Did the bells ring out for Christmas Day in the Pig Pen?
WELL, it’s that time of the year again, and the countdown is on for Christmas, though this year – for very obvious reasons – it’s going to be a little bit different. However, the one thing that won’t change will be the regular airing of Christmas records, and indeed, some radio stations started before we’d reached the end of November.
When I was a kid, I was no different than any other child when it came to Christmas, and I couldn’t wait until December 25. And a big part of the few weeks until the big day for me was hearing those Christmas songs.
And when I say Christmas songs, I don’t mean the hymns or stuff like The Christmas Song or White Christmas; I mean pop songs.
I was a child of the 80s, and so I was blessed with a mix of singles from the previous decade – which is when the Christmas single probably peaked in terms of its popularity – alongside contemporary efforts. And growing up in a musical house meant our little place shook as the festive period approached.
The most ubiquitous Christmas single was – and probably still is – Merry Xmas Everybody by super yobs Slade, which from November 30 can be heard approximately 1,000 times a day and is said to earn the band around half-amillion quid every year. I know some people get sick of hearing it, but let’s be honest, it’s a bit of a banger, and Noddy Holder had pretty impressive sideburns.
A close second in the ubiquity stakes was Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day, and though I’m not at one with the song’s sentiment – Christmas every day would be a bit much, don’t you think? – as with the Slade track, it is a bit of a banger.
But my two favourites from the 1970s came with different sorts of messages.
John Lennon and Yoko Ono put out Happy Xmas (War is Over) in November 1972 – though they’d released it in America 12 months prior – and although the song references Christmas and the coming of the New Year in a big way, it is an anti-vietnam War song, the culmination of two years of peace activism and campaigning against the USA’S warped foray into Asia.
From the late 60s, Lennon had often been quite blunt when it came to his political messaging until the success of Imagine, which had a more universal appeal and led him to conclude, ‘now I understand what you have to do: put your political message across with a little honey’. With ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’, Lennon got his honey pot out again.
The second – and I sometime think that it’s my favourite Christmas song – is also a protest song of sorts, and was released in 1975, Greg Lake’s I Believe In Father Christmas. Lake said he wrote the song in protest at the commercialisation of Christmas, while the song’s lyricist – Peter Sinfield – has said the song is about loss of innocence and childhood beliefs. Whatever, the song is a thing of beauty.
The first great Christmas single of the 1980s was never much in the way of a hit, but has gone on to become much loved, and is a staple of the festive period. Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses was originally released in 1981 but failed to chart. The song was reissued 12 months later, but stalled at number 45, something which has always been a mystery to me. The song was written by Chris Burton as hip-hop was emerging, the song’s title being a pun on ‘rapping’, and a play on Kurtis Blow’s Christmas Rappin. And despite the song being a joyous celebration of the chaos that precedes Christmas, the irony is, it is a time of the year Burton hated (‘everybody I knew in New York was running around like a bunch of fiends. It wasn’t about joy. It was about something to cope with’); it has to be said, the song does have a very New York feel to it, while another point of interest is that many thought that the song’s vocalist was Debbie Harry, when it was Patty Donahue.
1984 was perhaps most notable for the formation of the large-numbered supergroup Band Aid led by Bob Geldof, and who took the
year’s Christmas Number One with Do They Know It’s Christmas?, a single recorded to raise money towards Ethiopian famine relief. But the Christmas song I most enjoyed that year, wasn’t really a Christmas song at all.
Frankie Goes to Hollywood had rampaged through 1984, upsetting Mike Read and the
BBC with their first single Relax, which went on to top the charts and shift two million copies after Read banned it, while their follow-up single, the anti-war Two Tribes, entered the charts at Number One and stayed there for nine weeks, while Relax went back up to number two.
The Power of Love was Frankie’s third single, and was released in November. And like its two predecessors, it topped the charts, hitting Number One early in December. But The Power of Love was the polar opposite of the band’s first two hits, a sweeping baroque-pop ballad
which was in stark contrast to the HI-NRG disco-rock of Relax and Two Tribes.
Although the single was soon toppled, it was still in the top 10 come Christmas, and has always been associated with the festive period, even though it’s not a Christmas song.
In 1993, nearly a decade after the release of The Power of Love, I regularly watched Gary Crowley’s music show The Beat which used to go out in the wee small hours, and during that summer I remember watching live footage of Frankie’s frontman Holly Johnson performing the song from one of the year’s festivals.
Johnson’s performance was incredibly moving; earlier that year he’d revealed he was HIV positive, and his soaring reading of The Power of Love felt like an act of defiance, a statement that he had no intention of going quietly into the night. It’s certainly a sentiment Johnson himself would concur with; when talking about the song, he once said, “I always felt like The Power of Love was the record that would save me in this life. There is a biblical aspect to its spirituality and passion; the fact that love is the only that matters in the end”. Amen.
But my favourite 80s Christmas song is the most popular song that Anglo-irish folk/punk rockers the Pogues ever produced, that memorable duet between Shane Macgowan and the late Kirsty Maccoll, Fairytale of New York. And last year, I was surprised to learn the song may have had its origins in the Pig Pen – aka the Burton Stores – on Hanley’s Parliament Row.
After one of my regular public transport failures, I found myself in the Coachmakers and struck up a conversation with Rob Ledgar, and asked him if he’d heard the Jim Morrison/ Fenton Town Hall story – Morrison is rumoured to have once spent the night in there – to which Rob replied that he hadn’t. And he then asked me if I knew about the Pig Pen and Fairytale of New York. I didn’t, and so I asked the question: “What’s that then?”
And Rob hit me with a zinger: he told me that Fairytale of New York was written in the Pig Pen. This was a new one for me. I knew of the band’s links with the Potteries through their banjo player Jem Finer who was born in the city and studied at Keele University.
Following graduation, he travelled around Europe before settling in London where he met Shane Macgowan, Spider Stacy and James Fearnley and formed the Pogues. Finer became the band’s most prolific songwriter and often wrote jointly with Macgowan, with whom he co-wrote Fairytale of New York.
As with the Jim Morrison tale, I wanted to believe it, but had my doubts. And so, I did as I did with the Morrison story, I did a bit of forensic work. And well, there might just be something in it.
Elvis Costello was the Pogues’ producer in the mid-1980s and he wagered frontman Shane Macgowan that he couldn’t write a Christmas song. Costello and the Pogues began to work on what was to become Fairytale of New York early in 1986, but they eventually parted ways when he and original Pogues bassist Cait O’riordan became an item, with O’riordan quitting the band in October of that year.
This meant their embryonic Christmas song lost its intended female singer. Steve Lillywhite, who made his name working with U2, became the band’s new producer and while working with the band on their new album (If I Should Fall From Grace With God), suggested that Fairytale of New York did not fulfil its potential using O’riordan’s vocals.
While working on the album during the summer of 1987, the band encouraged Lillywhite to take the track home with him and let his wife Kirsty Maccoll put down a guide vocal for the song. The Pogues liked what they heard, and the rest, as they say, is history.
In an interview regarding the song, Costello said that it took the band two years to write, record, and finally release it as a single. I remember the song’s release well, it hit the shops in November 1987, just in time for the Christmas period. The song peaked at number two, kept off the top spot by the Pet Shop Boys’ cover of Always on My Mind.
And so using Costello’s two-year timeline, for the Pig Pen story to have some truth, the
Pogues would need to have been in the Potteries towards the end of 1985. Well, on December 4, 1985, the Pogues played Hanley’s Victoria Hall.
Did the band fancy a late post-gig drink and, knowing Jem Finer hailed from the Potteries, ask him where the best place to get a late one in Hanley was, with Finer suggesting the Pig Pen? And with the pre-christmas booze flowing, did Elvis Costello’s challenge to write a Christmas song get kicked around, leading to an early version of Fairytale of New York to be sketched out?
Is ‘Fairytale of New York’ a product of the Potteries? What are the odds? Eighteen-to-one?