Somebody up there in the BBC rights-clearance song department really likes Slade. Their “Merry Xmas Everybody” comes up constantly on my favorite radio soap opera, The Archers. You can’t walk into a bar or a holiday party in the fictional rural town of Ambridge, it seems, without someone cranking “Merry Xmas Everybody” on the stereo.
I’ve loved the song since it was first released in 1973. It’s still fairly obscure in the United States now. Back then, I was one of the rare American kids who’d even heard it. My father, who’d been born in Ipswich and emigrated to the states in the late 1950s, made annual trips back to England every December. While there, he’d walk into a record shop and buy whatever the top ten British singles were, and save them to put in my Christmas stocking later that month.
Invariably, these were Christmas-themed records, which are sort of a British pop culture fetish. The fierce competition to have the top holiday record of the year fuels one of the romantic plots in the film Love, Actually. Christmas singles dominate the charts in December. Unless there was some massive holdover hit from Autumn—David Essex’s “Rock On,” which I cherished, or Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy?”, which appalled every fiber of my teenage self—what I received in my stocking were Christmas singles.
Many of these seasonal songs were magnificent: “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday” by Roy Wood’s Wizzard, the rough folk anthem “Gaudete” sung in Latin by Steeleye Span, “Father Christmas Do Not Touch Me” by The Goodies (a comedy trio whom some considered equals of Monty Python.) Some were sappy beyond belief: the recitation “Deck of Cards” (about how a 52-card deck could substitute for a Holy Bible) by old Music Hall great Max Bygraves.
The years when I was piling up the Christmas songs in my stocking came long before the game-changing “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” or the need for every newly coined pop star to make a Christmas album.
“Merry Xmas Everybody” was my absolute favorite. There was nothing like it. Wizzard and other bands had brought insouciance and rock chords to Christmas carols, but to my 13-year-old ears Slade’s song seemed salacious, sacrilegious. “What will your daddy do when he sees your mommy kissing Santa Claus? Aha!” brought a darker twist of cuckoldry and recrimination to the old chestnut “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus.” The punchy guitar chords, the raw harmonies, the noise.
Mostly, “Merry Xmas Everybody” (“Xmas” rather than “Christmas,” in the spirit of the willfully misspelled titles of other Slade hits such as “Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me,” “Look Wot You Dun”, “Mama Weer All Crazee Now” and of course “Cum On Feel the Noize”) had this ridiculous anger to it. Why mock Christmas so loudly? Why scream “Everybody’s having fun” with such sarcastic glee? Irresistible.
I became a hardcore Slade fan year-round, which made me something of a misfit at school. It was just one more personal pop-culture obsession which my classmates couldn’t fathom. Despite the band’s best efforts, they didn’t become widely known in America until the early ‘80s, and this was still the mid-‘70s, when Happy Days and Elton John were the main shared cultural tastes.
But my mid-‘70s Slade allegiance stood me in good stead when, just a couple of years later, big Slade fans from other parts of the world—London, Birmingham, Dublin, Queens—revised that whimsical wail into the punk rock movement, through bands such as The Ramones, Sex Pistols and The Undertones. All the bands the early punks mentioned as major influences, from Eddie Cochran to the Eddie and the Hot Rods, were already in my record collection, Slade foremost amongst them. Punk rock saved my life, I often say. Slade braced me for that.
So I dissolve into nostalgia every time I hear “Merry Xmas Everybody” in the background of an Archers scene. My daughters tell me that the song, which they’ve grown to love as well, is just as ubiquitous on episodes of “Doctor Who.”.
We laugh every time we hear it. Then we get out a CD and play it again. We all like to listen for that chaotic coda when Noddy Holder bellows “It’ssss Chrisssssssssstmasssssss!” after the umpteenth chorus of:
So here it is, Merry Christmas
Everybody’s having fun
Look to the future now
It’s only just begun.
