I’m biased but this makes the season start for me.

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I was tickled to hear Emmy the Great and Tim Wheeler’s christmas collaboration in Tesco the other day

Ignore the title, it’s not Motorhead. Lemmy, Billy Gibbons and Dave Grohl.

It’s not a single, as far as I know, but really ought to be. Saw her perform it last week, just beautiful.

It’s a Bad Brains Christmas

Another one that’s not a single, but is everything a Christmas song should be.

This is a single, and it’s to support two charities. People sent in photographs of loved ones lost through the pandemic – I didn’t know anything about it at the time, otherwise I’d have sent in a photo of my partner.

I’ll be perfectly honest, listening to this does get me more than a little emotional.

This was a single B-side, the A-side was ‘Spark’. It featured in a Christmas episode of ‘Bones’, when everyone in the lab got locked in after a biohazard incident. Oddly appropriate at the moment.

Heard this on 6Music this afternoon, I’d forgotten it.

The Staves do a good Christmassy single:

More a Winter song, but still Christmassy, I’ve seen Laura perform this song umpteen times, but never like this, with a full orchestra. Just lovely.

@eddiebaby – meant to say, you’re not wrong! 😁

I never knew who sang this and was shocked at how you Greg Lake looks, I always thought this was being sang by someone in their 40s or 50s!

Or is this a cover version I’ve found using poor Google Fu skills?

Written the year after I was born in ’74 apparently.

Nope, that’s the original version of ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’, one of my all-time favourite Christmas songs!

Greg was pretty young at that point, actually 27, but he’d already been the bass player and singer with King Crimson when they released their first album in 1969! He was born in 1947, he’d written a song called ‘Lucky Man’, which he recorded with Emerson, Lake and Palmer, when he was 12! He left Crimson in 1970, then formed ELP.

Check out Free, when they had their first chart hits, all of the band were still at school, the eldest was 17, IIRC.

Same with Kenickie, I saw them three times, they had to break off a tour to go back and take their exams at school! Lauren Laverne was about 16/17, as were the others.

Anyway, Joni Mitchell has just released an official video for ‘River’, one of the great Christmas songs!

Not familiar with the artist, but this is his Christmas single, and it has a certain poignancy to it.

Just came across this live version of a Greg Lake performance of ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’, with Ian Anderson on flute, with a choir, and it’s beautiful!

Nope, that’s the original version of ‘I Believe In Father Christmas’, one of my all-time favourite Christmas songs!

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