How did my Christmas Cigarettes fail to set the pop charts alight?
Saturday December 15, 2018
THE same old Christmas songs get trotted out every year, don’t they? But they remind us of our own Christmases past, what we were doing at a given time – and perhaps what we were singing.
Slade’s yuletide roof-raiser Merry Xmas Everybody was initially a hit in 1973, but every year since has captured the atmosphere of a good, old-fashioned Christmas knees-up.
In the early 1990s, I told my girlfriend Laura that I loved the song so much that it would be great to hear it repeatedly.
On our next date, she presented me with an early Christmas gift. She had only recorded it, one play after the other, on an old TDK cassette tape so that I could listen to Noddy Holder’s festive anthem on a loop!
I used to sing with an amateur concert party in the early 1980s and for a while sang the bass part in a short-lived barbershop quartet that performed as part of a Christmas concert for Bradwell senior citizens at Wolstanton Workingmen’s Club in 1984.
Amateur performances can at times seem very… erm, amateur, if you are not properly rehearsed.
At one of our group’s Christmas concerts at the workingmen’s club, our impresario had arranged for the whole ensemble to render When a Child is Born, the Johnny Mathis hit.
It went dreadfully wrong. I became more than vaguely aware that one half of our concert party was singing the second verse while the other was singing the third.
“I had the notion – probably triggered by blind panic – that I should come to the rescue by jumping into the middle of this cacophony and doing my own allotted ‘bit’, which was the recitation in the middle of the song that starts, “And all of this happens because the world is waiting, waiting for one child…”
Not only was it an appalling spur-of-the-moment decision, but I necessarily came in very late, and was way behind the music.
I rattled through my recitation at a rare old pace, and becoming acutely aware of the comedy element of our enormous mess-up, began to hurry my lines, sounding a bit like Groucho Marx at super-speed.
Our impresario sat just below the stage, his head covered in his hands – to no one’s surprise.
However, between 1986 and 1989 I had a good crack at what I had always wanted to do, performing in a pubs-and-clubs duo called Two For The Road, playing a lot of rock ‘n’ roll and country music.
I wrote some original material for the duo including parodies or general packs of daft, and one such number was a little ditty called Christmas Cigarettes. Cliff Richard wasn’t the only one who wanted to be top of the hit parade at Christmastime.
The jaunty melody was perhaps subconsciously influenced by Frosty the Snowman and Brenda Lee’s Rocking Around The Christmas Tree, but the asinine lyrics definitely bore the Merv stamp.
They told of a man’s yearning for no other Christmas presents but fags and his wish that Santa would oblige.
The lyrics in the song’s middle eight ran: “I’m always disappointed whenever Santa’s been/ they call the man St Nicholas, it should be St Nicotine.”
We performed this during one Yuletide concert in 1989, along with standards such as Jingle Bells, and were able to put audiences in the mood for Christmas.
We actually recorded Christmas Cigarettes – with my vocals, two guitars and a bass – on what would now be regarded as fairly primitive recording equipment, and I’ve been threatening to upload it on to Youtube for years, in the hope of being an internet sensation.
Having once earned part of a living from singing, I’m content just to dabble now, but there is something about Christmas and music that makes me want to perform again.
As a one-time Father Christmas at a local shop in the 1990s, I was pretty unique because, for a while, I ran Santa’s Karaoke, inviting kiddies to pick their favourite Christmas songs from a list of backing tracks and to perform over my microphone.
I’m delighted to have played my part in nurturing young talent in the Potteries!
Mervyn will present a Mervyn’s Mondays talk entitled Songs and Stories of the Potteries at the Victoria Lounge (formerly Reardon’s) in Adventure Place, Hanley, on Monday, at 11 am. Admission is £2.