Festive Jukebox

So did you download Jer McElderry’s ‘Winner’s Song’, or did you Rage Against the Machine? Either way, you’ve given Sony a Christmas bonus, so that’s nice. But you can feel a warm festive glow if you kept Cowell’s soma-coma pop pap off the top spot. Charlie Brooker explains why. I bought neither. Yet I have downloaded a couple of Christmas singles this year - which may surprise those of you familiar with my seasonal ambivalence and nagging suspicion that Dawkins is a bit soft on religion. OK, one of them was free.

The truth is there are a number of seasonal songs I like. If I was lucky enough to spend Christmas on a desert island, these are the eight discs I would take with me. Enjoy.

8. Geoff Love and His Orchestra - Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

Ah, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be. While nothing may say Christmas more to you than nu-metal anarcho-rock, it is Geoff Love who brings my ghosts of Christmas past chain-rattling into the room. As soon as I hear this, I’m transported to the 1970s, the suburban Midlands, and a house decked out like an explosion in Santa’s grotto. This album has been out of print for decades - but a couple of tracks have found new life recently on YouTube. Also available: Winter Wonderland.

7. Karen Carpenter - Merry Christmas Darling

I seem to recall playing the Carpenters’ Christmas album in the office when I worked as a researcher in the Psychology department at Staffordshire University in 1994. Happy days. I shared an group of offices called the ‘Mezzanine Suite’ with various researchers, lecturers and PhD students. We styled ourselves after the Bloomsbury Group. We put up Christmas decorations in October. We built a shrine to Kurt Cobain with Poundshop candles and a poster from Smash Hits. And we discovered in subsequent jobs that this level of arsing about wasn’t always appreciated. .

6. Kate Bush - December Will Be Magic Again

Just because: who wouldn’t want Kate Bush writhing in her pyjamas on a Snowtime Special for Christmas?

5. Vince Guaraldi - Christmas Time is Here

Vince Guaraldi was really my introduction to jazz - as far back as those Charlie Brown cartoons he scored. There’s also a version of this by a trumpeting Terence Blanchard on The Christmas Jazz Album which, in this house, has now replaced Geoff Love as our seasonal soundtrack of choice.

4. The Pogues and Kirsty MacColl - Fairytale of New York

This regularly tops many lists of favourite Christmas songs. I loved Kirsty MacColl, and she is sadly missed. I even tolerate her use of the word ‘faggott’ in this, which is a vile, offensive word in most contexts. BBC Radio 1  made a strange decision to censor it by dubbing it out a couple of years ago (I don’t know why - there’s a radio edit with a toned down lyric). What has been far more offensive at Radio 1’s is Chris Moyles’s popularization of the word ‘gay’ to mean ‘rubbish’ or ‘lame’, and the BBC’s defence of it. Is it pure coincidence that there is a resurgent culture of homophobia among young people, to the point where some of them are killing people on the streets?

3. Level 42 - All I Want for Christmas is You

This year, one of the new people I met on Twitter turned out to live almost next door to me - just around the lake. Lisa is a Level 42 fan, which is how I heard about this. She is not, though, quite as mad-stalking - and lucky - as super-fan Heather, for whom Mark King made this video. They also gave away the single for free on their website. I was never much of a Level 42 fan - but I like this.

2. John Lennon and Yoko Ono - Happy Christmas (War is Over)

It’s easy to judge a man who sings ‘Imagine no possessions‘ while blatantly wearing a fur coat and living in Kenwood House in the video - especially in these credit crunching times. But John and Yoko’s anti-war sentiment is worth remembering at this reflective time of year, now that we seem to be in a perpetual state of war to rival Orwell’s Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. It also lives on in the continued work of Yoko Ono and can be found on most social networking sites, which she actively uses to spread their pacifist ideas.

1. Tim Minchin - White Wine in the Sun

This was the Christmas number one I’d hoped for. I compiled this list before I heard the overexposed David Tennant’s Desert Island Discs this week (you can go off people, you know). He also chose this, not only as one of his eight discs, but as his one favourite disc. I am a fan of Tim Minchin’s work and world view. His lyric sums up my ambivalence about Christmas:

“I have all of the usual objections to the mis-education of children, who in tax exempt institutions are taught to externalize blame, and to feel ashamed, and to judge things as plain right or wrong. But I quite like the songs.”

I quite like these songs. Hope you do too, and had a fun, festive break. See you in the New Year!