“HE’S JUST SINGING THE LIST.” The peevish reluctance of Merry Christmas Everyone

To be sentimental is to be human – it’s a trait shared by no other animals. So in some ways, I guess it’s not surprising that sentimentality is also enshrined in some areas of law. If a building manages to survive for long enough, it becomes a listed building and has a preservation order slapped upon it. Sometimes that happens even if there’s nothing intrinsically unusual about that building. It could be a crofter’s cottage or a stable. If it’s made it this far, seems to run the logic, it’s earned the right to stay forever.

And do you know what else is a bit like that? Merry Christmas Everyone by Shakin’ Stevens. In the canon of Christmas songs, there’s nothing exceptional about it at all. It’s a strangely joyless, desultory piece of hackwork. It’s like a Christmas song written by Count Olaf in the Lemony Snicket books, pretending to be Santa as part of another ruse to trick the Baudelaire orphans to letting him adopt him, thus stealing their fortune.

In fact, such is Merry Christmas Everyone’s contempt for its audience that it isn’t trying to conceal the process by which it came to exist. The verses, written by Bob Heatlie, are a list of all the things that you might typically expect to find in a Christmas song. Bob hasn’t even bothered to make them rhyme. In the end, he couldn’t even be arsed to write a proper lyric for Shaky. IT’S JUST SOMEONE SINGING A LIST. AND NOT EVEN A GOOD ONE LIKE SUBTERRANEAN HOMESICK BLUES OR HELLO BY THE BELOVED.

And because the song is a list of things from Christmas – most likely scribbled down in haste on the torn-off bit of a fag packet on the way to the studio – Merry Christmas Everyone assumes an oddly instructional quality. It’s a bit like a song commissioned by the Government to teach new arrivals in the UK from countries that don’t celebrate Christmas what they might expect to see happening here from early December onwards. All of its festiveness is attributable to its use of bells, but no amount of bells can distract from its overriding mood – that of its narrator’s peevish reluctance. It’s written with the same energy I bring to the job of filling in a record company “supplier” form in order to raise an invoice so I can get paid for the press bio I wrote three weeks ago. It’s literally a thing I have to do to get money.

We should rescind the preservation order that effectively bestowed upon Merry Christmas Everyone by supermarket/MTV playlist ubiquity, erase it from the canon and make room for something which took a bit more effort. Perhaps Blue Tinsel, Red Tinsel by Darren Hayman (see below), which is a much better list of Christmas stuff and features much better bells and has a much better tune and is much more heartfelt and features the totally brilliant line: “a bike wrapped up that looks like a bike because the shape of a bike is always a bike.”