“’Tay Christmas till I say so.”
So runs a familiar internet meme of recent years, accompanied by the grinning, rubicund face of the spirit of Christmas past himself – otherwise known as Noddy Holder. Spend a quarter of an hour in any supermarket around this time of year, and you’re sure to hear Slade’s evergreen Christmas hit being played in the background. When you do (and you will), take a moment to reflect on the fact that the song is now fifty-one years old, which is the equivalent, in 1973, of listening to a song from 1922. We were singing carols of more recent vintage than that in our school choir.
So, imagine yourself in a supermarket at Christmas 1973. If a fifty-one year old song came on the tannoy, who might have been singing it? Well, the top selling artist of 1922 was one Fanny Brice, closely followed by Paul Whiteman and Al Jolson. Would any of those songs have been familiar to listeners fifty years later? Surprisingly, yes: the chart includes ‘Toot Toot Tootsie (Goodbye)’, ‘The Sheik of Araby’ and ‘Way Down Yonder in new Orleans’. Conclusion: Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas Everyone’ has joined the pantheon of popular music standards: but we knew that anyway.
What we don’t find in that hundred-and-two-year-old top fifty are any Christmas records. Not that there weren’t any around – a few Christmas hits from 1922 include ‘When the Christmas Chimes are Ringing’ by Lewis James, and Ernest Hare’s novelty waxing ‘Santa Claus Hides in the Phonograph’ (not a song so much as a recitation with a brief rendition of ‘Jingle Bells’). So Noddy and co weren’t exactly breaking new ground.
In recent years, the race for the Christmas number one has become a tedious face-off between talent show winners and downloads, and the bar for quality (never very high) has been brought almost to the ground by some particularly worthless endeavours. Was there someone called manbaby or similar? I neither know nor care.
Back when Slade were current chart-toppers, the idea of a Christmas single still had a certain novelty value. There had been a flurry of entries around the late 50s and early 60s, courtesy of Harry Belafonte (‘Mary’s Boy Child’), Nina and Frederick (‘Little Donkey’) and Adam Faith (‘Lonely Pup in a Christmas Shop’), but since then artists had shown no interest in yuletide waxings. It was all about to change.
Slade’s Christmas single was the icing on the cake of what would prove to be the band’s most successful year – they’d already scored two number ones and a number three hit – but it would be the band’s last release to hit the top spot. When it entered the charts on 15 December 1973 – straight in at number one for the third time that year – I doubt any of us thought it would still be getting regular airplay half a century later. Noddy’s rationale for doing the record was simple – people needed cheering up in a time of economic doom and gloom: strikes, runs on the pound, power cuts, you name it. Did he see it as a potential pension fund? Possibly not, although the thought may well have occurred to fellow Midlander Roy Wood, whose ‘I Wish it Could be Christmas Every Day’ began with the jingling not of sleigh bells but a cash register. Roy knew exactly what he was doing. Wizzard’s Christmas confection stalled at number four, but has been doing very nicely ever since.
Two glam rockers going head-to-head with Christmas pop songs was bound to have repercussions, and they arrived the following year in the shape of Mud, whose dreary Elvis-by-numbers knock-off ‘Lonely This Christmas’ secured them the number one spot in 1974. Hard on their heels came the Wombles’ ‘Wombling Merry Christmas’ and further down the festive charts we find Showaddywaddy’s lumpen effort ‘Hey Mr. Christmas’ and Gilbert O’Sullivan’s pensive (and predictable) ‘Christmas Song’. The lid was off the bottle of Christmas pop and the contents were fairly fizzing up the hit parade…
For me, 1973 was the year of Slade: I even had a poster of the band on my bedroom wall. But I was about to lose most of my interest in contemporary pop on account of something that happened during that festive season: the BBC showed the Beatles’ film A Hard Day’s Night on Boxing Day morning, the first time I’d seen it. I knew the Beatles well enough from back in the 60s, but it was only now that I began to take a more serious interest in the band and their music. By Christmas 1974, glam rock (which was dead in the water anyway) would be kicked into the long grass, and my presents included no fewer than three Beatles LPs.
It wasn’t just me, either: after their incredible success in 1973, Slade began to slip, although they made a creditable number 2 later the following year with ‘Far, Far, Away.’ Leaving the UK to try and crack America (without much success), the band lost sight of their fanbase, many of whom defected to a certain tartan scarf-wearing Glaswegian ensemble, and hits were suddenly harder to come by. The feature film Flame (released in January 1975) didn’t help, with its downbeat portrayal of the seedier side of the music business. The band Flame may have been a fiction, but when they split up at the end of the movie, it might as well have been the real thing – as some fans inevitably perceived. Flame was a daring move – up to then, pop music films had mostly been lightweight nonsense – but what Slade really needed was a cheerful Carry On-style romp rather than a dour, darkly-lit exposé of pop’s crass commercialism.
Luckily, they had secured their financial futures for eternity back at Christmas 1973.
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