![]() ![]() Slade clear half a million pounds a year from ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, according to a recent estimate. The real big-hitters, though, are coining it. Rea probably makes a tidy sum from that song every year. If she had been a lion she would have bitten off my head with a single gulp. ‘Do you like this one, then?’ I asked her. Queueing in a supermarket a couple of days before Christmas, behind someone buying worrying quantities of cheese strings, I noticed that the start of the Rea song on the in-store PA made the woman behind the checkout desk grind her teeth. Chris Rea’s ‘Driving Home For Christmas’, greeted with mild revulsion on release in 1988, has become a staple of the yuletide playlist. ![]() I’m not sure even Sir Elton John would pretend that ‘Step Into Christmas’ was one of his more accomplished songs. Out of desperation, radio stations started playing even relatively obscure Christmas songs from the 1970s and 1980s. Pop hardly ever tries to do that any more. The thing about Christmas songs is that they need to appeal to everyone. The cross-generational consensus we had enjoyed in the 1970s and 1980s was finally crumbling, and the young were listening to stuff older listeners could not abide. The end of Top of the Pops in 2006 has also been cited, although both these events were symptoms of a wider change in pop music, rather than their cause. So why no new Christmas hits? One or two critics have pinned the blame on Matthew Bannister, the one-time Radio 1 controller who reoriented the station towards de yoof in the mid-1990s and compelled his older listeners to flee to Radio 2. One can only marvel at such longevity, but this might have something to do with the absence of newer songs coming along to supersede it. As did, curiously, the Pogues and Ms MacColl’s ‘Fairytale of New York’, which made its tenth visit to the Top 20 this December, reaching number 14. It has always sounded like a new version of an old song, harnessing the now incarcerated spirit of Phil Spector, but Carey co-wrote it herself, and this year it sold its millionth copy in the UK. One of the few recent additions to the canon has been Mariah Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’, and that came out in 1994. Prince Harry’s legal defeat will be particularly painfulįor this is a little corner of popular culture that has become completely stuck. ![]()
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