WEEKEND COLUMNISTS I popped into a shop last week to buy food. It had artificial snow on the windows, crackers thrusting from every nook, and a dingy Christmas tree blinking in the corner. The kind of thing guaranteed to bring you down. As I waited to pay, however, I was startled to find myself experiencing a minor surge of warm feelings. I was in the tentative opening phases of a good mood. Was it a funny turn? Too much caffeine? The answer came to me quickly: it was, amazingly, the music playing in the background.
This, too, had a Christmas theme: it was a compilation of songs from the 1950s. I couldn’t identify the voice – not deep enough for Crosby, lacking the velvet of Belafonte, too sober for Dino – but it crooned softly and sincerely. A well-judged orchestral arrangement floated serenely above the vocal, lush and wholesome. It engaged with that part of my brain that wants all Christmases to be like this, swathed in effortless elegance.
There was a time when all listening was easy. The 1950s was the smooth decade: the western world indulging in its new-found affluence but celebrating it in a humble way, mindful of the horrors of the very recent past. Christmas was a time for modest thoughts and gentle expressions of goodwill. The last UK Christmas number one of the previous decade had been “The Harry Lime Theme”, a clever, distinctive melody that nevertheless carried the menace of the film in which it sounded, The Third Man, a grim examination of human toxicity.
But by 1950, the urge to investigate man’s propensity for moral degeneracy had exhausted itself. Bing Crosby teamed up with Gene Autry to deliver the first Christmas number one of the new decade: “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer”. The following years’ chart-toppers turned their backs on ethical complexity of any kind, as American pop culture sidled its snoozy way on to Britain’s radiograms. Its crowning glory was Belafonte’s ethereal “Mary’s Boy Child”, which went down crackingly well with a highball.
The nearest the 1950s came to danger (we are excluding the Suez crisis) was Jimmy Boyd’s “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, which must have caused many an evening of psycho-sexual turmoil among the country’s pre-pubescents. (There was, you may not be amazed to hear, a serious effort to ban it. Innocent times!)
Things hotted up in the 1960s, in all kinds of ways. The Beatles seized four of the five Christmas number ones between 1963 and 1967. They did not refer to Christmas at all, but were full of hand-holding and feeling fine. These are the earliest Christmas singles I remember, and they still give me a joyful rush.
Christmas singles went off the rails in the 1970s. Pop music was not allowed to express innocent joys any longer, and it duly collapsed into parody. “Ernie (The Fastest Milkman in the West)” and “Long Haired Lover from Liverpool” made ghastly musical stars of Benny Hill and Little Jimmy Osmond. Mud’s “Lonely This Christmas” was a vile pastiche of the crooning era. Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” stood out for its barmy ambition and was, perhaps, the last truly satisfying Christmas number one.
Otherwise, a note of hysteria began to make itself heard in the pubs and clubs of the land. Slade’s “Merry Christmas Everybody” was brash and presumptuous (“Everybody’s having fun!”). Roy Wood’s Wizzard supplied the clamorous “I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day” (I don’t believe you). Lennon (“Happy Xmas (War is Over)”) and McCartney (“Mull of Kintyre”) turned to their respective brands of slush.
Pink Floyd ended the decade with the portentous “Another Brick in the Wall”; the 1980s kicked off with “There’s No One Quite Like Grandma” by the St Winifred’s School Choir. The UK was clearly in a cultural crisis, lurching from truculence to sentimentality. “Band Aid” was sui generis. Otherwise, a bad sign: we began to look to the past for inspiration. “Reet Petite”, “Always on My Mind” and, one more time in 1991, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, all made it to the top of subsequent Christmas listings.
There was the vapid hegemony of the Spice Girls to come but, in truth, there was no longer any joy to be found from analysing the national temperament from the song it chose to cherish at Christmas. When Bob the Builder sang “Can We Fix It?” in 2000, it was a marker for the millennium; the answer was an emphatic “no”.
Today even the bookies are bored with calculating odds for this most outdated of cultural barometers. The last four Christmas number ones have come from the winners of The X Factor. It is a shoo-in. There has at least been something of a flight to quality: Alexandra Burke sang Leonard Cohen’s genuinely touching “Hallelujah” to top the charts last year; Susan Boyle has had “Wild Horses” thrust on her, not entirely disastrously, this year.
Then there is the continuing story of Bob Dylan, whose freshly released “Must be Santa”, a speeded-up German barn dance, mounts new heights of infantile surrealism (Bob Dylan, United Palace Theatre, New York). It’s a messed-up world out there. Especially at Christmas.
peter.aspden@ft.com
More columns at www.ft.com/aspden
