Last Minute Present Dash

Christmas Eve, as so many who so evidently believe that they are the first to assert this radical and fresh observation are only too keen to remind you, is – courtesy of the unreplicable thrill of anticipation – inevitably more exciting than Christmas Day itself. This wasn’t always entirely the case, though, and in the days before round-the-clock on-demand shopping and streaming and special ‘Christmas Jumpers On!’ editions of Morning Live with phone-ins that seem to go on for fifty seven billion hours, Christmas Eve would always reach a point somewhere around mid-afternoon where it fell into exactly the same sort of tedium-overwhelmed lull as a Sunday afternoon. Everywhere was closing or closed, you couldn’t have your presents or even any of the good food until tomorrow, and all four television channels were saving all of their highlights until the big day itself. In all honesty, you may as well have been reluctantly sitting through Seal Morning and trying not to think about school the next day. Thankfully, there was always a good chance that if you turned on the radio, you might at least hear a smattering of vaguely festive discs new and indeed old in between the aviator-shaded DJs pretending to laugh at jokes out of crackers that they hadn’t actually pulled on air, and in a seasonally benevolent bid to remind you of the real reason we celebrate Christmas – primarily so that Christmas Eve never gets that tedious again – I’m taking you all back to the eighties with a collection of lesser heard would-be Christmas hits and some thoughts on long-lost must-have presents, the b-side of Do They Know It’s Christmas?, the origins of the Christmas Day EastEnders double bill, the long-faded glamour of Ferrero and the ubiquity of the Quality Street and Woolworths adverts, and absolutely no glad tidings whatsoever being afforded towards Jive Bastard Bunny…

Roger Limb And The BBC Radiophonic Workshop- The Box Of Delights (Opening Titles)

The synthed-up interpolation of Victor Hely-Hutchinson’s The Carol Symphony that introduced the BBC’s much-loved 1984 adaptation of John Masefield’s epic tale of frightfully well-spoken Kay Harker – well, apart from when he doesn’t have a tosser to his kick – and his bid to convince the local constabulary that a ne’er-do-well posing as a priest is trying to get his hands on a mysterious ancient magic box with the assistance of a human-sized rat with a fixation on ‘green’ cheese and that interminably recounting how to make a ‘posset’ may not in fact be a productive use of police time after all. Incidentally, if you’re someone who much-loves The Box Of Delights, you can find my episode-by-episode look back at the serial with its original context and original audience very much in mind here.

Shakin’ Stevens – Merry Christmas Everyone

Originally slated for release in 1984 but held back a year to make way for Band Aid – and you can find much more about the story behind that decision here – Shaky’s chart-topping ode snow falling all around him would top the Christmas charts the following year and was widely hailed as the rock’n’roll festive classic that never was, apart from the hundreds that there actually were in the late fifties, most of which he had actually already covered himself anyway. Also worth noting, as it seems to have been widely forgotten everywhere else, is that the snazzily-overcoated video prominently featured a much-promoted at the time cameo from a Saturday Superstore competition winner, who doubtless had to endure misplaced seething peer resentment well into the New Year.

Neil – My White Bicycle (Xmas Ripoff Mix)

Neil Weedon Watkins Pye’s slightly lyrically toned-down reworking of Tomorrow’s 1967 backwards-at-the-same-time-as-forwards minor hit protest song became even more minor a hit when it was issued as the inevitable follow-up to Hole In My Shoe, slipping so far into obscurity that this bit of 12″ Extended Version silliness bemoaning the commercialisation of Christmas until a brand-new two-wheeler gets delivered by Santa has never even shown up on any of the reissues of the far more enjoyable than you’d think Neil’s Heavy Concept Album. Fascists! Incidentally, this wasn’t The Young Ones’ only brush with the festive season – and by no stretch of the imagination the more controversial one either – but you can find more about that here.

Jason Donovan – When You Come Back To Me

Originally the surefire guaranteed bookies-averted shoo-in for Christmas Number One in 1989 until Jason was convinced to lend his vocal talents to Band Aid II – and since perpetual wisher of a Merry Christmas Bob Geldof has been moaning about how this version doesn’t ‘count’ because it was all done on computer and had people who were actually bloody selling actual sodding records in 1989 instead of whatever nonsense he’s on about now we can presumably accordingly pretend that it did reach the top slot after all – this jarringly sprightly lament for a wintry lost love whilst dodging smiling shoppers with armfuls of presents and sporting a coat that looks like it cost the wrong side of five hundred quid in the video is arguably the most unfairly overlooked Christmas hit of the entire eighties. Only a few short months later, Jason Donovan would ‘go’ ‘psychedelic’… but there’s more about that here.

XTC – Thanks For Christmas

Hot on the heels of Love On A Farmboy’s Wages, Andy, Colin and Dave close in on the festive top ten with one of only a handful of actual musically credible Christmas singles that were actually genuinely good songs too released during the entirety of the eighties, which in a rightful world would be as revered and as widely played as Fairytale Of New York but – predictably – they elected to release it credited to ‘The Three Wise Men’ in one of those eye-rollingly inevitable ‘jokes’ that were neither amusing nor intelligible or obvious to anyone bar XTC themselves, with the result that nobody noticed it and it would subsequently only resurface on the leftovers and flexidiscs collection Rag And Bone Buffet. The b-side Countdown To Christmas Partytime, in case you were wondering, is essentially just a decidedly unseasonal funk-pop workout that suggests they weren’t actually invited to the ‘party’ in question but were unconvincingly posing as Green Gartside in an attempt to gain entry.

Bill Waddington – Don’t Forget The Old Folks At Christmas

Coronation Street‘s Percy Sugden issues a singalong that you can’t quite actually sing along to plea to look in on your elderly neighbours over the festive season, essentially just making the exact same lyrical point again and again with very slightly different terms of reference. Such was the mania for both charity singles and the freshly schedually promoted Coronation Street in 1986 that it, well, entirely failed to chart and probably even to raise very much revenue on behalf of the mysteriously unspecific ‘charity’ flagged up on the single’s sleeve. Still, at least it’s light-hearted and has a nice jaunty melody, which is more than you can say for a certain other Christmas-themed record by the cast of Coronation Street… but there’s more about that – if you dare – here.

Bad News – Cashing In On Christmas

Vim Fuego, Colin Grigson, Den Dennis and Spider Webb – or, if you prefer, Adrian Edmondson, Rik Mayall, Nigel Planer and Peter Richardson – never quite seemed to be able to decide how far their Spinal Tap-predating The Comic Strip Presents…-hogging spoof New Wave Of British Heavy Metal outfit Bad News should straddle the line between comedy joke band and actual band who were a bit of a comedy joke, and the surviving live recordings of their appearances at proper rock festivals make for interesting listening to say the least. You cannot help but suspect that the “Hey hey, Bad News!” – “FUCK OFF, BAD NEWS!” refrain might well have been delivered in somewhat less than the spirit in which it was intended. Correspondingly their actual singles and albums are full of songs that are slightly too realistic a representation of the work of a second division lower end of top forty-bothering metal outfit to actually bear repeat listening, with the notable exception of this brass-festooned celebration of the cynical commercial joys of the festive season with lots of peace and love and joy and jingle bells on it, which should have been the big Christmas hit they demanded in the lyrics but wasn’t. Then again, neither was Christmas With The Devil by Spinal Tap. Did Hale And Pace’s ‘headbanger’ characters ever get to do a single?

Mel And Kim – Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree

The second ever Comic Relief single as Mel Smith, Kim Wilde and a credited as ‘with lots of help from’ credited Griff Rhys Jones borrow their name from the Showing Out (Get Fresh At The Weekend) hitmakers and their song from the Sweet Nothin’s hitmaker for a bit of fun at the expense of anyone who enjoys office Christmas parties and… well, the no-one who enjoys pumpkin pie. Presented here in its full extended-with-improvised in-studio-badinage 12″ version, it’s worth pointing out that the similarly extended b-side in which Mel tries to lead a hopeless choir through an unsatisfactory rendition of Deck The Bloomin’ Halls is every bit as funny, in the same way that The Manifesto, Stick It Out (Aerobic Mix) and Glasses (TV Edit) were not.

Spitting Image – Santa Claus Is On The Dole

Possibly at least moderately misunderstanding the reason why so many actual holiday hit-hungry punters bought The Chicken Song, Luck and Flaw’s latex lampoonists go straight for the hard satire on their more entertaining yet less successful follow-up with a pun-heavy Thatcher and Kinnock-ridiculing chronicle of what might happen if Father Christmas was handed his UB40 due to an unreversible paperwork error, which once again boasted a top drawer b-side in the Ian Hislop-instigated The First Atheist Tabernacle Choir. Incidentally this full-length version was taken from the exact same 12″ that I got for Christmas in 1986, and you can find out more about what else I wanted – and whether or not I got any of it – here.

Val Doonican, Michala Petri and St. Philips Choir – On The Way To Bethlehem

The genial rocking chair-fixated crooner joins forces with an award-winning Young Recorderist Of The Year and the worryingly overmanned fourth wheel to the already hotly contested Aled Jones/Paul Miles-Kingston/Peter Auty mid-eighties celebrity chorister craze for an in-studio rendition of what is apparently more properly and unimaginatively titled Shepherd’s Pipe Carol, taken from one of the very last of Val’s once-traditional stocking-hanging late-ish night Christmas Eve BBC1 variety shows, where you could be tempted towards thinking that we may have lost something since those days until it is immediately followed by special guest Howard Keel, at the height of his Dynasty-reignited fame, taking until approximately 29th December to make it onto the stage.

New Kids On The Block – Merry Merry Christmas

Danny, Donnie, Jon, Jordan and L’il Joe issue a unilateral global declaration of peace and love and harmony – and snowflakes apparently falling ‘without a care’ – from their 1989 carol-and-rap festive album of the same name, issued about three minutes before they took up near-permanent residence of the upper reaches of the UK top forty, and indeed their own brief ‘psychedelic’ phase which again you can find more about here. People stop and stare, a Christmas tree is there, a star on top which nothing can compare, apparently.

Max Headroom – Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re A Lovely Guy)

If you lived in America and liked a particular brand of arch niche dystopian sci-fi and indeed unsuccessfully rebooted cola drinks, then Max Headroom’s moment of high popularity was yet to come. Over here, however, his annus mir-mir-mirtazapine was most definitely 1986, when he had enjoyed a top ten hit in cahoots with The Art Of Noise, starred in an actually genuinely good best-selling computer game, and landed a high profile Christmas special of his Channel 4 chat show, in which he patronised Bob Geldof and performed this funny and tuneful and suitably downright odd yuletide celebration with the assistance of – who else – St. Philips Choir. Meanwhile if you lived in America and liked a particular brand of people in rubber masks breaking into your television signal and shouting unintelligibly, well… there’s a bit more about that with top Headroom conspiracist Grace Dent here and in the context of the Doctor Who episode it interrupted here. Also you can hear me talking about why I loved this single and The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident in Looks Unfamiliar here. Anyway, Merry Christmas! Now hand me that box of Ferrero Pocket Coffee…

Buy A Book!

You can find much more on Christmas records old and new – apart from Keeping The Dream Alive by Freiheit which is not one – in Can’t Help Thinking About Me, a collection of columns and features with a personal twist. Can’t Help Thinking About Me is available in paperback here or from the Kindle Store here.

Alternately, if you’re just feeling generous, you can buy me a coffee here. You’re quite welcome to ask Shaky where he got those chunky mugs in the video from.

Further Listening

You can also listen to Ben Baker on the original version of Now – The Christmas Album here, Stephen O’Brien on The Box Of Delights here, Tim Worthington on Merry Christmas Santa Claus (You’re A Lovely Guy) here and Grace Dent on The Max Headroom Broadcast Signal Intrusion Incident here.