Advent Calendar 2021 – Day 8 🎄

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After sharing two repeats yesterday, I thought I’d give you a couple today that I have never played before – ever, even before I began sharing Christmas songs on my blog. One is from my ‘guilty secret’ artist and the other is one of my occasional dips into the pop charts, for a bit of fun. Here goes…

I’ve described Taylor Swift before as my guilty secret, as it supposedly wasn’t cool to like her: after all, she began as a country singer, then transformed into a pop princess, whose target audience was probably at least fifty years younger than me. But underneath that, she has written some great songs, as evidenced by her two ‘folk’ albums of recent years, folklore (2020) and evermore (2021). Back in 2007 she released a six track Christmas EP, The Taylor Swift Holiday Collection, and this is my favourite track from it:

Rather like the Jackson Browne song I shared yesterday, this questions whether we have forgotten the true meaning of Christmas, but it could hardly be done in a more strikingly different way! The EP reached #20 in the main US albums chart, #14 in the Country chart, and #1 in the Holiday albums chart. The only other place it charted was Japan, where it got to #76. Five of the six tracks also reached the US singles chart: all except this one. I think it is the most catchy of the bunch, so that seems strange, but I’m not an American record buyer, am I?

Today’s second song was only ever intended to be for fun. It is a cover version of a song originally recorded by Brenda Lee in 1958:

This was released in November 1987, as part of the UK’s biennial charity fundraiser, Comic Relief. It featured the comedian Mel Smith, who sadly died in 2013, and pop singer Kim Wilde, under the name of Mel & Kim, to avoid any possible confusion with the Appleby sisters’ band which was a regular in the UK charts at that time, and was known as Mel And Kim – spot the difference! The video featured many faces familiar to a British audience at that time, notably Mel Smith’s comedy partner, Griff Rhys Jones, who bookends the video in one of the ‘talking head’ pieces their tv shows always included, and in a fleeting appearance midway through. And I only counted one (in a photo) who has since been disgraced! In case you were wondering, the carol singers are the boyband Curiosity Killed The Cat, whose period of fame barely lasted one life, let alone nine. The video helped the record reach #3 in the UK singles chart, selling over 250k copies in the process. Brenda Lee’s original, by the way, has sold more than 25m copies in its lifetime. This is still a fun watch today, and there are loads of visual gags to enjoy in it, as well as the deliberately cheesy lines from Mel. And for me, anything with Kim Wilde has got to be worth a viewing. Other covers of the song – which won’t be appearing here – include Miley Cyrus, in character as Hannah Montana, and Justin Blubber. The one by Kacey Musgraves and Camila Cabello isn’t bad, though.

That’s it for the music today. I guess you’d like a smile now? OK, here you are – a gentle one:

See you again tomorrow 🎁

36 thoughts on “Advent Calendar 2021 – Day 8 🎄”

  1. 90% of my elementary girls wanted to be Taylor Swift. She was as popular as any artist during that era and still is on a nice run. I hadn’t seen the other one before, but I enjoyed the comedy in their video.

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      • That’s great! If you look them up on YouTube you’ll find loads more: the ones like this from a few years ago, right up to date, as they are releasing a new one each week in the run up to Christmas. ‘Prolific’ doesn’t begin to do them justice, and Audra is still cute…

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  2. Two great tunes, Clive…It’s always good to rock around the Christmas Tree I also love Kim Wilde and have done for a long time as for Taylor Swift and the “Birthday Boy” I really liked that track…I think quite a few of these “pop” artists do grow up to be fine songwriters and singers…in my quest for “Silent Night” Tracks I have to admit I found a few I liked by artists I previously haven’t given air time to…x

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