10 of the best Christmas songs (that aren’t by Mariah Carey)
Judging by the number of trees and lights going up already, the UK is rounding off the worst year ever by turning Christmas 2020 into a six-week celebration of successful vaccine trials. Sure enough, sales and streams of festive songs are up by 50% compared with the same week last year, with Mariah Carey leading the charge and likely to go Top 40 tomorrow. But to avoid being thoroughly sick of All I Want for Christmas Is You before you have even opened an Advent calendar, consider adding these lesser-known tracks to your playlists.
Luther Vandross – The Mistletoe Jam (Everybody Kiss Somebody)
Vandross powerfully emanates the warmth and earnestness of Christmas – he is the perfect accompaniment to
a four-Baileys high with the heating on full. His 1995 album This Is Christmas features a beautiful take on Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas – it vies with the Judy Garland and Frank Sinatra takes for the title of definitive version – plus excellent originals, such as the piano ballad With a Christmas Heart and The Mistletoe Jam, a frisky funk number with the come-on: “Glad you got big legs / ’Cause they’re so good when we’re romancing.”
Britney Spears – My Only Wish (This Year)
What with the sheer volume of classics from the glam rock era and before, it is tough to make a new Christmas song break through, but this effort from Spears has doggedly made its way into the canon. In it, she pleads with Santa for a boyfriend; that heartbreaking minor chord change in the chorus will surely convince him to deliver a hunk down the chimney.
Kelly Clarkson – Underneath the Tree
The X Factor enforced a brutal secularisation in the Christmas charts, its almost unshakeable grip on the Christmas No 1 between 2005 and 2015 preventing wonderfully festive songs such as this from getting the attention they deserved. Thankfully, Clarkson’s 2013 song is becoming a perennial. It bounces like a five-year-old on their parents bed at 5am on Christmas morning – if you attempt to play the sleigh bells along with it, you will need a protein shake to help your triceps recover.
John Fahey – Christ’s Saints of
God Fantasy
If you are the sort of person who likes Christmas, but not in a 2,000-calories- before-11am- then- a- fight- aboutimmigration-policy-with-your-stepdad sort of way, this beautiful 10-minute suite of solo guitar ruminations may be the thing for you: as cleanly beautiful as a robin’s footprints on a winter morning.
Kanye West – Christmas in Harlem (feat Teyana Taylor and CyHi the Prynce)
The greatest piece of Christmas rapping sees West loosening up for the holidays, doing his shopping last minute and being an endearingly sleazy Santa getting sloshed on eggnog with his girlfriend. Taylor’s sublime chorus never fails to make the heart twinkle.
Leroy Carr – Christmas in Jail – Ain’t That a Pain?
As you ponder lifehacking Boris Johnson’s Christmas lockdown rules by turning your in-laws’ house into a blood donation centre, you can at least give thanks that you are not the character in this Carr song. The 1929 recording by the bluesman sees him longing for turkey and a Christmas tree in his cell and bail money as a present, but the melodiousness of his lament suggests even he has a glimmer of Christmas sparkle.
Jesu – Christmas (Life Mass)
Christmas, a 2010 doom-shoegaze track by Justin Broadrick under his Jesu guise, becomes sublime in this 2018 live version for a fashion show in a Paris church: a carol of sorts, with 12 minutes of beautifully chiming and shredding guitars instead of choirboys.
Cotton Top Mountain Sanctified Singers – Christ Was Born on Christmas Morn
Recorded in 1929 and led by the vaudeville comedian Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon, this jazz-gospel crossover may sound like it was taped from the far end of an AM radio dial, but its wildly catchy melody burns through the scuffs and scratches.
Courtney Barnett – Boxing Day Blues (Revisited)
A loping, moping tune that is devoid of Christmas cheer, but still has a little spring in its step. The Australian indie star sings of a horribly uneven relationship, in which one person cares too much and the other not at all: “Like a Christmas tree on Boxing Day, thrown away / Why don’t you feel for me any more?” If everywhere you turn there are bubbled couples smooching while you are social distancing, this is one to put on headphones and kick dead leaves to.
Low – Some Hearts (At Christmas Time)
Making the greatest Christmas song of the past 20 years is commendable; making the second-greatest is just showing off. The Duluth, Minnesota, band’s quietly rollicking masterpiece Just Like Christmas has rightly become well known and squares nicely with the jollity of the season. This 2016 followup is very different: a percussion-free ballad with Mimi Parker singing, as if with a consoling hand on yours: “Some hearts will break at Christmas time.” Her melody is as pure, glistening and open as a snowbound prairie and pricks my eyes with tears every time I hear it. Christmas can be tough, and this year it will be newly and especially so for many; let’s heed Parker’s words.
ens to steal the whole movie with her consistently funny, and actually rather tragic, ignored sister act. Near the end, DuVall and Holland put a few steps wrong with some slightly over-egged physical comedy and a final “No, I’m sorry” meet-back-up-cute that doesn’t land with enough of an impact, but they also avoid some obvious cliches, refusing to smooth out some of the film’s established creases, so while the happy ending is happy it’s not one without caveats.
Happiest Season exists within wellworn framework but still feels fresh, a sprightly and substantial comedy that will be an immediate addition to the Christmas movie rotation for many, including myself. We may never know just how many people would have paid to go see a mainstream gay movie such as this but there is something comforting about a wide cross-section of families gathering over the next month to easily watch, and enjoy, it together, a pre-warmed blanket of a movie to remind us that lesbians aren’t just for depressing period dramas and fetishistic thrillers, they’re for Christmas too.
Happiest Season is available on Hulu in the US and to rent digitally in the UK on 25 November and in the UK
quite have faith in the sentiment the lyrics were supposed to be espousing.
21. Freedom Time (1966)
Recorded at the first Wailers session following Marley’s return to Jamaica from his mid-60s sojourn in America, Freedom Time is audibly influenced by the music he heard in the US – there’s a distinct hint of the Impressions’ civil rights anthem People Get Ready about the lyric – and a total delight: piano-led rocksteady with a beautiful descending melody.
20. War (1976)
As stark and potent as late 70s Marley got, War dispenses with standard verse-chorus structure and any semblance of lyrical poetry. The music exists as an austere backdrop for words taken from a Haile Selassie speech: “Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.”
19. One Love/People Get Ready (1977)
Marley recorded several versions of One Love – it began life as a ska track in 1965 – but the version on Exodus, interpolated with People Get Ready, is definitive. Its contemporary role as jolly soundtrack to umpteen Jamaican tourist ads overlooks the fire and brimstone aspect of the lyrics.
18. Small Axe (1973)
Usually taken as a metaphorical song about colonialism, there seems every chance that the defiant Small Axe was, at heart, actually about the Wailers’ perennially volatile relationship with the Jamaican music industry. The re-recording on Burnin’ beats the Lee Perry original – slightly slower, with lovely backing vocals courtesy of Peter
Tosh.
17. Soul Rebel (1970)
Of all the tracks the Wailers cut with Perry in the early 70s, the title track of their December 1970 album feels the most forward-looking. It would be a brilliant song however it was produced, but its bass-heavy sound makes it feel like something from far later in the decade.
16. Top Rankin’ (1979)
His 1979 LP Survival was Marley’s most politically militant statement, its preoccupation with pan-Africanism reflected not just in the lyrics of Top Rankin’ (“They don’t want to see us unite … all they want us to do is keep killing one another”) but its sound: the horns carry more than a hint of Fela Kuti about them.
15. Sun Is Shining (1971)
Marley frequently reworked old material during the 70s, but the version of Sun Is Shining (a song apparently inspired by Eleanor Rigby, of all things) on 1978’s Kaya is dwarfed by the 1971 version produced by Perry: minimal, bassheavy, gloomier-sounding than the lyric suggests, with Tosh’s melodica snaking around Marley’s voice.
14. Jamming (1977)
Jamming is Marley at his most genial and pop-facing, but the music that underpins the charming tune is surprisingly tough. Check out the instrumental and dub versions appended to the deluxe edition of Exodus for proof of what a fantastic rhythm section the Wailers boasted.
13. Them Belly Full Hungry) (1974)
(But We
After the departure of Tosh and Bunny Wailer, Marley came out swinging on 1974’s Natty Dread. Any fears the Wailers might be diminished were dispelled by the simmering tension of Them Belly Full, its invocation to “forget your troubles and dance” tempered by its ominous warning: “A hungry mob is an angry mob.”
12. Duppy Conqueror (1970)
Co-written by Perry, Duppy Conqueror’s Louie Louie-esque groove seems to commemorate producer Joe Higgs’s unique method of curing the Wailers’ stage fright by making them rehearse in graveyards. “If you’re not afraid fe sing fe duppy [ghosts],” explained Wailer, “the audience can’t frighten you.” The high, shivering vocal interjections add a suitably uncanny ambience.
11. Lively Up Yourself (1974)
Natty Dread’s opening track is a reggae equivalent of Rock and Roll Is Here to Stay: a chest-out espousal of the genre’s virtues that seems aimed, as much as at anyone, at the white audience Island Records was trying to bring to Marley. The incredible audience-assisted version on 1975’s Live! feels like a mutual explosion of glee.
10. Exodus (1977)
A lot of Exodus tended to the mellow, but the strength of its title track comes from a relentless urgency. Exodus is built around a riff that stays the same for the best part of eight minutes. Its final 60 seconds are the nearest the 70s Wailers albums got to dub.
9. Slave Driver (1973)
Slave Driver and Tosh’s superb 400 Years are the toughest moments on Catch a Fire. “Every time I hear a crack of a whip, my blood runs cold,” sings Marley, capturing the song’s emotional temperature. For all its rage, it is icy too – with a sense of certainty that “the table is turned” and its targets are in hell.
8. Turn Your Lights Down Low (1977)
Leaving aside the intriguing question of how Marley got his wife, Rita, to sing backing vocals on a song about his mistress Cindy Breakspeare, Turn Your Lights Down Low is an exquisite love song. Hovering somewhere between reggae and a soul ballad, its melody is gorgeous, while the slide guitar and – yes – the backing vocals are beautifully done.
7. I Shot the Sheriff (1973)
Eric Clapton’s hit cover drew greater attention to Marley as a songwriter, but its slick funk isn’t a patch on the Wailers’ cop-baiting original, lacking its falsetto vocals, reedy organ line and the terrific breakdown with its echoing vocal – “If I am guilty I must pay!” – and funk-inspired clavinet.
6. Is This Love? (1978)
Kaya is by some distance the least well-regarded of Marley’s 70s albums, a lightweight filling sandwiched between hit-packed Exodus and the fiery Survival, but its big hit is irresistible, evidence of one of Marley’s less exalted skills, as a masterful pop craftsman piling one fantastic melodic hook on top of the other.
5. Trenchtown Rock (1971)
Blessed with one of the all-time great opening lines – “One good thing about music, when it hits you feel no pain” – the original Perry-produced Trenchtown Rock was one of 24 singles the Wailers released in 1971. Its elated shout-out to the Kingston neighbourhood that gave birth to reggae stayed in Marley’s live set for the rest of his career.
4. Redemption Song (1980)
Rita has suggested Marley knew he was dying when he recorded Uprising; certainly, its closing track provided his musical epitaph. There’s a full band version of Redemption Song, but it has none of the acoustic take’s raw impact. Closer to folk than reggae, alternately brooding and exultant, it remains moving despite its subsequent omnipresence.
3. Stir It Up (1973)
Gorgeous evidence both of the debt the Wailers owed American soul music and that Blackwell’s controversial decision to overdub Catch a Fire’s tracks using UK and US session musicians yielded dividends. John Bundrick’s synth is a perfect addition to the stunning, airy harmonies, augmenting the song’s heavy-lidded, blissful, post-coital mood.
2. Get Up Stand Up (1973)
As with John Lennon, canonisation has done Marley few favours. Rather than the benign patron saint of potheads and beach bars represented by the trite but wildly popular Three Little Birds, it’s better to remember him as the co-author of Get Up Stand Up, a militant, righteously pissed off call to arms that has lost none of its urgency.
1. No Woman No Cry (1975)
People who saw the Wailers’ 1975 shows at the Lyceum in London talk about them in awed terms: the subsequent live album suggests they’re right. The studio version of No Woman No Cry is fine, but the live take – longer, slower, sadder, the drum machine replaced by Carlton Barrett’s astonishing playing – elevates the song. It’s a raw recording by modern standards (a bum note of feedback rings out at 1min 47sec), but from the moment the audience take up the chorus’s refrain before the band do, it feels luminous and utterly magical, the intensity of its emotional twists and turns – from melancholy nostalgia to optimism – potentiated.