The gift that keeps on giving

Every year Christmas records sell — but do the artists live happily ever after? Simon Hattenstone asks those who know, from the Pogues to Boney M to Slade.

IN Nick Hornby’s novel About a Boy, Will Freeman never has to work again because his dad wrote a huge Christmas hit.

Every December the record sells, kerching, kerching, and he lives happily ever after. But is that true? Are those lucky enough to have written a classic Christmas hit, living in clover?

The biggest non-charity Christmas hit in Ireland and the UK is ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ by Boney M. It went to the top of the Irish charts on Nov 25, 1978, and stayed there for an amazing seven weeks.

It is very easy to forget how successful Boney M were in the 1970s. No other artist has two songs in the UK’s all-time Top Ten singles chart — ‘Rivers of Babylon/Brown Girl in the Ring’ at number 5 and ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ at number 10.

Liz Mitchell, who was the lead singer for both hit songs, now performs as ‘The Voice of Boney M’ and still tours across Europe. “You must be loaded?” I ask when we meet. Liz, who has been smiling and laughing, looks as if she’s about to break into tears when I mention royalties. Has she worked out how much she makes every year from Boney M’s Christmas single ?

“If I was to spend time working out what the record company got — and those in that team of people around us — I would lose my mind,” she says.

It is not only the Christmas single, she says, but there’s also a Boney M Christmas album. “Every Christmas we make platinum with it.” They must make lots from that, then? “We don’t. Our royalty statement has been minimal and menial. Really. We don’t collect more than a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent of a per cent. We get maybe the seventh of one per cent,” she admits.

No wonder she is upset. In the unlikely event that Boney M sold £1m-worth of Christmas records a year, the four band members would receive £357.14 each.

Their Christmas hit ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ was unusual for Boney M. They usually spent an age making singles, then tested them on the prospective audience before returning to the studio to polish them. But this song, originally a hit for Harry Belafonte, was recorded in just three days and rushed out.

“I remember Frank (Farian, their producer) asking me to sing the verse a cappella. He got goose bumps, and went, ‘Yes we’re going into the studio’ and ‘Mary’s Boy Child’ went out as we recorded it,” she explains.

The reason for Boney M’s limited financial rewards is due to the fact that they sang other people’s lyrics. The secret to winning the Christmas hit jackpot is simple — write your own songs. However, during the 1960s and 1970s pop stars were often very self-conscious about writing Christmas singles.

They were considered cheesy, clichéd, with children singing and bells ringing. What most artists didn’t realise at that time was a great Christmas hit could become a long-term classic, earning royalties for years to come.

In 1973, Slade were the biggest band in Ireland. In that year alone they had three number one hits. Whilst in the UK, they were the first since The Beatles to go straight to number one with each song, culminating with their fourth hit ‘Merry Christmas Everybody.’

Jim Lea is Slade’s baby-faced bass guitarist, violinist and songwriter. He wrote the tune and unforgettable chorus for ‘Merry Christmas Everybody’. The rest of the lyrics came from band leader Noddy Holder.

Lea says he owes the song to his mother-in-law. “She said to me: ‘Why don’t you write a Christmas song, Jim?’ I got a bit annoyed. I was young and full of testosterone, and said: ‘Don’t tell me what to do, we’re top of the tree.’ Then one day I cooked it up in the shower. I took it to Nodd and said: ‘It’s a Christmas song, I’ve got the: ‘So here it is Merry Christmas’,” he explains.

“But he went off and did probably the best lyrics he ever wrote about the ‘Grannies have a twist and a stout, and sitting with their stockings round their ankles, legs apart.’”

Slade finally recorded the song during the summer of 1973 in New York. “John Lennon was doing his Mind Games album and the volume knob had got ‘John’ on it, so we had that taken off and a new knob with ‘Slade’ put on. It was very humid and to do our vocals we needed an echoey place, so we used the lobby of the record plant.”

Lea added lots of instrumentation to the record (fortunately, Lennon had left the harmonium in the studio) but he says it initially sounded a mess. At which point he left it to the producer, Chas Chandler to mix.

“When I heard it I was chuffed. There is not a kid singing or a sleigh bell or anything jingling or jangling, it’s just a rock band playing a song. And it is brilliant. I really love it,” he says.

But ‘Merry Christmas’ was Slade’s last number one hit. Three years later they were obliterated by the punk scene. However, in 1980 Ozzy Osbourne pulled out of the Reading Festival and Slade were invited to play as a last-minute jokey replacement.

“We blew the whole thing to pieces. If you think about it we could barely get a gig at the time. It was our second encore and Nodd said: ‘Is there anything you want to hear?’ and the crowd just started singing ‘Merry Christmas’. We’d never played it live, and there was this ridiculous situation of 100,000 people singing a Christmas song in August. We just stood watching them. It was bizarre.”

Why is it still so popular? Lea laughs. “It looks as if it’s never going to go away. It could be here in 200 years time. I think it’s because of the way the melody lilts around and it’s got a happy-sad feel. It sounds nostalgic.” Lea has not had to work since Slade. Is ‘Merry Christmas’ their biggest earner? He insists he’s not done the sums, but it must be. “The Performing Right Society put out a statement saying Slade’s ‘Merry Christmas’ is the most heard song in the world because royalties come in from more countries than for any other song. The estimate is that it’s been heard by 42% of the planet, more than three billion people, whether they wanted to hear it or not.

Shouldn’t he be a billionaire? He laughs and talks about the astronomical tax rate in the UK during the 1970s. “I am comfortable, that’s the best way to put it,” he says.

Greg Lake, of the progressive rock band ‘Emerson, Lake and Palmer’ stresses that he didn’t set out to write a Christmas hit. “We didn’t want to be a singles-chasing band,” he says. Were they more of a triple album-chasing band? “Yes, we were. I can feel a concept coming on,” he giggles.

His song ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ released in 1975 was an attack on commercialisation. “When I was a young boy, I remember Christmas being about goodwill on Earth: how did it ever get corrupted into this horrible, present buying orgy? So we decided to write a serious song about Christmas,” he says.

Peter Sinfield, a former fellow band member, wrote the lyrics. “When the record company said; ‘Greg, we’re going to release this as a single,’ my reaction was: ‘You can do whatever you want, but I can’t see it working. It’s got a 100-piece orchestra.’ At the time, Christmas hits were Slade or Roy Wood, knees-up type songs. ‘I Believe in Father Christmas’ was cynical and a bit melancholic.” The song went to number two in Ireland and the UK, losing out to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody for the top spot.

“If there ever there was a single I wouldn’t mind being beaten by that was the one,” he says.

Was the cheque for the Christmas song the biggest he has ever received? “No. We sold over 26 million albums, we’ve got a big catalogue and our stuff gets used in films. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve not checked the income for years, but people do have this fascination with the earning power of it. It’s like, ‘Oh, you wrote a Christmas song — you never need to work again,” he explains.

Is that wrong then? “Yes. When the record was initially in the charts there was a lot of money coming off it, but now it’s just radio play really.” He pauses. “Well, I tell a lie, because the record’s been covered by everyone — Sarah Brightman, U2 (both in 2008) — and all those are royalties.”

Jona Lewie was a two-hit wonder with ‘You’ll Always Find Me In The Kitchen at Parties’ followed by ‘Stop The Cavalry’ released in 1980. He didn’t think of it as a Christmas song. As far as he was concerned, it was an anti-war song that happened to mention Christmas. Lewie had spent many years struggling.

So was he surprised by the success of ‘Stop the Cavalry’? Especially as it didn’t even make number one, being beaten in Ireland and the UK by St Winnifred’s School Choir’s song ‘There’s No One Quite Like Grandma’.

“You’re always hoping something might happen, and you can’t believe it when it does,” he admits, candidly.

Lewie has rarely played live in the intervening 30 years, and has spent the past 10 years working on his latest album. How on earth has he managed to make a living?

“Stop The Cavalry constitutes 50% of my real income. The thing is, I do everything on the track. I write the lyrics and the melody, so that’s all of the publishing. And because I am a musician I can do all the backing track, so that’s all the recording royalty. I was a one-man show. And if you can get a track associated with Christmas, you get annual regurgitation and potential for earning every year.”

So is it possible to live a life of luxury from one Christmas hit? Hardly, he says. “I’m more thrifty than spend, spend, spend. But I’ll spend £3 on a coffee, then a cake, then another coffee and before you know it you hardly have change out of £20.”

However, the success of the Christmas hit can also cause major divisions within a group, especially if only one member has written the song and is getting all the financial rewards.

Boy band East 17’s ‘Stay Another Day’ was the Christmas number one in 1994 both in Ireland and the UK, selling over 910,000 copies. Although it was written by band member Tony Mortimer, it was sung by Brian Harvey.

So Mortimer made the money then left the group a year later. “It was all based around Tony writing the songs and the rest of us going along with it. I was singing songs I didn’t mean. It’s just me Terry and John now.” explains Harvey

Perhaps surprisingly, the last Irish act to hit the top spot in Ireland was comedian Mario Rosenstock in 2005 with his parody of Will’s Young’s song ‘Leave Right Now.’

The parody related to Roy Keane’s controversial departure from Manchester United and his falling out with manager Alex Ferguson.

“We certainly didn’t make enough to retire on, or hop on a plane and spend our days in Rio de Janerio,” laughs Ian Dempsey, the Today FM Breakfast DJ, who launched the song. “We have had to keep on working. But it was a bit of fun, good promotion for the show and I think it was successful because it touched a nerve. It was a great story and Mario made it even better.”

Since then, every Christmas number one hit here has been by that year’s X Factor winner. In 2010 Limerick comedy duo The Rubber Bandits hoped to break this inevitable cycle with their song ‘Horse Outside’. Paddy Power placed it at 8/1 as the favourite to win the race.

But in the end, X Factor winner Matt Cardle’s ‘When We Collide’ beat it by 25,000 sales. “The young fella with the horse outside didn’t have a major record company behind him and his CDs got lost in the snow on the way to the shops.

“Seriously, how could two young fellas compete with the X-Factor? To have a Christmas number one you need to do some serious planning. We just put up a video on YouTube and everyone wanted it to be the Christmas Number One,” recalled Blindboy Boatclub.

But the most classic Christmas song — voted repeatedly as the best of all time — is the Pogues ‘Fairytale of New York’. Released in 1987, it went to number one in Ireland and stayed there for five weeks.

“Elvis Costello was producing us at the time and he bet me and Jem (Finer a band mate) that we couldn’t turn up with a Christmas record that wouldn’t be slushy,” explains Shane MacGowan.

The Pogues didn’t record the song until two years later, by which time Cait O’Riordan, their only female band mate, had left the group to marry Costello. So they needed a new female singer.

“Steve Lillywhite was now producing, so we’d known Kirsty MacColl for a while as she was married to him. She was hanging around the studio and said; ‘Why don’t I have a go at doing the woman’s part?’ Cait had a brilliant voice, but as it turned out Kirsty was much better for that song.”

In 2000 Kirsty was tragically killed in a speed boating accident in Mexico, as she saved her son’s life. Since then MacGowan has repeatedly said he doesn’t like singing his classic song without her.

“I like hearing other people singing it — young couples, old couples, when they do it properly. Just singing it in a pub. I don’t get much of a kick doing it live any more,” he admits.

When asked the million-quid Christmas song question, MaGowan isn’t playing. “I am not going there,” he insists.

So is his song the greatest Christmas record ever? MacGowan doesn’t agree. “No it’s not,” he says, before reeling off his favourites. “I love ‘The Christmas Song’ by Nat King Cole.”

And suddenly he crokes into life. “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire… dudududududu. And I like ‘I Believe In Father Christmas,’ by Greg Lake.” Now he’s not talking about his own song ‘Fairy Tale of New York,’ he is unstoppable. “There is the Phil Spector version of ‘Santa Claus Is Coming To Town,’ ‘Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree’ by Brenda Lee.’ And the one final thing he says; “Happy Christmas to you, and all your readers.”

Additional reporting by Rachel Borrill