The hits Yule always love
WHICH record will be number one at Christmas 2017?
This question will be very important for future pub quizzes, family disputes and for our own personal memories.
Each tune provides a snapshot and background melody to the year in question, acting like a time machine to take us right back to our Kerplunk, selection boxes with Spangles in and Morecambe and Wise festive special.
A few years fast forward will have the Christmas number one seeing us staggering around the upstairs gallery of the Oxford/Tiffany’s/Studio/Icon or whatever your particular generation called the place.
No matter; as the strains of the current Yuletide number one drifted across the dance floor, mingling with clouds of ciggie smoke and Hai Karate fumes, you genuinely felt your chances of a snog had magically been boosted by its very
presence. My own personal Christmas number one recollections start in perhaps one of the most iconic years in the history of the Yuletide pop music – 1973.
This is the year in which, with Wizzard’s I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day snapping at their heels, Slade topped the charts with the now secular carol Merry Christmas Everybody.
You just know the festive season has begun when Noddy Holder’s strangled Brummie tones screech “It’s Christmas!” (along with the Coke advert’s “Holidays are comin’” and the imposing of Victorian working hours on shop staff).
This leaves us in a very bizarre cultural position, for while the soundtrack of the season will always be 1973, the images will remain that of Dickens, with Victorian revellers in crinolines and top hats watching urchins skate on iced-over ponds.
My next festive memory, while tastefully skipping past Johnny Mathis and Boney M, has to be Christmas 1979 and Pink Floyd’s
Another Brick In The Wall (Part 2, in case the music anoraks are reaching for their android devices to complain).
As a ‘rebellious’ 15-year-old studying for the final year of my ‘O’ Levels, this song said it all ... “We don’t need no education, we don’t need no thought control”.
Our terrifying but excellent English master Mr Conway (God bless you Sir, wherever you are) pointed out that the lyricist did indeed need a lot more education with the use of such deplorable grammar.
The next year saw the sickly sweet strains of St Winifred’s School choir singing There’s No One Quite Lke
Grandma. This probably wouldn’t happen now as the Ofsted inspectors would have put the school into special measures over safeguarding issues and Grandma would be too busy deciding whether today’s choice would be ‘eating’ or ‘heating’ as she certainly hasn’t got the money to do both at once.
Christmas 1981 saw the Human League at the height of their powers with the electro-pop classic Don’t
You Want Me and all the lads in sixth form fancied the two nonsinging backing singers – Joanne and Susan. We all still flock to the wedding/Christmas party dance floor when it starts ... “I was working as a waitress ...”. Just lush!
My final Eighties memory has obviously got to be Christmas 1984. Never mind the soft focus big-haira-thon of Wham’s Last Christmas video, or Frankie’s Scouse Nativity for The Power of Love – this year culminated with the historic release of the Band Aid single Do They Know It’s Christmas?
Bob Geldof, moved by images of the famine in Ethiopia, rallied the whole, usually selfish and indulgent pop music industry to do unbelievable good.
Not only was it a great year to show how we all cared, it was also a godsend that there was just so much unbelievable British talent about then too.
Just a few of those singing on the record included Sting, Bono, David Bowie (who was originally intended to sing the opening line but ended up on the B-side), George Michael, Boy George, Paul Weller, Paul McCartney, Phil Collins, Paul Young and, of course, Bananarama!
Any attempt (however well intentioned) to re-record the song today would involve such a motley collection of whining, interchangeable boy bands and X-Factor nonentities, that even 2000’s Yuletide smash Bob the Builder would be preferable!
■ Mike is performing at the South Causey Inn Comedy night on Saturday.