Christmas Notes: “Merry Xmas everybody”

From the book “Note di Natale” by Davide Pezzi (with a preface by Arturo Stàlteri) published by VoloLibero in recent days some songs of the 95 covered by the author in the 300 pages of the volume; we tried to choose the least “predictable”.

In 1973 Slade were at the peak of their popularity: they had two UK top singles in three months – “Cum on Feel The Noize” and “Skweeze Me Pleeze Me” – both of which entered the charts straight at number one, a feat unheard of since the Beatles with “Get Back” in 1969, and are usually cited among the main exponents of English glam rock, although beyond the eccentric hairstyles, colorful costumes and boots with the wedge, their music has little to do with it
see with the refinement and ambiguity of David Bowie or Roxy Music, being more in the hard rock area, with a very hard and even a little noisy sound. How much further away from the spirit of Christmas songs, but as we know, even the tough have a heart…

During their lucky year, their manager, Chas Chandler, suggests the band record a song for Christmas, a proposal that initially leaves the group members a little perplexed, if not downright annoyed. The bass player
Jimmy Lea, however, begins to think about the idea, and one day, while he is in the shower, he invents a melody that could work as a verse, after which he remembers the chorus of a song that Noddy Holder, the band’s lead singer, had written several times. years earlier, in 1967, with his first group, ‘N Betweens, entitled “Buy Me a Rocking Chair”.

«Nod had written the chorus in 1967. At that time it was all flower power and Beatles” – said Lea – “I don’t use recorders, I just remember everything and if something was written ten or fifteen years ago, it stays up there in my head . I’ve never forgotten that refrain, and I was in the shower somewhere in America thinking, suddenly the phrase came out.
“you’re hanging your stocking on the wall,” and I realized it went well with the music of that old song.”

No sooner said than done, he calls Holder and, after an evening spent drinking in a pub, the two camp at the singer’s mother’s house to complete the song, combining the parts written separately, and writing lyrics that are suitable for a Christmas song. When Noddy Holder writes the phrase «Look at the future now / it’s just begun», he has in mind the strikes that have been raging in Great Britain in recent years. He told the Daily Mail in 2007: «We had decided to write a Christmas song and I wanted it to reflect a British family’s Christmas. Economically, the country was in difficulty. The miners were on strike, along with the gravediggers, the bakers and just about everyone else, I think people wanted something to cheer them up, and so did I. That’s why I wrote that verse.”

Once the song is finished, Lea and Holder make the rest of the band and the producer listen to it, accompanying themselves with the acoustic guitar, but since they are leaving for a long tour which will also include the United States, the recording is postponed. In a sultry July, taking advantage of a tour break, Slade enters the Record Plant Studios in New York, where John
Lennon has just finished recording the album “Mind Games”, and Lea uses the harmonium that the former Beatle had used on his album for the recording.

To complete “Merry Xmaƨ Everybody” Slade stayed in the studio for five days, because they couldn’t find the sound they were looking for. In particular they look for a reverberation that American technicians are unable to achieve.
obtain. «We recorded it at the Record Plant in New York, on top of a building. We said we needed an echo room, but in those days no one was looking for the big, fat sound that everyone likes now” – recalls Lea – “The engineers thought we were crazy, and said: “No, man, you know the Eagles? A very clean sound, this is what should come out of the speakers.” The band then proposes to record the vocals of the chorus in the entrance corridor of the building, which has the kind of echo they are looking for, but they are told that it is not possible, because all the businessmen going to the various offices pass through it. . The band ignores the advice and takes their microphones and equipment into the lobby. «Anyway, we went down the corridor and there we were, in the middle of summer, singing ‘So here it is Merry we were crazy.”

“Merry where it remained until mid-January and then remained in the Top 50 for nine weeks. The single would eventually sell over a million copies and become a standard Christmas song in Britain, being voted the UK’s most popular Christmas song in a 2007 poll. Every year “Merry Xmaƨ Everybody” is reissued, and regularly enters radio playlists and themed compilations. Noddy Holder defined the
song his pension plan, reflecting on the royalties it continues to generate: in 2015 it was estimated that the song brings in £500,000 in royalties a year.