Well, not quite yet. But certainly close enough for us to post our favourite Christmas songs – the wierder and more wonderful the better. I’ll start below
It’s Christmaaaassssss!
by 61 Comments
Comments
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Liverpool” finest, Edgar Jones, formerly of The Stairs, has just released this one. Its not going to trouble Wham!, but always nice to have a new contender
How about a spot of Dino?
Christmas gloom.
Aussie Christmas.
Some like it dark
Dark?
A vague recollection of discovering this one on this site. It’s brilliant before you factor in the bands average age was 12 when they recorded this. A remarkably fun bit of Christmas cheer – and Christmas is for the kids after all.
I prefer my Christmas songs suffused with melancholy. The Coventry Carol is a favourite, but there isn’t a YouTube recording of my preferred version by Kate St John. We’re seeing The Unthanks this evening and I hope it will be in the setlist as it’s on the Unthanks in Winter album they’re promoting.
Instead, here’s Thea Gilmore’s Old December from a gig I was at (though it’s not my vid) 7 years ago yesterday.
@Gatz I don’t want to disappoint you, but conversely also want to prepare you for said disappointment…they don’t do CC. But it’s still a wonderful show.
Well they certainly played it tonight. A stunning 3 part close harmony between Rachel, Becky and Niopha with Adrian providing a simple drone accompaniment on harmonium.
Viv Albertine’s festive offering.
Must be…for it’s sheer chutzpah.
Well I was waiting for this – if no one else had posted it I’d have had to…/
Surely the greatest? 😉 I never heard of this until I moved to Canada
He co-wrote it, so why not acousticise it
Love Jim.
Live from the Marquee – SAHB ‘There’s no lights on the Christmas tree mother, they’re burning Big Louie tonight’
Probably our last Christmas after 23 years in this house, so it’s a slightly melancholy mood (but in French).
This remains pretty unbeatable;
But this year I’ve found myself slightly obsessed with Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s The Power Of Love. What an absolutely incredible song that is.
I posted Smith & Burrows elsewhere yesterday but I’ve just finished Trevor Horn’s autobiography (The Blockheads didn’t end up playing on Relax, although they did do sessions) and I have found myself drawn to Video Killed The Radio Star, especially the 2004 Princes Trust concert version.
Have you heard the Blank & Jones “reconstruction” of Power Of Love that came out about 10 years ago…..
I had never heard this before, and it’s wonderful – thank you for sharing it!
The whole album is really good – they got the masters from ZTT. It’s mainly FGTH but with a couple of Art Of Noise (Moments in Love is superb) and Propoganda thrown in.
Message me if you need “help” with a copy (I don’t know if it’s still available)
The breakaway Christmas hit this year in Sweden comes from the (temporary) boyband parody collective Björnzone. They first appeared as an interval act for Melodifestivalen (our “Song for Europe”) as a one-off, but suddenly released this Christmas song, which manages to be a parody of Christmas songs (and boybands) while still kind of being a great Christmas song – or at least one that sticks in your mind like gum! It’s no surprise that it was written by a few of the guys that are a part of the Cheiron/Denniz Pop/Max Martin team(s) that’s been writing all of the hits for all of the boy bands and girl singers since the 90s…
It’s simply called “A Christmas Song” (of course) and is all over Swedish radio. Working in a supermarket, I get to hear it at least five times a day – but I’m still not sick of it yet.
The “band” consists of a bunch of Swedish singers and actors, and the video is quite amusing as well, IMO. Enjoy!
Thanks for posting that. Older readers may remember Not the Nine o’clock News, and it makes me think of the kind of thing they did. Their parodies were often better than the songs they were lampooning. I also think I recognise a Eurovision winner in there.
I still sing “How many shopping trolleys gan you get, in an inner city ga-ha-rden” alarmingly often… 🙂
Bittersweet festive fun from the hardest working man in show business.
I have a James Brown Christmas album. It’s hilarious, he just does his usual funky stuff and yells out Santa now and again. Not great.
A goth Christmas song, you say? Absolutely. This is Siouxsie and her band of merry Banshees, including one Robert Smith.
I like the rawness of this, with Siouxsie adding extra voices in the mix – harmoninsing but not harmonising, if you know what I mean. It could only be her and God bless her for that. Merry Christmas.
Walking along my local high street (Sainsbury’s to Waterstones and back) this afternoon, I passed a gang of Hare Krishnas chanting away as they headed towards the multistorey car park, then a gang of charity collectors with a loud battery PA on a sack truck (playing an atrocious pop/r&b version of “White Christmas”, walking down, the original version of “Jingle Bell Rock” on the way back), and also passed a little quartet from the local homeless charity singing “This Little Light Of Mine” in perfect 4-part harmony.
I passed a young woman walking along with her little girl, just after walking by the gospel quartet. The little girl was happily singing “This Little Light Of Mine”.
Christmas hasn’t begun round mine til this gets an airing.
Marvellous!
Here are a couple of travelling Xmas songs.
Firstly Nick Lowe
Then there is this from Amanda Anne Platt & The Honeycutters
The worst Christmas song ever turned into the best
I like the original very much. There are much worse festive frivolities out there.
The original is made even worse by being written and sung by a Beatle. Tom takes a steaming pile of poo aand transforms it into a thing of rare beauty.
Absolutely not the worst. It’s completely naff, but I love it
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/19kMbWTd4P/
There’s a rash of this sort of thing all over YouTube suddenly…I think I detect the hand of AI. See also My Front Bottom, Let’s Go Dogging, Knob Slobbering, that all-time classic When She Farted on My Balls, and other titles unsuitable for a family popular culture blog.
You may be right, but there was the album from the 50’s by Faye Richmonde (which was a little before AI)….
Indeed there was…
The Pop connoisseurs may appreciate this from Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s daft, catchy and brilliant
Ain’t no chimneys in the projects.
We AWers have all heard The Waitresses, so here’s the Spice Girls:
Kylie and Iggy Pop:
Save Ferris give it a Jewish twist:
Love the Kylie version. Seen/heard to best effect on the screening of the Kylie Christmas concert at the RAH in 2015, which is now one of my core festive viewings traditions. Pure joy.
Yeah. I prefer the live Can’t Get Blue Monday Out Of My Head to the studio version, too.
Jill Sobule wishes us a Merry Christmas From The Valley
One for the kids (I – ahem – co-wrote this…)
Can never resist this:
Oh, do stop all this nonsense! None so better, never will be
Weird, you say? How about (the much missed) Fonda 500?
My wife has been asking for a dinner gong for a few years now, I forgot about this for a couple of years then remembered last Xmas so bought her the one pictured below. She was very happy when she opened it but we were both never all that happy with the actual sound of it, calling the family in for dinner it was often either unheard or misheard, so this year I decided to up the gong levels.
The first gong, I bought this sound unheard on eBay last year, and despite it’s size and art deco appeal it has been a disappointing gong for a whole 12 months.
The latest gong is probably twice the size of the other one and I spotted it in a second hand shop just before Xmas and loved it’s resonating bonggggg, so was pleased to pick it up for £25. Dinner gong mission accomplished!
hear the gongs in action : https://streamable.com/2yt6qd