Читать книгу It’s Christmas!: Whatever Happened to the Christmas Single? - James King - Страница 8

THE ONES I USED TO KNOW

Cosiness: it’s both the friend and the enemy of the Christmas single. Cosiness is partly to blame for the state of Christmas pop music that we’re currently in.

To illustrate my point, let’s try a little experiment: I’m going to share with you my first memory of a Christmas single. Now I’d love to relate this in a scientific and methodical way but I’m pretty sure it’s impossible. You see, as soon as I think about the song in question I go into default ‘cosy mode’. I can’t help it. I know I’m not alone either. ‘Awwww, it’s Christmas!’ we all cry every December. ‘We want it to be old-fashioned! It should be about log fires and colourful sweaters and classic songs!’ But isn’t that the problem? Cosiness like that never moves thing forward.

Anyway, back to the test. For me, for more than thirty years, George Michael singing nonsensically about ‘a face on a lover with a fire on his heart’ has been the sound of Christmas.⁶ And I can still remember perfectly the first time I heard it …

It began as a ‘thud’ in my living room, where the music centre of my childhood lived: the family gramophone, a sprawling Seventies monstrosity that I struggled to excuse even in my infancy. Edged in wood effect and wired up to speakers similarly timbered, it was the focal point of the room – its brown hues contrasting harshly with the sleek metallic lines of the modern TV and video player next to it. ‘HMV’ was printed on the front, complete with the familiar logo of a dog staring eagerly into a giant speaker. ‘That was a great record player in its day,’ I’m now constantly told by my dad. But this is 1984 and I am just a child, embarrassed by its antique appearance. Still, as it’s all we had (and all we would have for several years to come) it is from this beast that all family music of my early years came. And it is from this that I heard that ‘thud’: the distorted sound of a kick drum, the opening riff of ‘Last Christmas’.

It came from a seven-inch single given to my sister as a present, supposedly from me but actually bought by our mum from the local Woolworths. When the song ended, my sister put the needle back to the beginning and the fuzzy booming of the melody began again. In the hands of this stereo, one of the gentlest, most wistful of festive songs almost sounded aggressive. And yet, somehow, the poignancy still came through. I stretched out on the floor, full from the Terry’s Chocolate Orange Auntie Sheila had given me, bathing in the scent of pine needles from the tree, and listened to the lyrics as I played with my new Star Wars figures:

‘Last Christmas, I gave you my heart,

but the very next day, you gave it away …’

And I remember it hitting me: this is my perfect Christmas. I am both entirely aware of the activity around me and yet I’m still innocent enough to see it all through a magical haze. I know that it was my dad who bought me the remote controlled car whose batteries I’m now impatiently charging, yet, at the same time, I’m not entirely ruling out the possibility of Santa Claus really existing. There could be both. Yes, I’m all wrapped up in a special cosy feeling, a warm and fuzzy glow of both naïveté and knowledge. And it’s a feeling soundtracked so perfectly by Wham! Aaaahh …

Point proven, I think. See how easy it is to fall into the trap? Nostalgia (from the Greek nostos ‘return home’ + algos ‘pain’) can be so addictive. I’m reminiscing about Christmases past and wondering for the umpteenth time why ‘things ain’t what they used to be.’ Like I said, we’re all turning into Noddy Holder’s gran. With that warm comfort of childhood just a semiquaver away, I suppose it’s no wonder. Cosiness is a tough thing to turn up your nose at.

Such an obsession with the oldies has left us all pretty muddled though. We are living in the past by endlessly remembering a time when we lived in the present; we are nostalgic for a time when we had nothing to be nostalgic about. That’s a problem. Still, how can we move forward with the combined weight of Noddy, Shane and George around our necks? In his expertly exhaustive book ‘Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past’, Simon Reynolds identifies a perplexing chicken-and-egg dilemma that is worryingly prevalent across the arts: ‘Is nostalgia stopping our culture’s ability to surge forward, or are we nostalgic precisely because our culture has stopped moving forward and so we inevitably look back to more momentous and dynamic times?’⁷

I think Christmas music has got it extra bad. With our inability to let go of tradition, we are annually convincing ourselves of some kind dissatisfaction with the here and now, and this just makes us look back all the more. Sure, this can be quite empowering for a few years, just like re-runs of Jessica’s gold-winning sprint. Reynolds also concedes that: ‘Nostalgia is, after all, one of the great pop emotions’.

Even nostalgia, however, eventually wears thin.