Merry Christmas Everybody!

Here's wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas or whatever your preferred holiday might be! I've opened all my presents (It was a lot and they were all great!) and now I'm having a break before we start making lunch, a major operation that lasts quite a while.

I could just leave it at that but yeah, I'm not gonna. This whole finding odd Christmas songs thing I've been up to has had some long-term benefits in that I've discovered a handful of new artists, performers and bands whose post-Noël careers I'll be following with enthusiasm.

I offer them up as gifts.

First, The National Jazz Trio of Scotland with their all but unrecognizeable version of one of the most annoying of all Christmas classics, Jingle Bells. They aren't a trio and they definitely don't play jazz. They may be Scottish, I couldn't say for sure. They have a whole album of Christmas songs (Doesn't everyone?), some of which are even quite cheerful. This isn't one of them.

If that hasn't drained all the fun out the festivities, this ought to do it. It's a magnificent desconstruction of Mud's cod-fifties classic, Lonely This Christmas. I must have heard this song literally hundreds of times but I never realized how utterly bleak the lyrics were until I heard this version. Les Grey's gurning face and pantomime performance leeched out all the meaning. The Mysterines pour it all back in and then some.

And finally, in a vague attempt to regain the room, here's a cover of Nikki Sudden and the Jacobites' Teenage Christmas, here given the full tweepop treatment by Eux Autres, who are, bizarrely, a brother-sister duo from Portland, Oregon. They "channel sixties' French pop and give it a unique sensibility". Or, in this case, eighties/nineties' drug-drenched boho minstrelsy. Same thing, really.

Always leave 'em laughing, eh?

Merry Christmas!