How Hard Can It Be_ - Jeremy Clarkson [112]
Sunday 29 November 2009
Sing about the fat man again and I’ll shoot Tiny Tim
In the olden days, before the Christmas No 1 slot was invariably bagged by the winner of Simon Cowell’s annual karaoke competition, there was always a mad scramble among record companies and artistes to bang a big one in the yuletide goal. This brings me directly to Bob Dylan’s first seasonal album – Christmas in the Heart. Well, it had to be in the heart, didn’t it, because it wasn’t very likely to happen in his synagogue.
I suppose I ought to mention before we begin that Dylan is not my favourite recording artist. Or my second-favourite. In fact, he is my 2,507th favourite recording artist, just after Pinky and Perky. Some say he is the heart of modern music. But I don’t think he’s even the stomach lining. He’s just an annoying wart on the gall bladder of rock’n’roll. Certainly, I’d never tire of flushing everything he’s written or recorded down the lavatory. Even when he’s doing a happy song, he always manages to sound so bloody miserable, like a widower trying to be cheerful at his wife’s funeral. And when he’s being down in the dumps, which is usually, I can’t understand why he would want to inflict his bad mood on everyone else. If I want to feel sad, I’ll poison my donkeys. It’d be better than listening to Bob droning on.
But that’s enough about Bob, because while listening to the chief miserablist’s awful collection of Christmas songs, one of which seems to suggest that one of Santa’s reindeers is called Clinton, I began to wonder what had been the worst Christmas song of all time.
Bob, we must remember, is by no means the first big-name star to take the yuletide shilling and bash something out for the world’s Xmas stockings. Who, for instance, can forget Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Santa Claus Is Coming to Town’ or Madonna’s ‘Santa Baby’ or John Denver’s ‘Please, Daddy (Don’t Get Drunk This Christmas)’. Quite something from a man who had two drink-driving arrests to his name.
But the winner of the Surely You Don’t Need the Money award must be Ringo Starr for his 1999 collection of Christmas songs, one of which, I seem to recall, contained the lyric: ‘It’s been around since you know when.’ Er, didn’t ‘the year dot’ rhyme? The worst? Well, obviously, you have to consider Boney M’s syrupy ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ and ‘When a Child Is Born’ by Johnny Mathis. But for me, it will always be Bing’s dreadful ‘White Christmas’.
I accept of course that we need a constant supply of new Christmas records because the old ones become turgid and dull. ‘Silent Night’, for instance, is a monstrously dreary hit from yesteryear, and if I hear ‘Away in a Manger’, I’m filled with a sometimes uncontrollable need to kill myself. I will also accept that some of the more recent offerings have been very fine. Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’ is nearly boisterous enough to get me dancing and is, with hindsight, just good enough to have kept Wizzard’s ‘I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday’ off the top spot in 1973. I also admit to a fondness for Greg Lake’s ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’, although I know that owning up to that is like owning up to a fondness for child molestation. And I still like to hear Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home for Christmas’. Then we have the Pogues and Kirsty MacColl, whose ‘Fairytale of New York’ I ought to hate as heartily as I hated Bryan Adams’s stupid ‘Reggae Christmas’. But I don’t.
Mostly, though, Christmas songs are dreadful for a very good reason. The story on which they are all based only really works if you have the mental age of a four-year-old. It is possible to write songs about love, breaking up, getting back together and – in country music, anyway – breaking up again. Just after your dog dies. And your pick-up truck breaks down. You can write songs about a bohemian rhapsody and the dark side of the moon, but you cannot really write a song about what most people think is a bit of a fairy tale. Not if you want to emerge from the release with any dignity.
The notion