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

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

The Records - Starry Eyes

The Records straddled that magical threshold between The Bay City Rollers and Cheap Trick -- sugary sweet vocal melodies, rocking guitars, skinny ties, modish haircuts and songs about girls, girls and... mostly girls. How do you distinguish late 70s power pop from post-punk or early 80s new wave? The Records' 1979 hit "Starry Eyes" is a good place to start. The song bears characteristics of all three genres. By listening to the following three versions,   you can literally hear the late 70s turning into the 80s. See if you can hear it. "Starry Eyes" - 1978 Demo "Starry Eyes" - 1978 Single "Starry Eyes" - 1979 U.K. album version (produced by Mutt Lange)
Post a Comment
Read more