Chris Upton: Hardly a time for harmony

Dec 24 2009 By Chris Upton

The other day I was walking down New Street, humming A Winter’s Tale by David Essex. It’s very embarrassing when this happens, and I felt like going back along the street and apologizing to everyone I’d walked past.

Nor was this the first time it had happened. The previous week – in the pub – I’m sure I heard myself singing I Wish it Could be Christmas by Wizzard.

There’s very little medical help available in such circumstances. The nurse referred to it as a “subliminal infection” and shook her head sadly.

What happens is that, from mid-November, every shop, supermarket and cafe will be playing Christmas pop on its PA system. The first time I heard And So This is Christmas by John Lennon – one of the few Christmas hits I can bear – was November 12 in Cafe Nero.

I felt particularly sorry for the girl behind the counter – now trendily referred to as a barista. At least I could walk out; she was having to put up with it on an audio loop for eight hours a day. No compensation for industrial injury is claimable in such cases. By the end of the month I could see that serious psychological damage had been done.

Resistance is futile. Eventually these tunes will sink into one’s subconscious. Roy Wood and Noddy Holder creep into the dark passages of the mind, and start hanging up balloons and decorations. You might call it “repetitive strain syndrome”. The worst of this is that the merciless compilers of Christmas music loops work with a very limited palette. There are – at a rough guess – about two dozen hits, and these are all they need, either in the original version or an even less bearable cover version.

What exactly is the point of a cover version of Band Aid’s Do They Know it’s Christmas? ?

But if, at the end of this Christmas offensive, I loathe and detest Wizzard and Wham and Mud and Slade and even Lennon & McCartney, there is one thing that is unimaginably worse than the relentless parade of Christmas number ones.

And that is a jazzed up version of Jingle Bells and Rudolf the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

Now that really does make me consider emigrating to Tehran.

* Dr Chris Upton is wearing ear-muffs at Newman University College.