Saturday, December 23, 2006

Christmas Crackers

The UK is Christmas mad. More money is spent on buying cats and dogs presents than the entire GDP of **insert small African country here**.

What I find funny is the Christmas tunes pumped through the stores here. And that's every store. Not just your Marks and Sparks, but your Pakistani corner shoppe and your local hairdressing/tanning/stick-on nail salon.

To qualify for going onto high rotation on radio or into the CD player, all a song must do to achieve Christm-arse repetition overload is to have the word "Christmas" in it. Innit.

A point in case - I was in the famous toy store, Hamley's of Oxford St London, when I heard The Pogues Fairytale In New York come over the in-store muzac system. Now this is a toy store. There are small children around.

And this is what they heard:

A song primarily about being heroin junkie. If you would like to familiarise yourself with this little ditty, click here for a wee listen.... And meet Shane McGowan, their front man, pictured here on the left.

Now you may argue that the kids are too busy looking at toys. But I say - do you know all the words to Hotel California? Well do you? And did you ever own said Eagles song? No? Neither did I... but I know the words. That is because of the evils of commercial radio and high rotation.

In saying all of the above, I would much rather listen to The Pogues than "Do they know it's Christmas", Cliff Richard or that horrible boob tubette, Messiah Carey with her horrible horrible, evil song, All I Want for Christmas is You (to shut up). And here she is singing it live... uh! Just horrible!


2 comments:

ali b said...

There's a post script to this....Our union has been doing some protesting of major banks and firms who choose contract cleaning companies that treat their workers badly. Hamley's is one of those firms. So, comrades in London did a big protest outside their store during peak Christmas shopping times. And what did Hamley's do? The sent in the clowns! Staff dressed up as clowns to create a diversion. Anyhoo, the cleaners won. YAY!

Anonymous said...

Shane MacGowan looks like Jock.
Or vice versa.
Too much whisky?
(Who - Shane, Jock, or me?)