The Ronettes and Bob B. Soxx & the Blue Jeans, ended up defining the sound of the modern Christmas, and we hear echoes of it in records made today: the kitchen-sink production known as his ‘Wall Of Sound’, layered voices and sleigh bells galore. The most successful Christmas single written in the last twenty-five years, Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ (1994), takes its inspiration and feel entirely from Spector, combining it with an irresistible tune to create an almost perfect Christmas pop song. (Although I acknowledge that not everybody feels this way. While I was writing this book, one person sent me a message about ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, saying, ‘I hate it with every fibre of my being. Saccharine musical vomit.’)

  Cambridge, Christmas 2013

  Me and my husband have always loved throwing Christmas parties, and Mariah’s song always seems to be the one that people are waiting for. It’s my favourite song, Christmas or not; Mariah’s voice is so huge, and it’s the perfect combination of being a massive banger and wonderfully romantic. I remember having these elaborate crushes when I was a teenager, wondering whether the boy I liked would kiss me when that song was playing at the school disco, so that’s probably how it was cemented in my head.

  Anyway, when we were planning our wedding reception we wanted it to be like one of those Christmas parties, that’s the feeling we wanted. So I asked the DJ to play it at the reception. It was in the middle of a heatwave in July, absolutely sweltering, and it came on, and people were grabbing my arm and saying, ‘I think there’s been a mistake?’ But it wasn’t. And it was a beautiful moment. It’s like they say in Muppet Christmas Carol, ‘Wherever you find love it feels like Christmas’, and I guess it was like that. Except the other way around.

  A. B.

  You can hear Spector’s influence in the singles that competed for the 1973 Christmas top spot: Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ and Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’. In an interview with The Guardian in 2011, Roy Wood of Wizzard said that he decided to make a Christmas single ‘because they’d been unfashionable for years’.16 Slade’s Noddy Holder, meanwhile, explained to Uncut magazine in 2013 how that period of history was ‘a miserable time’ and that he was ‘trying to cheer people up’. Wizzard’s song is more unashamedly festive, with bells, kids and the cynical sound of a clanging cash register, but Slade’s ended up leapfrogging it to number one. Both songs have become a backdrop to the British Christmas, audible throughout November and December; we holler along to the choruses and then realise, despite having heard both songs eleventy billion times each, that we know barely any of the words of the verses. It’s weird, that. Maybe we’re just too drunk or distracted to pay proper attention?

  Making records doesn’t happen in an instant. Many Christmas records were written and recorded in the heat of summer, and Slade’s and Wizzard’s were no exception. Slade’s was made in New York during a heatwave, while Wizzard tried to create a wintry atmosphere in a London studio with blue light bulbs, and used motorised fans to make it cold enough to wear scarves and overcoats. Many 1940s classics were also composed in temperatures way above zero; ‘White Christmas’ was written in July, as was ‘Sleigh Ride’, as was ‘Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!’, and I have sympathy with anyone whose job it is to conjure up a Christmassy atmosphere out of season, because I’m typing this paragraph in May.

  What elements make the perfect Christmas song? Choirs of voices and clanging bells are a given, but what else can musicians chuck into the mix to increase their chances of radio play? Answer #1: Kids. Wizzard recognised this in 1973 and sought the help of children at a Birmingham primary school, but the appeal of the innocent voice of a child had been recognised by songwriters decades earlier, even if that voice was lisping (1944’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth’) or slightly deranged (1953’s ‘I Want a Hippopotamus For Christmas’17). In more recent times, Clive Dunn’s ‘Grandad’ (1970) and ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’ by St Winifred’s School Choir (1980) have both scored big in the Christmas charts, thanks to our fondness for recreating the shrill racket of a school concert in our own living rooms.

  People who take their pop music seriously would have been livid that St Winifred’s School Choir kept John Lennon’s ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ from being Christmas number one that year, but that’s what happens when people who don’t usually buy records suddenly find themselves in a record shop with no idea what to get their cousin. Under such circumstances, whimsy is a safe option. The choices made in that moment of uncertainty have coloured our Christmas charts for years, with such oddities as The Goons’ ‘I’m Walking Backwards for Christmas’ (1956) and Dora Bryan’s ‘All I Want for Christmas is a Beatle’ (1963). But it was in the late 1960s that novelty records began massively outselling the competition in Christmas week. The Scaffold’s ‘Lily the Pink’ (1968), Rolf Harris’s ‘Two Little Boys’ (1969), Benny Hill’s ‘Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)’ (1971) and Jimmy Osmond’s ‘Long Haired Lover from Liverpool’ (1972) were all Christmas number ones, despite having nothing to do with Christmas. Renée and Renato’s ‘Save Your Love’ (1982), Mr Blobby’s eponymous horror show (1993), and Bob The Builder’s ‘Can We Fix It’ (2000) all fit neatly into this category, and thankfully, at least for the purposes of this book, we can consider this category closed.

  At the other end of the scale we find Christmas melancholy. Despite being told that Christmas is the season to be jolly, we’ve always had a need for songs that depict bleak and horrendous Christmases, either to indulge our own sadness or to make our own situations seem relatively cheerful. ‘The Little Boy that Santa Claus Forgot’ (1937) is an early example, featuring the harrowing tale of a present-less child who you’d hope would end up getting something nice by the end of the song, but (spoiler) he doesn’t. ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’, one of the most beautiful Christmas songs we have, is an emotional yearning for better times, and the very first version (sung by Judy Garland in the 1944 film Meet Me in St Louis) resonated hugely with wartime audiences.

  Since then, the competition to depict the worst Christmas imaginable has been intense. Brenda Lee’s ‘Christmas Will Be Just Another Lonely Day’ (1964) raised the issue of Christmas solitude: ‘I had a lonely September, October, November, too / but December is twice as lonely without you’. This was echoed a decade later in Mud’s ‘Lonely This Christmas’ (‘Since you left me my tears could melt the snow / What can I do without you, I got no place to go’). With December being a peak time for break-ups, Christmas songs about being single have a guaranteed appeal for anyone wrestling with loss. American performers, however, tapped into a much wider range of problems, e.g. John Denver’s ‘Please Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)’, Dolly Parton’s ‘Hard Candy Christmas’, John Prine’s ‘Christmas in Prison’18 and The Everly Brothers’ thoroughly grim ‘Christmas Eve Can Kill You’, which should be followed with the bracketed disclaimer (But Only In Very Exceptional Circumstances). Our very own David Essex had a broken-hearted Christmas hit with ‘A Winter’s Tale’ in 1982, but its melancholy was shattered slightly with the ridiculous line: ‘The nights grow colder now, maybe I should close the door’. (Shut the damn thing, Dave, it’s freezing in here.) Wham, of course, nailed it with 1984’s ‘Last Christmas’, which, along with The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’ have become our two quintessential melancholic Christmas tunes. (Although you wouldn’t think so when you hear o
ffice parties roaring them in pubs as if they’re singing The White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’.)

  Ironically, the one thing that’s unlikely to improve your chances of having a Christmas hit is to mention Jesus, although Cliff Richard is the exception, having managed three number one hits this way in 1988, 1990 and 1999 with ‘Mistletoe and Wine’, ‘Saviour’s Day’ and ‘The Millennium Prayer’ respectively. Steeleye Span scored an unlikely a cappella hit with ‘Gaudete’ in 1973, which does mention Jesus, but in Latin, so it blew our minds by qualifying as religious, melancholy and a novelty all at once.

  If Christmas is a time for considering people who are less fortunate than ourselves (and it is, in theory, although it rarely works like that in practice), then the ultimate expression can be found in 1984’s ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ by Band Aid (and subsequent versions by Band Aid II, Band Aid 20 and Band Aid 30). It has become one of the most recognisable Christmas tunes in Britain, but it emerged from the unlikeliest of briefs, i.e. to raise awareness of the famine that was raging in Ethiopia at the time. I asked Midge Ure, who co-wrote the song with Bob Geldof, about the enormity of the task that befell them. ‘How do you write a Christmas song about something so miserable?’ he recalls. ‘I remember sitting with a Casio keyboard in my kitchen with a bell sound, and coming up with that melody [before the ‘Feed the World’ section]. Bob hated it. He said, “It sounds like the theme from Z-Cars”, and he wasn’t wrong, it’s pretty close. But we realised in the studio that the song had nothing memorable, that it needed a hook, so we added that “Feed the World” section at the end as a “War is Over”-type thing. As a record it did a brilliant job, but as a song, it’s a bit odd! It wasn’t a well sculpted piece of music, but it was made better by everyone else’s talents.’