The Greatest Xmas No.1 Never

Don’t get me wrong. As Jewish as I am, I’m all for Noddy roaring “Eeeet’s ChrisssssssssMAS!” or Johnny L hoping war was over or Roy wishing it could be like Yuletide every day. They all have their place. As do Shane and Jonah and Darlene and even, in my weakest, soppiest moments, the L from ELP. That said, only three songs about the upcoming festivities have ever reverberated beyond the turkey and tinsel.

Bronze goes to Randy Newman’s Christmas in Cape Town, a blackly comic snapshot of life at the sharp end while apartheid still had the vast majority of South Africans in its relentless grip. As ever, it’s tricky deciding where, if anywhere, Randy the Singer’s persona coincides with Randy the Writer. The following may or may not confirm your suspicions:

This English girl from the North somewhere
Is stayin’ with me at my place
Drinkin’ up all my beer
Talkin’ about the poor niggers all the time
It’s a real disgrace, she says
I tell her, Darling, don’t talk about things
you don’t understand
I tell her, Darling, don’t talk about something
you don’t know anything about
I tell her, Darling, if you don’t like it here
Go back to your own miserable country

Then there’s Laura Nyro’s Christmas In My Soul, a lament from the gut combining quiet rage and incurable optimism. Nature, the Black Panthers and the Chicago 7 check in as the Bronx Bronte urges the world to, well, spread the love a bit more. OK, a lot more.

Red and silver on the leaves
Fallen white snow runs softly through the trees
Madonnas weep for wars of hell
They blow out the candles and haunt Noel
The missing love that rings through the world
On Christmas

But head and shoulders above the lot, for me, stands Alan Hull’s Winter Song, the finest song that grossly neglected Geordie ever penned but more, much more, than that.

I’m not sure when he wrote it. It may have been while he was working as a nurse in mental health at St Nicholas Hospital in Newcastle. He may even have drawn inspiration from Christmas In My Soul. The sentiments certainly spring from the same pod. The keystone of Lindisfarne’s first and best album, 1971′s Nicely Out Of Tune, it is a cri de coeur with knobs on, yet infused with a delicate beauty, thanks in good part to the exquisite acoustic guitar that guides and drives, a perfect accompaniment to Hull’s plaintive, wistful rasp. Before Lindisfarne formed he ran a folk club, and it shows here more than anywhere else in his canon. At times you can hear John Martyn, at others Lennon, but to these ears neither was ever quite as poetic or humane as this:

When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer, whose passage is complete
Whose memories lie in ruins and whose ruins lie in heat
When winter…comes howling in.

When winter’s shadowy fingers first pursue you down the street
And your boots no longer lie about the cold around your feet
Do you spare a thought for summer whose passage is complete
Whose memories lie in ruins and whose ruins lie in heat
When winter…comes howling in?

As a singer, Hull was better on tenderness and wit than rage, though he found a suitable balance for his most overtly political compositions, All Fall Down and Poor Old Ireland, magnificent strokes both. He was never tenderer than here, the anger serving the humanity. In extending the final line of each verse a notch more each time, he accentuates the despair, deepens the empathy.

For a long time, Van Morrison was driven by the quest to capture the spirit of Yeats, the lion, the “yaargh”; he would have found common ground with Hull as the latter prolongs the last two words for all they’re worth, fusing them and tugging them and stretching them and plucking them but never quite snapping them…howwwwwww-aaaa-linnnnnggggggggggggg iiiinnnnnnn. He doesn’t quite hit those heights on the live Back To Basics, recorded a year before his horribly early death in 1995, but he goes pretty damn close. If you don’t shiver at that, you might want to look under the bonnet and check whether you still have a fully-functioning soul.

Mark Knopfler, Jimmy Nail and Malcolm “Supermac” McDonald were among the Geordie heroes who supported a proposal to honour Hull with a plaque outside Newcastle City Hall, which was approved in February. “Lindisfarne were to Newcastle what the Beatles were to Liverpool,” claimed councillor Henri Murison: initially at least, that probably pissed off Eric Burdon and Alan Price royally, but I suspect they knew what he was getting at. Either way, the words “time”, “about” and “bleedin’” spring to mind, if not quite in that order.