Well kids and kidettes, it's the most wonderful time of the year - which wouldn't be hard these days, let's face it, getting hit by a car would probably be much more fun than these desperate times. I know you're all clamouring for a glamourous, meaningless end-of-year list to entertain you for five or six seconds before you get bored and leave the site in apathetic disgust...so here you are! I'd like to waste some time presenting to you my top Christmas songs for this - and any other - year.
Some are timeless eternal classics, some are sonic crimes and crass and sick. You be the judge of what is what, it's really not for me to say. Anyway. Too long, didn't read; for the three of you who still have the attention span to have made it this far into the thick of the swing of things, here are, in no special order, hollydaze tunes you will want to be assailing your miles-away, socially-distanced, suicidal, weeping family with this Yuletide on famcam. Enjoy!
HOLIDAYS OF HORROR
MACABRE
In at Number One with a bullet! Well, I suppose it would be if there was any real grading system to this stuff. And it would be bullets plural. Our first demented entry comes to us courtesy of the classic 1989 death metal album Gloom by Macabre, which I bought when it came out, and still like certain tracks from. Including this one, obviously. It's a subtle, sensitive ditty about American spree killer Ronald Gene Simmons, who killed sixteen people, including fourteen members of his family, just before Christmas 1987. Tugs at the old heartstrings, and gets bonus points for the use of We Wish You a Merry Christmas throughout. A real Chrimbo buzzkill. I still send this one to some people I know round this time every year; it's become a tradition of sorts. I don't know of what sort, mind you...perhaps it's best not to think about it, and to just listen to the brilliantly horrible song. Listen to the guitar and drums! Good old Illinois filth!
Jumping back across the Atlantic, now, here's a tune from Macclesfield's genius satirical sleaze-mongers and beer-guzzlers. The subject matter is pretty much what you would expect from them: cracked puns, family mockery, and defiantly deviant fanny-fingering fun. One for your Skyped school nativity play! The poignancy will bring granny to melancholic grandkids-missing tears!
THE TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
GG ALLIN
Ah, now we're cooking with gas! This hilariously diseased effort from Jesus GG Kevin Michael Whatfuckingever Christ Allin takes the 18th century English Christmas carol (Wikipedia is my pretend-knowledgeable friend! Cheers, Wiki! Still not donating!), beats it, throws it to the ground, pisses and shits on it, and leaves it dazed and bruised and abused and confused. Typical GG behaviour, in other words. Dunno where a scumfuck like him is going to find "A virgin so very horny," mind you...
THE DWARVES
DRINKING UP CHRISTMAS
Let's face it, singer-songwriter Paul 'Blag Dahlia' Cafaro is a middle class poser. But he has also written some great songs, including this one. Drinking up Christmas is a reworking of Better be Women from the great 2000 album of theirs, Come Clean. Dahlia takes us into the Bad Santaesque world of a dipso manic Santa staggering and stumbling round a party bitterly verbally abusing the bemused partygoers. "I'm the zero with Yuletide cheero!" A real feelgood tune from a feelbad, dickless Saint Nick. Cheers, ya reindeer-shagging cunt!
SANTA CLAUS IS A BLACK MAN
AKIM AND THE TEDDY VAN PRODUCTION COMPANY
Hmmm...how should I approach this one...kid gloves? Sensitivity? Nah, fuck that! Anybody who knows me knows that isn't for happening. Though, to be honest, this is a really cute, fun song. Maybe I shouldn't be including it here, but Hell, well, fuck it. If people thought Jesus was white, which he wasn't, what with coming from the Middle East and all, I see no reason why Santa can't be black. Unless he is a white time-travelling Dickensian street urchin covered in soot from sliding down chimneys. Sound plausible? Nah, of course not. I love the awww-inducing five-year-old voice of Akim Vann here, daughter of Teddy Vann, the record producer and songwriter. I dunno who the black woman singing is - 45 seconds of research won't answer that stubborn secret, and I'm too lazy to do more - but she has a great voice. This song was a fave of the cult filmmaker (and personal hero of mine) John Waters. Until he got sued for using it without permission on a Christmas compilation he put out. That probably put a crimp in his appreciation of it, I would imagine. Bonus points here for having a pishy band name that took up half the cover. Magic!
THE HIVES AND CYNDI LAUPER IN A CHRISTMAS DUEL
THE HIVES AND CYNDI LAUPER (oddly enough)
A funyun, fairly and squarely tearing down the Phil Spector Wall of Sound to present us with a bratty battle of the nearly-ex oversexed sexes. Two disillusioned partners look to kick the shit out of each other and throw ever-increasingly-painful insults at each to wound with a sabre-rattling ho-ho-holy shit! Who said love was dead? Good will to all men and women indeed!
FAIRYTALE OF NEW YORK
THE POGUES
You didn't really think I was going to do something like this without including this perennial classic, did you? I'm not totally taking the piss like a catheter, only partly so. All the stink and stooshie this one has kicked up from the poetically challenged from the last few years has been appallingly hilarious. Apparently it reminded some gay guy of being bullied in high school, or some such trite shite, with its contextually-correct use of the word "faggot." Well, lots of shit from my own high school days make me cringe. You think I want to hear Wham! songs and remember being a shy, shite 13-year-old at school dances? Doesn't really bother me. You know why? Because I am not FUCKING PATHETIC. Anyway, superb song, classic lyrics, excellent performance from a top-of-his-game Shane MacGowan. Wouldn't have been the same without Kirsty MacColl, mind you. RIP, Kirsty. Your voice will ring annually in our ears forever.
CHRISTMAS IN HEAVEN
MONTY PYTHON ENSEMBLE CUNTS SINGING
This is from the hilarious 1983 Monty Python film Meaning of Life. No, that is not the name of the performing troupe, obviously, but I didn't really know what to call them. Wait a second...the main guy singing is Graham Chapman with those false teeth...isn't it? It was the fake tits that threw me! What's he doing warbling with birds wearing fake tits-oot suits? I suppose I should go back and change the ungainly name I saddled the performing artist with, but I can't really be bothered. You do it, and bill me for the work, save me the trouble. Thanks.
MERRY CHRISTMAS BABY
RUDY RAY MOORE
Anybody who knows me knows that Rudy Ray Moore is one of my all-time artistic heroes. Or maybe that should be heroines, cos he was a closeted gay guy, but that makes absolutely no difference whatsoever to class, charisma, cheek, cheese, and Christmas cheer. I think he's a fucking great singer, and love the Hully Gully Fever album with his 50s R&B songs on it. As I understand it, by virtue of when and where he grew up, he was no fan of white people, so I always feel slightly odd about him. To make up for my melanin deficiency, I will punch myself right in my lukewarm white snowballs right now. That's what the modern middle class media do all the time now, anyway. Let's see...OUCH! HOHOHYABASTIRTYE! That make up for my skin colour, Rudy? I hope so! Laughing here, as ever. But that fucking cocknock knobthrob just won't go away anytime soon...feeling a bit sick...need to get some cold beer from the fridge to nestle against my self-assaulted cocky Caucasian testicles...back in a minute, you ratsoup-eatin' motherfuckers...
SANTA CLAUS IS COMING TO TOWN
THE CRYSTALS
The is a stone cold classic. I mean, most of the 1963 Phil Spector album this comes from, A Christmas Gift For You, is great, and has provided many memory-minting songs that resonate down through the increasingly-secular unspectacular decades. It makes me think of Martin Scorsese films where some gangster guy gets wacked. I mean, I don't know if he ever used this specific song in such a context, but, being him, he's bound to have, hasn't he? I certainly hope so. Those vile yank faux-Italian mafioso types need taught a lesson about how crime doesn't pay, don't they? And wee Marty probably gave it to them at some point. Pretty confident and sure of it. "Listen you Santas, you screwheads..."
NEDS KRU FT. THE WEE MAN
MANKY XMAS KARAOKE
This is probably the most entertaining song ever put out by a Scottish Jew, an ex-medical-student-cum-wannabe-rapper-cum-wannabe-wrestler. Aye, you read that right. I am including this cos this guy is just so fantastically eccentrically weird (making Judaism proud by prominently sporting a Star of David, at the same time as shagging a cooked turkey, and making light of the 'hilarious' subject of housebreaking) that he just makes the list by sheer idiosyncratic default. It's also well done, which is another factor in its inclusion here. "Deck the cunt that you just vollied" is a classic line! As for his later wannabe-comedy-rapper career, wellll...
TWELVE DAYS OF CHRISTMAS
BOB AND DOUG MCKENZIE
Now here is one close to my heart. And booze-full bladder. In the very early 90s, the Canadian comedy film Strange Brew was a cult fave with myself and my friends at the time. We still occasionally quote it to each other, and still love it. It's the story of two sci-fi-loving nerd brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, and it's beyond hilarious. The booze-blootered bickering bastards started off doing short skits on Second City Television, talking to the camera about their pathetic drunken lives, in 1980 - they were basically like original Youtubers. They got huge in their native Canada for a while. This is one from them. Funny quick story - one time, at a record fair in Grangemouth with my pal Scanny, I decided, on impulse, to look for the two albums they had out. I had never done this at a record fair before, never thought to do it. Both albums were there! Tell me that wasn't meant! "You wanna know how to wreck a movie, eh?" Laughing here. Superb character-observation-driven comedy; dig in if you have never seen it. You won't regret it. The version of this song by the McKenzie brothers is much gentler than GG Allin's version too, oddly enough.
BILLY IDOL
I shamefacedly confess I was not aware of this kitsch anti-classic until a couple of years ago. This may be because I left my brief, shameful, Idol-listening phase (not something I like to talk about, let's move on, nothing to see here) sometime in the mid-80s, before his third album. But I did love the Rebel Yell album. I was only 15, I may hopefully be forgiven, and at least I didn't take any fashion tips from the leather-draped bondage-bandaged cunt. Mind you, that would have gotten me killed in Falkirk back then. And now, I would imagine. And hope.
FELIZ NAVIDAD YA BAS!!!!
THE END
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