12 Days Before Christms Poems

Lloyds Bank Turd

This solidified species
of 8th century faeces
measures the digestion
of York's early Christians.

It's a less luxurious rule
than a current Christmas stool.

12 Days Before Christmas Poems

Whilst teaching, I produced an annual Christmas Stocking Fillers, started in 1992, of poetry and prose for friends and colleagues. Most of these were light and fluffy, especially in the early days; some satirical and increasingly angry, certainly further down the years as government messing with education grew, and a regular feature was a poetry pastiche based on the Education Secretary of the day.

I propose over the next 12 days before Christmas to print a selection of these here, starting with a twee trio from the first publication.

I

Three wise women
would have driven
in a car
to that far star

II

The presence
of presents

is the litmus
of Christmas

III

To be guided by a bright star today
is probably all right
if you're sure that what leads you on your way
isn't a satellite

The Cubical - It Ain't Human

Not Much Changed In Their Cubicle

I’m not going to be much different, but in referencing the growling vocal of Dan Wilson, I'll cite the lineage of Van Vliet [though some difference in avoiding the generic ‘Beefheart’] and Waits as necessarily the first touchstone, and it’s an appropriate shorthand. There’s obviously Howlin’ Wolf – though I think another reviewer has pilfered there too – and my single independent if still obvious invocation is the occasional warble of Roger Chapman. Ninth track Paper Walls is a brief metamorphosis as Nick Cave and is actually my favourite.

That’s the vocal largely out of the way, and in many respects this is the distinctive feature of band The Cubical, if you’ll excuse the paradox of this statement. The Liverpool group grind out their garage blues in predictable but rousing simplicity, and Wilson’s vocal grit, precursor baggage dragged over the long line of stones, is always to the fore, apart from track Worry where it is more barroom folk smoothed out by a shandy instead of gutrot. And it is live in a smouldering bar bathed in booze where this band is most likely best supped, the echoes and derivations drooling down your face as if afresh.

Dave Cloud & The Gospel of Power - Practice in the Milky Way

At The Alter Of Cloud's Gutter Church

Beefheart meets Drury meets in the gutter and speaks gutter French and gutter lyrics to girls with gutter thoughts – not the girls’, not the Spotty Bird’s – and even Guy de Maupassant is dragged down into the act or to The Nudist Camp where Cloud’s slow growl intones girl, when I first met you I was scared to go without my shirt and pants but eventually, at ease, feels the breeze tickling through my knees. Strange.

Listening to twelfth track Surfer Joe and its spoken narrative with echo I was reminded of the raw rock of 70s biker-group Circuit Rider, and right on cue, next track School of Hard Knoxsville opens with the idle then roar of a Harley. Spooky. It’s not a particularly interesting track but for that surprise link.

It’s an uneven collection and at twenty tracks, too many, but the punk and raw rock of the whole makes it rough and ready as a listen. Song titles like Sky High On My New Bimbo, Bring On The Nubiles, Eat Me Raw and Spanky Spank paint the lyrical preoccupations with a big and dirty brush. Salacious. It’s dubious stuff, but that’s the appeal, and Spanky Spank for example is humorously hypnotic, but it won't keep you in this state that long.

Top Fifty - Juicy Lucy

Juicy Lucy - Lie Back And Enjoy It

Juicy Lucy's eponymous debut album has perhaps the critical acclaim from those who champion the band, featuring as it did the top 20 hit and great Bo Diddley cover Who Do You Love. It's a great blues-rock album, but it is their sophomore release Lie Back And Enjoy It that introduced the band to me and thus is my favourite. Before moving on to that one I can't resist posting the inner cover of the band's first album featuring the wonderful Zelda Plum covered in fruit,

Lie Back and Enjoy It has more occasional but not constant great swamp blues, like second track Willie Dixon's Built For Comfort with gravel vocals by Paul Williams, ex Zoot Money; guitar by Micky Moody; slide guitar by Glenn Ross Campbell, and that screaming saxophone I so liked at the time played here by the brilliant Chris Mercer. It's the chugging bluesbeat that propels this funky song. Third track Pretty Woman is more of a country rock number and is perhaps the reason many prefer the first album's predominately blues selection; and fourth, closing side one of the vinyl, is a light but breezy, slide-driven and band-penned Whiskey In My Jar. Side two opens with a gutsier return to a rock and blues sound, the Davis/Bramlett Hello L.A. Bye Bye Birmingham [and reading the writing credits from the album sleeve is quite a task as it opens out into six album-sized squares, the inner spread a picture of the band in performance with album details, and the outer using each of the six individual squares to present a member of the band - see below]. Seventh track That Woman's Got Something is another band-penned number and is an acoustic and authentic sounding blues with Paul William's vocal growl carrying the song. Eighth is my favourite - and here shouteth the purists in their dismay - a dirty cover of Zappa's Willie The Pimp, Williams' vocal sleazy and slithering. There's some great playing on this with Campbell's rampant slide and Rod Coombes' pulsating drums, including solo with Moody echoing on guitar. Playing this song loudly over and over when I got the album, along with and similarly Built For Comfort, they tend to dominate my recall of the album and represent what is best in it. Overall it's not the most consistently strong or musically memorable of my other selections in this category, but being reminded of the Vertigo cohort, to which JL's first two releases belonged, it still commanded a place for the amount of playtime it got in my early collection and listening leanings.

There's a 'Meat Alert' for the next posting which is chronologically but not physically before this one....

Meat Alert

Juicy Lucy

The title for this post is out of deference to any vegetarian readers and is written ahead of a Top Fifty selection of the band Juicy Lucy. I just wanted to share that if you type Juicy Lucy into Google images what you get predominantly is the burger version rather than the band! Still, American cuisine at its fattening finest.

Surprise Songs

Rebecca Ferguson - Heaven

Here's one for the music snobs to shove up their tight prejudices: an ex X-Factor participant, coming second to the anonymous Matt Cardle last year, but having a classy and classic soulful voice. I wasn't actually surprised that all of the songs on this album are fine ones having read a range of positive reviews from people whose opinion I trust. Because I'm listening to Shoulder To Shoulder as I write this that's the one I'll commend. This is a natural voice - none of that affected contemporary female vocal vernacular that makes it sound like a crap Bronx inflection with gurgling babyvowels.

Top Fifty - Manfred Mann Chapter III

Manfred Mann Chapter III - Same [1969]

I could quite easily get lost in the Vertigo label's psychedelic swirl and spin out a large number of its acts for my Top Fifty. But one that definitely earns its place there rather than from some dizzily spun projection is Manfred Mann Chapter III and the band's eponymous album released in 1969.

Formed by Mann and long-time collaborator Mike Hugg, this is a wormhole hyperdrive away from the popworld of Manfred Mann's previous music, and it transported me up and beyond within its cosmic, jazz-infused launch at my tender age of 15. I'd been listening to Archie Shepp, Ornette Colman, Charles Lloyd and other 'modern' jazz at the time, and it's the saxophone solos that appealed first in listening to this album. Mann's instrumental Konekuf is a big band number that starts with a slow rising melody akin to Strauss' Thus Spoke Zarathustra but it breaks into a sax and brass cacophonous free-for-all that I thought then - and still do - was brilliant in its wild and angry squeals and screaming. Saxophonist Bernie Living was a core member of the band, but additional sax players were Clive Stevens, Carl Griffiths and Dave Coxhill, so I'm not sure which of those first three [Coxhill playing baritone] is responsible for the solo on this amazing track.

Opener Travelling Lady, which began life as a Hugg popsong in the mid sixties, displays the quieter and more melodic aspects of the album, but this too breaks into a freeform jazz saxophone display. Snakeskin Garter, as far as I can recall, was also used in an advertisement for some men's cologne. This song, as with most of the others, has Hugg on whispery-gruff vocals and this provides a rather sombre, though for me totally apt tone to all of the tracks.

I got this album when I was in the fifth year of my secondary modern school on a large sprawling council estate. I've written before about my positive experience of attending this school, and also of having a track from this album, Mister Your're A Better Man Than I [composed initially for the Yardbirds in 62/63], played in our house assembly, done so by the rather formal but nonetheless niceguy Housemaster who then sermonised on its lyrics which were to do with human inequality and therefore 'meaningful' for an assembly. I was proud of introducing that song to my more popster peers.

Another school experience also involved this album. Although a secondary modern, the school still harboured pretentions based on grammar and public schools so it had a house system: six different house names accommodated within three separate but replica round buildings, each single building split in half. Another aspect of the architectural and structural aping of such a traditional system was that all students in the fifth year had their own separate common room within each of the six houses. I belonged to a small group of incipient hippies getting into underground music and we used to bring our albums into our common room and play them on the record player there. This had the effect of driving most of the others away, especially when listening to an album like Manfred Mann Chapter III [or a Black Sabbath or similar] where we sat in our corner being introspective and cool and earnest and headbanging.

There was a volume two of this band released in 1970, and other live and demo additions, but the band could not be sustained because of its size and the wilder jazz of its musical ethos, and so Manfred Mann Chapter III disbanded and became the Earth Band in 1971.

Whenever I fancy a self-inflicted musical mindmess I play Konekuf very loud. To consolidate that mental tribulation you could play it just before or after Do Wah Diddy Diddy and experience what happened to the Manfred Mann musical timewarp continuum!

Surprise Songs

Majic Ship - Down By The River/For What It's Worth from Majic Ship [1970]

I'm going to enjoy this category. A Neil Young/Buffalo Springfield cover that works well and off an album of largely sound psyche-rock from the former garage band The Primitives. I've only just listened to the album and am of course a sucker for any good p-rock from this time, and there is a raw energy and production that appeals as well. Having just written about Neil Young it had an added attraction.

Surprise Songs

Captain Beefheart - Sun Zoom Spark from Hoboism

A new category for quick posts. Just listening to this down and dirty blues, great grating vocals and harmonica to die for. As in your face as it gets, until the next track Key To The Highway, the growl crawling right into your ear.....

Top Fifty - Affinity

Affinity - Affinity

I've been listening to the Time Machine, A Vertigo Retrospective compilation of artists from this superb label with a great prog, jazz-fusion, folk and rock roster, for example, Colosseum, Juicy Lucy, Clear Blue Sky, Manfred Mann, Black Sabbath, Cressida, Affinity, Bob Downes, May Blitz, Nucleus, Gentle Giant, Jade Warrior, Platto, Tudor Lodge, Warhorse, Uriah Heep, Gravy Train and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band.

As ever I was musically prompted, and again to consider an album for my Top Fifty, this time Affinity's single eponymous album of 1970. It features the outstanding vocals of Linda Hoyle and the soulful pounding organ of Lynton Naiff. Whilst receiving positive critical reviews, Affinity doesn't appear to have been that widely popular a band and album at the time, certainly in comparison with other Vertigo acts, and this may be because of the number of covers on the album and the fact that the group only released the one disc, splitting up in January 1971. There has been a more recent resurgence in interest with new compilations of earlier material as band Baskervilles, instrumental numbers, live performances and alternative versions.

As with so many of my choices for this category, the music matters, but it is also about the time I was listening and the influence it had then and the memories that remain and are triggered when listening now. There's a storming version of All Along The Watchtower, influenced by Hendrix rather than Dylan, and the organ playing is a powerhouse structure upon which Mike Jopp lays some classic wowwow guitar, in many ways formulaic of the jazzrock sound of the time, and especially the English leanings of bands like If, Ten Wheel Drive and similar. I love it. Other key tracks are the similarly loud and driving I Am And So Are You, Mr Joy and the brilliant witches' recipe lyrics and cauldron-boiled organ and guitar of Three Sisters. There is a sweet version too of John Sebastian's Cocoanut Grove [spelling on album].

Linda Hoyle went on to record an excellent, but again single album Pieces of Me. Naiff went on to play with Toe Fat, but I'm not sure about the others. The original Affinity album is worth quite a bit of money and I treasure mine.

The Madness of Being Calm

Institutionalised

Being institutionalised carries the connotation of having been committed to a psychiatric hospital, but I want to explore its more general implications - though in doing so I think I might be arguing that the connotation does apply, but as a nuance.

I have recently become engaged in an email correspondence with friends and ex-colleagues from the institution where I used to work, having been retired [voluntary redundancy] for about 18 months. The correspondence included me as a former colleague, but essentially an outsider: a sounding board and/or likely protagonist from afar. I was included by a friend and to the probable dismay of one other, and maybe more, having been copied in to a range of people who work there.

The institution is my previous school, an 11-18 comprehensive. This school like all of the other clones now in this country has for some time promoted its specialist status, this one as a Maths, Science and ICT college, and has recently also obtained the requisite, and therefore redundant Academy appellation. My prejudices must already be clear: I despise these shallow namings, and detest the political motivations behind them. It is a sham to imply difference – and the questionable imperative of difference – as well as a political ruse to divide and rule. This is a much bigger debate than the one I want to primarily address here, but there is a pertinent link with the issue at hand.

That issue is the request from the institution for an email ‘corporate’ signature by all of the teachers working at this school. Whilst I have obviously become engaged in the ensuing debate, the central point I want to make is how the difference between being an actual part of that institution and then separate from it, like me [but accepting the nature of my continued connection], has a significant impact on the emotive resonance of that engagement.

Whilst most issues that I find ludicrous – like this one – will resonate in my emotional, intellectual and political sensibilities, I was nonetheless struck by how calm and reasoned I felt with this issue. Had I still been there and some senior manager and/or minion of that ‘leader’ made this request of me, I would have gone ape-shit [and the antithesis in the language I use is critical]. This is what I want to explore – being institutionalised in this sense.

I was involved in the issue when my good friend included me in the email exchange of the argument and stance he was taking against the individual telling him he wasn’t allowed the flowery and purple signature he had chosen: it did not fit the ‘corporate’ identity the school was trying to establish. Something more uniform and plain was being requested. Sharing my free-spirit and liberal views, my friend was not accepting this, and the exchange to this effect was becoming a little heated. And this was being shared across a group of people – me now included – rather than as a private disagreement between two opposing individuals.

My intervention was to try and articulate the feelings behind my friend’s objection, feelings with which I strongly empathised but which I realised I wouldn’t have taken the time to expand upon if still there! If I had been, I would simply have ignored the requests, become incensed and agitated, and persisted with whatever colourful signature I had chosen for myself – quite likely printing this out in large letters and posting around the site. Now perhaps this is simply a realisation of and reflection upon the mad man I was, but I believe it is more an understanding of how being institutionalised aggravates and exacerbates those differences of opinion within a complex organisation – as most schools are – and where there will necessarily be differences of opinion, especially between teachers, managers and non-teaching staff. And this is like all other complex institutions, but it is worth stressing how the inevitable differences of opinion in schools have been corrupted by the increasing reliance on and reference to business models.

Fair enough, this isn’t particularly apocalyptic, but I have come to realise how being outside the institution has allowed me to calm down, and has probably saved me from serious illness, or worse, and prevented me from realising my homicidal tendencies! I am still animated by those political and other extraneous, idiotic observations on and interventions in education, but not being institutionalised by it allows a seemingly healthier distance from which to observe and then comment more calmly. I hope the length of this response isn’t some merely apparent calm and rational manifestation of the same madness I think I have avoided!

I need to return to the pertinent context which prompted all of this. I won’t print the correspondence of others which, although it would be unnamed, should still remain private, but I’ll include snippets of my observations to engage in the argument itself. My initial and private response to my friend included this mildly [for me] emotive counter-argument,

I trust you will retain this absolutely resolute and righteous stance, but not let it get to you. The idea of a ‘corporate’ signature is utterly despicable, and, unfortunately, so predictable. To even use/promote the idea of a corporate signature is painfully pretentious. Of course, I’ve never, never had any doubts that I left at the right time before such nonsense drove me completely bonkers, but this would have lit a conflagration under my sense of always rejecting the pitiful.

My general response included all addressees in that first email from the friend and I’m hoping - because it’s my hypothesis – that it is more reasoned and calm than my already tamer personal response, but also whatever reaction would have exploded if I was directly affected by all of this. This response does reflect on observations made by the individual requesting and advocating the ‘corporate’ signatures,

I don’t believe anyone’s hard work was being denigrated, but the idea of a ‘corporate’ signature is risible. If you have a creative disposition, such a singular and bland representation does grate against that independent impulse. If you’re not creative, you won’t understand this.

When teachers – who are by nature creative: they have to be – have everything in their professional lives standardised and judged accordingly, something as apparently minor but precious as a personal signature takes on a significance. It’s one small way within the increasing formatting of their lives [email correspondence being a prime example] that they can retain some semblance of self.

To conclude, the individual promoting the corporate ideal – and he was following a senior manager’s line, though also obviously in personal agreement with it – did respond to this and invoked the private sector as a model for what the institution was trying to achieve. Any mention of the private sector in connection with education, especially being conjured as a compass to guide - is a bloodred rag to this bull, but that is the point. Had I still been in that institution I would have railed against this with an anger dangerous to all, me in particular. I simply responded by wishing him a Merry Christmas. The phenomenon of this may not be easy to spot in this lengthy exploration, but I know what a personal journey away from the utter madness of being institutionalised this has been.

Demonic

A friend has just sent me this link http://www.boredpanda.com/worst-album-covers-ever/ with the query of how many I had - cheeky - and I think my favourite has to be this one:

I actually only have one vinyl copy of an album in this list: Prince's LOVESEXY, a title more naff than the actual cover.

Top Fifty - Neil Young

Neil Young with Crazy Horse - Everbody Knows This Is Nowhere

I have neglected my Top Fifty for a while and therefore am returning now with a gem and the jeweller. I have selected another 'obvious' choice in as much as who wouldn't/couldn't have this in their favourites at some reasonably high ranking?

This album was my initial introduction to Neil, and I didn't in fact hear his eponymously titled first album until much, much later. I also discovered this big bang release whilst staying with a friend in his Putney flatlet in London - a small home behind the toys, sweets, cigs and newspaper shop he ran at the time [his parents', but him in charge, precariously]. I discovered loads of music in that place, along with much else, and when I look back it was an amazing, impressionable and exciting time - I was 16 years old and entering an occasional world where everyone else was in their early twenties and much more experienced than me. What a journey.

The album was designed to appeal to someone like me, and so many others. It opens with Cinnamon Girl and those simple power chords and bass setting the pace, then the beautiful harmonies co-producing that perfect symmetry of heavy rock with folk vocals [noting Stephen Stills' apparent long-standing and bitter  criticism of Young's involvement in CSN&Y because he wanted to play folk music in a rock band]. Next track Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere introduces the Country element a la Gram Parsons and The Byrds, an inclination to twang that resonated in my American bones.

Favourite has to be third track Round and Round [It Won't Be Long] - everything about the roundness of its title, lyric and slow loop of a song structure hypnotising as you listen. Then there is the beautiful poetic tone of the lyrics

Round and round and round we spin,
To weave a wall to hem us in,
It won't be long, it won't be long
How slow and slow and slow it goes,
To mend the tear that always shows.
It won't be long, it won't be long.

and the assonantal words lull and calm and comfort the teenage heart!

Side one closer Down By The River oozes its cool, the bass-line and funky chord core laying down a smooth strut and stroll for Young's signature fuzzed-out guitar to dance and shriek upon throughout; and then again the gorgeous harmonies. All praise to band Crazy Horse for its central contribution.

Side two opens with the other countrified number The Losing End [When You're On] and I wonder if this alienated any listeners? Never this one. Sixth track Running Dry [Requiem For The Rockets] is a wonderful folk lament with its melodramatic violin strain [Bobby Notkoff from The Rockets and Electric Flag] and the echoed guitar.

The album ends on another Young classic Cowgirl In The Sand, all sublime vocals and guitar jam igniting the rockharmony universe with its emerging and decades' forming planetary system of memorable albums and the still-rockin' great, great artist that is Neil Young.

Unknown

Reading Steinbeck in November’s late and

surprising sun, a single rose opening to crimson

on the bush from where the others were cut

to bloom indoors; and from the fecund touch of

his narrative also grows this palpable unknown -

I won’t have it a god’s - but nature’s unnatural threat

years after the grandeur and doom of his

writing about certain uncertainty in its poise.

Now how to strike a balance, convince you

my telling and feelings are as real, the true

thrall of the tale as much in that bud here in this

garden where I sit reading and drinking coffee,

domestic and eased and fortunate, but still to sense

and worry as well how something is growing awry.

Hippies' Apostrophe Stinker

The lamentable missuse of the apostrophe is not, as contemporary pedants would claim, a newish problem - not that I consider it pedantic to use this essential punctuation mark correctly.

Admittedly, far worse than its cross-gender missapplication at the Weeley Festival, Clacton-on-Sea, August, 1971, were the facilities themselves. I believe the female provisions were relatively superior, with buckets provided, but the male plumbing consisted of a deep trench, scaffolding and occasional boards - this construction element the nuance provided for those needing a poo. I didn't walk that lavatorial plank, as far as I recall.

I trust my readers can spot the three errors.

Tracer - Spaces In Between

Amen

Oh sweet Lord of rock'n'roll, He who maketh the grunge and stoner and the heavyth sounds for His new bands to plunder and for here to come asunder out of the farbeyond, and to have giveneth one brother Brown Your lineage of thunder in voice and blessed lightning in fingers - such richness bestowed on one; never too much beneficence from Thee - and to ordain this terrestrial triumvirate as Trio, hail Lord for such continuance and to bringeth them here to me so I too heareth from that eternal echo of those who cameth before.

Circuit Rider - Circuit Rider

What Goes Round Comes Around

This is a cool, psychedelic/folk/spaced-out recording from a bunch of unknowns, early 70s [*], and the opening few tracks are mainly acoustic guitar, walking bass and jazz drumming, with later tracks including electric fuzzed-out and wah-wahed guitar riffs. The vocal is a gruff amalgam of Morrison, Van Vliet and Jagger - I kid you not - and most tracks sound like home recordings/demos, certainly maintaining a raw and improvisational feel.

Second track How Long, similar to the opener, is a slow acoustic number with the three core instruments, but the vocal dominates in its essentially spoken narrative running above the looping melody, and other voices join the singer with random how longs and a gradual general groaning mimesis. Truly far out.

Third track Forever Angels Proud is the only real clue to the band's origins/background: clearly a bunch of freaked-out bikers, and the song is as hot as the chilli dogs, baked banana and beef taco mama crawling over me invoked in its lyrics. Howling humans and hollering hogs [and Hogs] take over in a barnyard and bike race/rocket launch cacophony at the end. Even more far out.

Fourth Laugh introduces some squealing electric guitar over the superb bass, but the song fades out suddenly as the guys simply decide to stop. Sixth Limousine Ride  reintroduces the electric guitar with some superb psychedelic playing and use of echo, and sixth Billy Bad Billy, an apparent tribute to Billy Bonney [don't call me 'kid'/don't call me nothin' at all], sustains the badboy bikers celebrations as well as transport listeners even further out wherever. Eighth Chinese is a Morrisonesque shouted and demented narrative over guitar and bass. Ninth Red Dog is remarkably conventional as a slow blues, and the most Beefheart-sounding in that amalgam already mentioned. A brilliant noise with more howling.

Closer Old Charlie returns to the acoustic playing of the album's start but is a relatively rough ending to an otherwise rousingly raw whole. How I would love to have known this in the 70s because I can imagine the buzzing impact its musical psychedelia and irreverence would have had - though recently when listening on earphones in my middle-aged, middle-class walk to Sainsburys, it infused the bourbon I was after with fresh circuitry for the later if differing trip.

[*] There's some engaging if esoteric online debate about whether this was recorded in 1971 but not released until 1980 as a limited private pressing, or indeed recorded and released in 1980. The mythologising roars to life like a Harley when some suggest the vocal is actually Jim Morrison who never died! Too far out.

1, 2, 3, 4 and 5

After yesterday's pleasing capture of numbers 4 and 5, I went back today and got the first three, again all in mint condition, first editions. If you like books you'll understand.

Good vinyl haul today as well. And some fine bread, especially the sourdough - my new obsession, apparently.

I'll list the vinyl as this is meant to be essentially a music blog rather than a diary:

• Lucky Town - Bruce Springsteen
• Human Touch - Bruce Springsteen - when these came out together, I bought cassette tapes, not the vinyl, so pleased to get these to fill out the collection. And this is when I saw Springsteen as he toured these albums.
• big hits [high tide and green grass] - The Rolling Stones, original DECCA collection
• Easy - Ralph McTell - with Danny Thompson
• Back on the Streets - Gary Moore
• A Tramp Shining - Richard Harris - has Macarthur Park, and only £1 - OK, that's all it should be..
• Stephen Stills Live - Stephen Stills
• Siamese Friends - Ian Matthews
• Willie Nelson Sings Kristofferson - Willie Nelson
• Brain Salad Surgery - Emerson, Lake and Palmer - excellent condition gatefold sleve album: all these last 5 at £1 each

Josh T Pearson - Rough Trade Christmas Bonus

Christmas Cracker

I’ve always been a sucker for Christmas songs - from carols, to classic 50s/60s crooner crafting, to pop hits, to the glut of annual artists/bands who join the festive treadmill with their latest commercial interpretations. I love it, to the disdain of my family.

I have my principles and disciplines though. I won’t listen until December, and usually a few weeks in. However, this year I have adjusted that tradition – though adhered to its key principle – as today is the 1^st December and I could not wait any longer to listen to Josh T Pearson’s Rough Trade Christmas Bonus release, out since 21^st November. This is an extra recording Pearson did as a thank you to Rough Trade for announcing his Last of the Country Gentlemen as their album of the year.

It’s superb. Simple arrangements with Pearson’s signature acoustic playing and intense, empathising vocal. Indeed, the live to tape recording retains studio chat and the overall effect is to sustain a sense of genuine feeling for the music and words. Pearson’s fundamental Christian beliefs add a sense of attachment to this traditional material other artists’ commercial endeavours on the same lack, not that the precepts themselves engage me – it is Pearson’s commitment that does, as on O Holy Night.

There are five songs: Silent Night, Angels We Have Heard on High, the resonant solo vocal of Away in a Manger, O Holy Night, and the sweet O Little Town of Bethlehem.