Christmas Clunkers 2

Hello again! Another seven slices of seasonal hokum for you.

The majority of today's collection of Christmas Clunkers comes from December 2011 - a bumper year in which I originally posted more than a dozen dreadful recordings. However I first featured our first track, one of the all-time bad Christmas records, just last year. Billy’s Christmas Wish comes from country trucking supremo Red Sovine. Christmas wouldn’t be Christmas without a little Red Sovine, would it?  

Billy’s Christmas Wish tells a tale so desperately lurid that I can’t believe his record company had the temerity to release it. It's the story - much loved by Christmas song composers - of a homeless, father-less child who prays to Santa every year but whose sack is perpetually empty and then, when it looks like the little beggar might finally get what he wants he goes and coughs up his last breath. As I've said before, the Red Sovine canon is the best argument I could ever present against country and western music.
 
It was way back in 2009 when I originally posted our next track. Merry Christmas Elvis, by Michelle Cody, was issued in 1978 on the Safari label, owned by song-poem hustler Ramsey Kearney (aka Will Gentry, co-writer  and performer of Blind Man’s Penis), I implore you not to not to choke on your mince pies at the song's saccharine denouement. Little Michelle had made an earlier stab at recording Jack Toombs’ song, probably in 1977 the year of Elvis’s passing, on the obscure Jimbo label.


The next five songs come from Christmas 2011. The ridiculously flat bass playing on Snow Man, from Bob Gerard, is typical of a great number of the offerings from Tin Pan Alley, one of my favourite song-poem labels. The Christmas Shoes came my way courtesy of Ross Hamilton. Its perpetrators, Christian rock phenomenon NewSong, should have been shot for this horrifically sentimental pap: the story of a small boy who wants to buy his mother some new shoes that she can wear when she meets God later that night. The song, which provided the inspiration for an equally sickening film of the same name, made the coveted number one spot on Billboard for one week in January 2001.

Next is a pair of particularly bad tracks from Christmas in the Stars, the Star Wars Christmas Album: Merry, Merry Christmas and C3PO, aka Anthony Daniels, retelling the classic T’was the Night Before Christmas (retitled here A Christmas Sighting) with a suitably Star Warsian bent.


Finally, for today at least, is the ridiculous Cheeky Girls with Have A Cheeky Christmas – just the sort of tune you should be kicking up your heels over after enjoying too much turkey and before settling down to the Queen’s Speech. The duo, who first came to fame on the TV ‘talent’ show Popstars: The Rivals, achieved chart success with four top ten hits between 2002 and 2004, the biggest being their debut single, Cheeky Song (Touch My Bum), which sold more than 1.2 million copies worldwide but was voted the worst pop record of all time in a Channel 4 poll.

See you all on Friday. Enjoy!