This seems an appropriate final choice in a year which looks like it might see London’s first white Christmas in (my) living memory. Happy Christmas!
This seems an appropriate final choice in a year which looks like it might see London’s first white Christmas in (my) living memory. Happy Christmas!
This is the only Christmas song released during my record-buying lifetime which sounds like an instant Christmas classic; as though you must have heard it before, probably performed by Brenda Lee or the Rockettes. But no: it’s just a properly good Christmas song from Mariah Carey.
(Actually it’s not the only one – Christmas Time (Don’t Let The Bells End), which we had last year, is an utterly authentic glam rock Christmas hit.)
Hurray! This is just lovely. I do like Johnny Mathis’s weird voice.
There doesn’t seem to be an official video available for this song, but I like this one because it has a bunch of old photos of Queen, which serve to remind us that however odd-looking the surviving members may be now, they were much odder-looking in their youth.
I fully support the sentiment expressed in this song.
This is a slight cheat, because we had it last year. I haven’t run out of ideas, it’s just that this song is so good and makes me so happy that I couldn’t bear to leave it out. To begin with I thought I’d use a different version, at least, but none of them is nearly as good as this. So here’s Andy Williams with the gorgeous Sleigh Ride. Enjoy.
The video for this song is a bit weird and sad; I don’t think I’d seen it before (or at least, I hadn’t been paying attention). It is one of the funnest ones to sing along to, though, despite being about war. Altogether now: dum-a-dum-a-dum dum, dum-a-dum-a-dum, dum-a-dum dum dum-a-dum dum-a-dum-a-dum…
I was going to use an older version of this song, but actually I really like the Destiny’s Child version (it is a hundred times better than their horrid reworking of The Twelve Days of Christmas), and the video is very cute.
(I’m out of the country for a few days after today, and I’m going to try scheduling the next four posts in advance, so if they appear at odd times or not at all, that’s why.)
A small piece of shameless self-promotion: if you haven’t already, do take a look at A long succession of thin evenings, the latest addition to my ever-expanding publishing empire. It’s a place for reviews of live music, theatre and comedy in London, and it’s an experiment in collaborative blogging. If you’d like to submit a review for publication there, let me know.
I love, love, love this gorgeous video. There are many great things about it, but the best is that all four members of Boney M dance their way through the song, and even though the women’s capes are so voluminous that all you can really see is a bit of bobbing, you can tell they’re giving it their all, under those swathes of fur. Good on you, women members of Boney M!
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