Frightened Rabbit - It's Christmas So We'll Stop
There’s a formula to being festive that’s maddeningly repetitive. I have a theory that when Noddy Holder was kicking about ideas in early 1973 for something festive he asked a friend to listen to something he’d written. Holder started to play the chords and sing ‘Are you hanging up your stocking…’ when the friend recoiled in horror and cried ‘Christ, every bloody year!’
This is different. As a glance at the track listing of It’s Christmas So We’ll Stop shows, it’s the kind of song you can do a ‘choir version’ of. It could only ever be Christmas number one if the festive season suddenly stopped being colourful and fun and started being leanly Puritan.
The choir version isn’t acapella with voices in place of instruments it’s acapella with monastic chanting in place of instruments. So it’s not at all festive but the hint of that’s in the title. It sounds friendly, endearing and nothing like any of those songs that got really, really annoying years ago.