Skip to main content

Slade - Merry Christmas Everybody


  

Christmas Day is gone. Still the holiday mood lingers. This is my third and final inclusion of a holiday song on the mixtape.

Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody was their biggest hit, selling over a million copies upon its release in 1973 and scored them a #1 hit in the U.K. You might know Slade from their tunes Mama Weer All Crazee Now and Cum On Feel The Noize. The latter was a hit for the hair metal band, Quiet Riot on 1983's Metal Health (which happened to be the first cassette I ever purchased).

I first heard Merry Christmas Everybody at a gig in San Francisco. My band was sharing a bill with a group name Petrol. The two brothers in the band were from the U.K. and they covered this Slade holiday classic year-round. In fact, they closed every show with this stomping anthem. I thought it was cool that they were playing a Christmas song in late August. In fact, I thought they wrote it. Later, the singer, Graham Shaw, revealed that it was Slade.

Petrol were a late 90s group who never developed a Web presence. To this day, all I can find is a scant entry for one of their albums on Discogs.

If you know Graham or his brother Michael, tell them I said thanks for introducing me to Slade and this fine Christmas anthem!

Comments

Post a Comment

Trending Tracks

R.E.M. - Begin the Begin

Let's start 2018 with a bang. R.E.M. 's Begin the Begin , a musical manifesto for personal activism, is a great place to start this year sonically. This was the lead song from 1986's Life's Rich Pageant and the first time that listeners could really discern Michael Stipe 's lyrics. His eccentric mumble emerged from its abstract cocoon and transformed into something more pronounced, confident and explosive. Along with Stipe' s strengthened howl, the band's music took on a more muscular tone. Bill Berry 's drums rocked harder and Peter Buck cranked up the distortion. The album was the first time that R.E.M. addressed political and environmental issues lyrically ( Fall On Me, Flowers of Guatemala, Cuyahoga ). Begin the Begin doesn't try to plant the seeds for a bloody revolution or take sides politically. Even Stipe recognizes his own inability to articulate solutions: "Answer me a question, i can't itemize I can't think...
Post a Comment
Read more

U.K. - In The Dead of Night

In the late 70s, as punk and post-punk bands spiraled towards their new wave destinies, prog dinosaurs stood paralyzed in the shadows. Bands like the Sex Pistols were meteors, igniting a global firestorm that would trigger prog's extinction. The British music press (Melody Maker, Sounds, NME, etc.), once proponents of prog darlings Genesis, Yes and ELP, now bashed any band releasing songs in odd time signatures and singing about aliens and whales. The punk revolution had turned the U.K. music industry and press on its head within a year (1976-1977). For me, this is one of the most interesting times in pop music. Although prog groups saw their audiences rapidly dwindle (Yes audiences had dropped from 20,000 to 3,000 by 1980's Drama tour), many record labels had built fortunes on the works of prog artists and were willing to foot the bill for some interesting transitional experiments. Yes' Drama , ELPs' Works , Genesis' . ..And Then There Were Three... were p...
Post a Comment
Read more