Let’s do this together
A bitter fight has broken out at home over the best Christmas song.
My vote for the undisputed Christmas classic goes to Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime closely followed (at a safe distance) by Chris Rea’s Driving Home for Christmas. But The Dark Lord says they’re dull and plinky plonky and argues passionately that the best ever festive track is Wham!’s
Last Christmas.
“Really?” I questioned her, “that’s a strange pop-tastic and clean-cut choice for someone who prefers her musical heroes to have genital mutilations and tattooed eyeballs.”
“For the last time, Mother, they’re body modifications not mutilations,” she rolls her eyes at me. Not for first or even second time that day.
Normally different generations hate each other’s music, but the kids now seem to love 80s fashion and music, so I have to relive my difficult teenage years all over again.
As if on cue, Jesse starts playing Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas, and I’m immediately transported back to those heady days in 1984 when Wham! was kept off the top spot by the big-haired all-star cast of Band Aid, back when these things mattered.
“I remember waiting patiently that Sunday afternoon listening to the Top 40 countdown to find out who was No1 for Christmas so I could tape it on my old Bush tape recorder,” I regaled her with a memory from my childhood.
“You taped the songs?” she asked, and I Googled the old machines to show her the creaky old ones of my youth.
“Yes I’d wait until DJ Tony Blackburn stopped talking nonsense over the beginning of the song, and then quickly press record. Then I’d play it back later, stopping and starting so I could write down all the lyrics and learn them off by heart.”
After taking it in, she looked at me pityingly and said: “It all sounds so… Victorian.”
Email siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk or write to me at Community Corner, PO Box 791, Winchester SO23 3RP.
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