In praise of seasonal chart fodder

Christmas: the most vulnerable time of the year. I heard ‘A Winter’s Tale’ by David Essex on the radio the other day and, oh boy. It was Noël Coward who wrote, in Private Lives, that smart little line about the strange potency of cheap music. It is a truism never more apparent than at Christmas, when we allow the gaudy and sentimental access to our hearts with only the most cursory of security checks. Songs that would never make it past the bouncers in May are whisked directly into the VIP area come December.

A quick google confirms that ‘A Winter’s Tale’ was released in the run-up to Christmas 1982, which means I was nine years old when it was first released. I can’t separate its pale domestic mopery from dusky, melancholic, snow-scattered drives home from my primary school in Inverness to our nearby village. In the lyric lamenting ‘one more love that’s failed’ I must have heard an echo, or an intimation, of the unhappy house in which I was living.