Slade, Boy George, Wizzard and Madonna: Christmas through music

“Are you hanging up your stocking on your wall?

It’s the time when every Santa has a ball …”

In 1973 I was 10 years old. I got a bike that Christmas. I think. Or maybe that was the year after. I can’t say for certain now. But I do remember that Slade were number one. I lived in a 1960s council house in a medium-sized town in Northern Ireland with my parents and two younger sisters. We’d hang Christmas cards up on a string as well as loops of coloured paper made at school.

We still had a coal fire. I might have already started to have to clear it out every morning to build a new one. I’d twist newspaper into knots, place sticks on top of them, then slack and, when the flame had caught, finally coal. Now and then I’d add a firelighter if we had any.

On Christmas Eve we’d send our letters to Santa up the chimney.

1973. That year wasn’t the worst year in Northern Ireland. The year before nearly 500 people were killed in the Troubles. In ’73 the number was just over 250. As if that number could ever be qualified with a “just”.

But it was the year my hometown, Coleraine, was blown up.

It happened on a Tuesday. On June 12, at three in the afternoon, the IRA detonated two car bombs, killing six people and injuring 33, some severely.

A bomb goes off in Coleraine (Image: free)

My mum remembers running through the town to get to us, to reassure herself that we were OK. But we were all safe on the other side of the River Bann.

I don’t think the Troubles had really registered with me at that age. The only talk about the bombs in town I recall involved ghoulish, made-up tales schoolkids told each other afterwards.

That would change. Within a year or two I’d go and meet my mate to walk to school and his parents would have Radio Ulster on before we left. Which meant I’d hear about the previous night’s atrocities in between the latest song by The Carpenters. Murder and AOR mixed in together.

But, in truth, the real horror I recall from 1973 was the Summerland disaster that summer.

That August a fire took hold in a leisure centre in Douglas on the Isle of Man. Opened in 1971, the building was designed to host up to 10,000 people. There were 3,000 inside on the night when the fire started. The structure proved to be highly combustible. Flames just ate it up.

Some 50 people died that night. And 80 more were seriously injured.

It made an impact because we had been in Douglas on our holidays only weeks before. Normally we went to Scotland, but this time we got on a plane to fly to the Isle of Man.

We stayed in a B&B in Douglas and I’d spend night after night that holiday in Summerland, cricking my neck on the bouncy castle in the basement.

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It felt more familiar to me than the dark streets of Belfast, so when the news came through it spooked me.

Even so, these were distant shadows. When you’re 10 your world is a small, tight place. Back then what did I love? Marvel comics, Doctor Who, Georgie Best, Tottenham Hotspur and Glam Rock. Especially Glam Rock.

Me and my mate John had a routine. Every Sunday night at 6pm we’d sit on the wall outside my house beside the street light and listen to the Top 20 countdown on Radio 1.

John was a big Gary Glitter fan. He would chase me around the block with his portable radio when Do You Wanna Touch Me came on to force me to listen. It seems, on reflection, I had the better instincts.

Glitter was in the charts that Christmas. But it was Slade that sparkled for me. We had just got our first record player that year. Slade’s My Friend Stan was one of the first singles I can remember buying.

They were the first band I loved. But I loved Wizzard and The Sweet and Bowie too. I was raised by Glam Rock. And when it comes to pop I am still drawn to the shiny and loud.

To hear Merry Xmas Everybody now is to be taken back to childhood. To its certainties and security, even though the world around us is never as certain as we think as children.

A few years ago I met Dave Hill, Slade’s secret weapon, in a hotel in Wolverhampton. We talked about 1973, the band’s annus mirabilis and Hill’s penchant for dressing up in glitter and tat.

He was once described as coming on stage looking like “an over-decorated, perambulating Christmas tree”.

One of his more conservative looks by the sounds of it.

But that was his shtick. Hill always said to his bandmates Noddy Holder and Jim Lea, “You write them and I’ll sell them.”

Never was that truer than in those Top of the Pops performances that December.

“If you think of Slade, you’ll think of some happiness,” he told me in that Wolverhampton hotel in 2017.

And I do.

Boy George and Culture Club (Image: free)

1982

“Time won’t give me time

And time makes lovers feel

Like they’ve got something real …”

I think she phoned me on Christmas Day. 1982. “I’m coming over,” she said.

A week before, maybe less, I’d caught the train from Stirling to Glasgow and then the boat train to Stranraer. I’d fallen asleep on the ferry to Larne and woken up halfway across the North Channel, greasy-haired and lost for a moment.

When she called we’d been apart for just a few days after being inseparable for the previous three months. The way the world turns. For most of that year I didn’t know she existed, and vice versa. There are pictures of Jean that Christmas Day at home wearing a paper crown and looking miserable.

At the time I didn’t think much of what it took her to get on a train to catch a boat to another country, one she had never been to before. One she only knew from what she heard on the news, none of it good (we were just a year on from the Hunger Strikes).

I think now that suggests some commitment to me. I’d never thought of that before now and it thrills me.

What did she see in me? I was never sure. We had some things in common. We were both working-class kids surrounded by middle-class kids at university.

Our dads had both been in the army. And we were both raised on Glam Rock. She’d tell me about 1973 and how at her school they’d have serious discussions about Wizzard’s hit that Christmas. Did you really wish it could be Christmas every day? She wasn’t convinced.

She was more worldly-wise than I was and more grown up in her tastes. We’d listen to Grace Jones and Talking Heads and The Only Ones and Patti Smith in her room.

But she liked pop too. And 1982 was Boy George’s year. On the cover of the NME in May. On Top of the Pops in October (because Shakin’ Stevens pulled out).

The day after, George was famous.

A month later Culture Club released the single Time (Clock of the Heart). And maybe somewhere in its light-touch melancholy I saw some glimpse of this new thing that was happening to me. It became the sound of our festive season.

That Christmas glows in my memory. The day after Boxing Day my dad and I picked Jean up off the boat. The car broke down outside Ballymena and we had to wait for my uncle to turn up and bring us home. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered that Christmas but her. She stayed with us until January and I travelled back to Scotland with her. Our first Christmas together. The first of many. But not, I know now, enough.

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“And time won’t give me time …”

We had tickets to see Culture Club in Christmas 1984. But in September they released Karma Chameleon. We didn’t care for it and gave the tickets away.

1991

“They’re justified, and they’re ancient

And they drive an ice cream van …”

We must have spent the afternoon at Jeanie’s parents. That was the usual pattern when we weren’t in Northern Ireland. Christmas dinner. Presents. Alcohol.

On Hogmanay, her family would all drink and sing old pop songs. Jeanie, her dad and her sisters. John Denver. Neil Diamond. I’d sit and listen.

Christmas was a little more civilised. A little. Two years before I remember trying to watch the ITV adaptation of The Woman in Black on Christmas Eve but heard nothing of it over the talking and singing.

But life was moving on. We’d moved into our own flat in Stirling in 1988. Just me and her and the two cats.

Three years later Spurs won the FA Cup, Helen Sharman went into space and we got a car.

A rusty red Volkswagen Jetta I’d eventually call Ray. Which meant we didn’t need to stay over at Christmas that year.

So after Christmas dinner we came home and then went to visit my mate Eoin in his flat. Jeanie and Eoin drank wine and I half-watched Jean Vigo’s 1934 French romance L’Atalante on BBC Two, feeling very grown-up. For the first time Christmas wasn’t just about family any more. It could be ours alone. Soundtracked by the KLF and Tammy Wynette. To the Bridge, to the Bridge, to the Bridge.

Tammy Wynette (Image: free)

2005

“Time goes by so slowly

Time goes by so slowly …”

That Christmas Eve we put the kids to bed, waited until they fell asleep, filled their stockings and then she kissed me and Madonna was on the radio and I felt as happy as I’ve ever felt.

The following August she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

2023

“And then he sang a song

The Rare Old Mountain Dew

I turned my face away

And dreamed about you …

This will be my fifth Christmas without her. These days I find myself in denial about the whole festive season. Wishing it might pass quickly, come and go without much fuss.

Jeanie loved this time of year. And then, when she learned she was sick, found it a torture. It’s not a torture to me, not quite. But it’s not my favourite time.

Christmas can be hard. Christmas can be lonely. I’ve been thinking of Sarah Millican’s #JoinIn Twitter campaign that she has run for the last 13 years for those on their own at Christmas.

She’s stepping away from it this year but it will continue to be a comfort to many.

This time of year is a challenge. And so some of us will try to ignore this Christmas or maybe seek sanctuary in the past.

Because the past can be a safe space. Because it is finished, complete. The Troubles are past. Mostly.

Summerland is the stuff of old newspaper headlines.

We can see the whole of 1973 now whereas what is happening now in 2023, what will happen in 2024 is not clear yet.

But then as time passes yesterday becomes a mystery too. We can maybe remember what it feels like, can see how it looks on old footage and in fading photographs. But with every year it is disappearing more and more into the shadows. That 10-year-old boy I was in 1973 feels far off.

And every year he slips further away. Familiar faces disappear. Family members. Pop stars. Memory’s anchors slip loose. This year, Sinead and Shane. Gone now.

Teddy's beloved late wife, Jean (Image: free)

But the songs, at least, have stayed the distance.

This December I’ve been reading Daryl Easlea’s Whatever Happened to Slade? It’s a book that sets out to reclaim the band’s reputation from the overarching shadow of their most famous song. And it does a splendid job of that.

And yet, who would want to live in a world that ignored Merry Xmas Everybody? When I hear it I am that 10-year-old boy once more for just a moment.

“Does your granny always tell ya

That the old songs are the best …”

Old stories fade. But new ones come along. I am lucky. I am not alone. I have family and my two daughters. And now a shiny new grandson. A new reason to celebrate this time of year. Maybe it’s time for me to remember that this is a time of cheer. I can try at least.

And next year I’m thinking of getting myself a new bike.