The Darkness | Take It Easy

The big day is rapidly approaching, and I’m running out of time to play you all the songs I want before my Advent Calendar comes to an end! So I’m giving you four today, all of which are making a return visit, plus a little film I found on YouTube.

The first one today is from one of my favourite bands. I have only played this once before, two years ago, so it’s about time for a reprise. By their standards this video is quite sedate:

Of course it’s cheesy, with a fairly predictable end, but that makes it just right for Christmas! The song reached #2 in the UK, having been the odds-on bookmakers’ favourite to be the Christmas #1 that year: it was beaten by the Gary Jules cover of Mad World which, though not a Christmas song, was very good, and was probably the one that restarted the trend for slowed down cover versions. The Darkness also reached the top ten in Denmark, Ireland and the Netherlands with this one. Not in the US though: apart from two earlier singles, their chart success there has been limited to lower level placings for their albums. I still enjoy this one now, though, even if it isn’t filled with the excesses of some of their other videos!

In terms of my favourites, this guy is right up at the top. I think I’ve played this one every year, so it wouldn’t be my Advent Calendar without it:

That isn’t a Christmas song per se, but to me it is a modern day retelling of the Nativity story. And it is lovely, so I’m always happy to play it. That isn’t an official video, and most of the images have nothing to do with the song, but I thought it was marginally preferable to giving you a static picture of the album sleeve. The song speaks for itself, though – it is a beautiful piece. It was on Cat’s Catch Bull At Four album, which was released in late September 1972, just in time for me to buy it and then have to leave it at home for my first five weeks at university, until I could get a lift back to pick up my record player and my collection. In those days, everything was on vinyl, which was heavy to shift around! The album reached #2 in the UK and spent three weeks at #1 in the US.

Yesterday might have seen the last of my Hafod Hardware re-runs, but that doesn’t mean that you have heard the last of Andrea Von Kampen’s lovely voice. She released a Christmas single of one of her own songs last year which I played, and it seemed a good idea to do it again:

On her YouTube page Andrea said this about it: “I wrote this song while thinking about a wintry day that feels magical and timeless. I wanted the music to sound like the song you hear when you open a music box as a kid. The strings add a lush and full presence while the rhodes adds that music box feel.” I think she has achieved that: it is a perfect little piece for this time of year.

Earlier this month I played you one of the charity singles that The Killers released for ten years. This is my other favourite from amongst them:

The Cowboy’s Christmas Ball was their 2011 offering. As I’ve said before, I couldn’t leave out that bit of lunacy, could I? Nothing says ‘Christmas’ quite like a bunch of cowboys inviting visitors from outer space into their Christmas hoedown, does it? What I hadn’t realised until last year was that the lyrics of the song were taken from an 1890 poem of the same name by a chap called William Lawrence Chittenden. The Killers adapted the original poem slightly, changing its location of Texas for their native Nevada, and the space visitors in the video were their own invention. There’s no mention of them in the 1890 poem: how surprising! Like most of their Christmas singles, this was a modest chart entry here in the UK, reaching #112, but it didn’t make the US charts – only one of them ever did.

That’s all the music for today, but I mentioned that I would also be playing you another video that I had found on YouTube. It’s in the vein of some of the ads I’ve been sharing with you – nothing spectacular, but quite nice all the same. And there is quite a story behind this one:

Phil Beastall, who made this, is a Commercial and Advertising Director. In 2018, this film – his annual Christmas offering – was a huge worldwide success. It currently stands at more than 2.4m views in the UK alone and has been shared over 100k times on social media. As a result, Phil was interviewed on ITV’s This Morning and Good Morning Britain and was featured in many news and radio articles. Off the back of this he was asked by Good Morning Britain to write and direct a film for their 1 Million Minutes Christmas campaign: the film helped the campaign to receive more donations than the two previous years combined. He was then asked by Lewis Capaldi to direct the music video for his #1 single Someone You Loved. I think this film is rather nice, and can see why it generated such a response. Phil has released a new one for this year, which is also very sweet: I’ll play it for you tomorrow.

That’s all for today apart, of course, from an image of the day. Not wanting to boast about my culinary skills, but…