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Help! I’m being held prisoner by Shakin’ Stevens

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For the last three days I’ve had “Merry Christmas Everyone” by the TOHH on intermittent repeat in my head.

For the first day it wasn’t so bad: “not a terrible tune, who did it?”, I thought and then it faded out. Next day, more of the same, although it was slightly less fun. This morning I woke up with it. Not the whole thing of course. Oh no, just the first verse again and again. If I’d got to a bridge or chorus that might have broken the curse.

Now it’s become a problem. In the hope that understanding your enemy is the way to defeat it
I just duckduckgoed the thing and found out the culprit. The bloke who wrote it also wrote “Japanese Boy” by Anneka, so I’m sure no jury would convict me.

I have decided not to include a video link. You are welcome.

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Comments

  2. Three days is nothin’. When I worked as a delivery driver for a number of years, Feel Me Now by Blancmange would arrive uninvited into my head every morning as I drove into the village of Clarecastle and remain for an hour or two. I have no idea what triggered it but it was very annoying.

    • Agreed, Max. Three days is a picnic. For about a decade, I cycled to work every day past the end of a road bearing the prominently signposted name, Willow Farm Lane. It was all but impossible to ignore and immediately triggered the sound of Peter Gabriel singing “If you go down to Willow Farm…” etc. Frequently, the song would last the whole of the remaining 40 minutes or so to work and start up again on the way home at the same spot. It’s fairly remarkable that I can still enjoy the song.

  4. Try working Christmas in retail, with the same songs playing on a loop for weeks on end. There was a version, not the Frank Sinatra one, of Ooh By Gosh By Golly which features a key change the memory of which makes me cringe my pelvis inside out more than 20 years later.

  5. I’ve been haunted by the theme tune from Terry & June since 1979. It springs unbidden into my consciousness without warning and lives rent free in my head sometimes for days at a time. It’s distressing especially as I never actually watched the wretched programme. I must have casually heard the damn thing at some random time in some long forgotten place and yet all these years later it pops up and drives me to distraction. Why is it I frequently forget important stuff and yet this ruddy nonsense has taken up permanent residence in my head?

  6. Talking of annoying Christmas songs, of which there are many, Stop the Cavalry by Jona friggin’ Lewie is the one that instantly sets my teeth on edge. Just the thought of all that ‘dub-a-dub-a-dum’ is enough to tighten the throat and loosen the bowels.

  8. If you need help getting Shaky out of your head, I can recommend Another Rock’n’Roll Christmas to replace it – it’s a solid gold festive earworm. There’s a bit of an issue with the artist, mind, so don’t go whistling it in public.

  9. It’s funny you mentioning Shaky, as I was talking to his nephew just last week. Shaky, or Michael Barrett as he was born, grew up just a mile or so away from where I live. He was from a huge family, the youngest of 11 children, so there are still lot’s of nephew’s and nieces living there.

    I worked with his nephew Dale Barrett for about 10 years from the mid 90s, when he became a postman at the delivery office where I worked. At Christmas, a big groan would sound when his song came on the radio, and everyone would shout ‘Uncle Michael’s on again’. But we would all sing along to it, and were proud that a local boy had made good.

    I don’t think anyone hears or plays any Shaky records anymore, apart from this time of year, but I vividly remember the first time I heard him. It was in the summer of 1980, and he had two minor hits with Hot Dog, and Marie, Marie. I thought Marie, Marie was a cracking little song, and I just played it again before posting this. Can’t believe that it’s 45 years ago.

    Talking about earworms, if you have grandchildren there can be nothing worse than ‘Baby Shark’. I don’t know how many times I’ve heard that song over the last few years, but it’s enough to drive a man insane.

    • I remember Shakin’ Stevens and the Sunsetz being a regular band on children’s ITV in the 70s. These kids’ shows were a strange hinterland of pop featuring acts that were generally nowhere near the actual pop charts but presented to us children as if they were big stars. All that changed when Shaky went solo and actually became massively popular. I think he was the only one that crossed over successfully.

    • “Somebody Touched Me” just cracked the Top 40 in Oz, and I remember seeing a clip on the TV when I was visiting a young couple who’d just moved in down the road. They were real Elvis fans (her hairstyle was pure Priscilla circa 1967) and they were torn – on the one hand “Huh, he’s just copying Elvis’s moves”, on the other hand they admitted he did it pretty well.

      • Yes, I remember those 70s shows very much. A great time to be a child I would say, as they don’t make shows like that anymore. Talking about the Sunsets, I looked them up online, and they seem to have had more past members than I’ve had hot dinners. One of them was another local boy, the late, great Mickey Gee. He had a great career after the Sunsets, playing with Dave Edmunds, Andy Fairweather Low, and even supported Carl Perkins on his UK tours in the 80s.

    • Marie Marie is a total banger. He had a hot band at the time, I remember a radio broadcast of a live show that my dad was listening to. I was too cool to admit that I loved it.

  10. I use ‘defence worms’ to chase the evil stuff out of my head. If I listen to Cornershop’s brilliant We’re in Yr Corner, it removes anything. Hanji! Love those guys.

  12. There’s a game of going as long as you can this month without hearing Last Christmas. I haven’t heard the original yet, but I guess I am out because I heard a ghastly cover version a couple of days ago

  13. When I use the local train service, which is quite regularly, at each stop there is a recorded announcement saying “This is” followed by a pause before the station name is announced. Unfortunately during this pause I always sing (in my head) “the dawning of the age of Aquarius”. I don’t even like the song.

  16. Apologies for repetition, but the story behind This Ole House is quite something.

    The writer of the song chanced upon the old house while out and about in an extremely remote location. He knocked on the door and no-one answered. He then pushed the door open and started to look around. Presently he found a dead body – a man lying on the ground. He had been there for quite some time.

    The house was in such a state of disrepair that the songwriter concocted a scenario that the man decided to give up on maintaining it and just leave the house exactly how it is and let it rot. There’s a parallel with the man himself, seemingly giving up on himself as well as the ole house. He vows not to leave the house until he dies, defeated by DIY.

    Shakin Stevens also sings the word “shaky” in the song, making him the first no 1 singer to use his own name. Sting also does it in Do they Know it’s Christmas. Both were coincidences but it is interesting to note that performers didn’t use their own names very much, except perhaps Bo Diddley. That all changed of course in the rap/hip hop era where many songs refer to the singer.

  17. Anyone playing the whamageddon game, I would advise you to avoid BBC2 from 9 o’clock tonight as they are showing 3 hours plus of George Michael and Wham, including at 10.15 the story of Last Christmas. Don’t say you haven’t been warned.

    I’ve already lost the game, as I had a double whammy (there’s a pun there somewhere) of Christmas songs at the end of a panto we took the grandkids to this afternoon. It was going so well right to the very end, until they played two original songs to finish the show. Believe it or not, they were Shaky’s Merry Christmas Everyone, and Wham’s Last Christmas. It was going so well this December, as I hadn’t heard either. Oh well, you can’t win them all.

  18. At my ballroom dancing class on Friday night, the teacher (who has just turned 40, so she was one year old when it was released) played Another Rock and Roll Christmas. I didn’t raise the thorny issue.

    It’s a Quickstep, in case you were wondering.

      • I’ll be honest: I don’t watch it. I do keep up with what Amy Dowden’s up to, because of the shared Crohn’s disease thing.

        I started ballroom classes when I finished university. I sit on my arse for a living, I need to exercise, I don’t like the gym, I like music, and I thought it might be a place to meet a nice young lady.

        I initially went with someone from work, but she had no rhythm and gave up after a couple of terms. And it turned out all the nice young ladies in town went to the university ballroom society, but my class was full of middle-aged divorcees (and John the Postman – not that one – who spent his weekends competing), so I was in demand.

        After five or six years, I was quite good, then the future Mrs F shacked up with me and I had to go back to beginners classes with her for a couple of years. Then we paused classes, which turned out to be for about 20 years, after we got married.

        So we’re back again at the local (beginners) classes. Occasionally my feet sort of go into autopilot, and do a step which we haven’t yet been taught in this class. But, tbh, we’re not much better than the other beginners.

        Mrs F was out at her works Xmas do on Friday (I didn’t go – can’t eat the food) so I went to ballroom on my own and danced with the teacher. I did a spin turn, which she hasn’t taught us yet, from memory.

        I still can’t do the Tango without falling over, though.

  20. After listening to Joe Lycett singing “Teddy Bears Picnic” to the tune of Wichita Linesman the other week on ISIHAC, I cannot get the Glen Campbell tune out of my head.

    • Since seeing Eliza Carthy and John Borden’s Wassail Christmas show during the week I’ve been singing I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas on an internal loop.

  23. On Saturday evening I went to the Xmas gig by local Steely Dan tributers Stanley Dee. Starting their first set with Green Earrings was a bold move. Various other selections were then played. Their second set commenced with Hey Nineteen. Near the end of the evening’s show, nearly all of the “hits” having been played, two non-Dan seasonal selections were played. Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody” and Wizzard’s “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day”. They finished proceedings with “Reelin’ In The Years” of course.
    Sunday evening I was at The Elephant Inn in N. Finchley for their Xmas jazz gig, with guest alto sax soloist Donovan Haffner and arranger/bassist Simon Woolf. Two “seasonal” selections were played at the end. A superb slow ballad rendition of “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” and a bopped-up “White Christmas” (apparently based on a live version by Charlie Parker from 1954).

    All those Xmas tunes are on my acceptable list, so hearing them played really well was most enjoyable.
    So far I remain quite amazingly un-Whammed, a condition I hope will last at least until the big day or even further into the future.

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