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.
That memorable Christmas – the one with the Star Wars figurines, Chocolate Orange gluttony, and the distorted voice of George Michael – was an admittedly big season. Alongside Wham! were two other big players aiming for Christmas number one. The obvious competition was Frankie Goes to Hollywood, who had already hit the top spot with their first two singles. ‘The Power of Love’, their third, with its nativity-themed video, was their big bid for a festive chart topper. However, by early December, it was usurped as the bookies’ favourite by something even bigger: ‘Do They Know it’s Christmas?’ by the charity supergroup Band Aid. What would happen in the ensuing weeks? It was quite the chart battle, Holly Johnson versus George Michael versus (amongst others on the Band Aid single) Boy George. Actually, written like that it looks like the campest chart battle ever.
If you gave me Marty McFly’s time-travelling DeLorean, I know exactly where I’d head: Sunday 25th November, 1984 Studio 1 of Sarm Studios in London’s Notting Hill. Formerly owned by Island Records supremo Chris Blackwell, and later by über-producer Trevor Horn, the building on the corner of Lancaster Road and Basing Street was even more of a hive of activity than usual that day. Outside, paparazzi and camera crews jostled for position. Inside, Bob Geldof took a deep breath. It was only 9 in the morning, but he and co-writer Midge Ure had already been in the studio for hours, preparing. Now their guests were arriving. Geldof had been building up to this moment since watching a report on famine in Ethiopia on the BBC’s 6 O’Clock News. Favours had been called in; egos had been smoothed. Geldof needed everyone’s cooperation for just a few hours and then, fingers crossed, a track could be mastered, pressed and released by the end of the week. Before it was even recorded, ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ was already being touted as a sure-fire number one. All Geldof had to do was control some of the biggest pop stars of the decade.
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