THE ADVENT CALENDAR OF FILTH
4: WINGS – Wonderful Christmastime
The Beatles never made a Christmas single. Unless you include those fanclub flexi’s where John Lennon does his amusing John Lennon voice and tells jokes you would only allow a pop star to get away with. ie Rubbish ones. John Lennon was the self styled wit of the band, and like many office pranksters had a sense of humour as developed as Sierra Leone (that joke is for all you geographical economists out there – I know you like Paul McCartney). Odd then that as soon as the band split the songwriting powerhouses of the Moptopped Maladjusts went hell for leather into the Christmas market. I’ll get to Lennon’s – though rest assured it is as much hippy claptrap as you would expect.
But to Macca and his Wings (I can only assume he named his band after those handy pantyliner appendages). He states in this jolly sleigh-bell-along that he is ?simply having a wonderful Christmastime? ? as if Christmastime is a real word. Plenty of other lyricists make this linguistic error ? it may be because the word Christmas really does not rhyme with anything. Wheras time rhymes with so many words that it even rhymes with rhyme ? which is about a rhymey as you can get.
Anyway, back to the McCartney?s Christmastime, of which they are having a wonderful one of. Well of course he is having a wonderful fucking Christmastime. He had just bought much of Berkshire, had a happy family, was not married to some mad Japanese performance artist and in Mull Of Kintyre he had managed to pull the wool over the eyes of the entire single buying public. He was on an unnatural high, which is possibly why he wrote a song bereft of any good points whatsoever. You would have to be the happiest man in the world, or extremely high on drugs, to possibly enjoy Wonderful Christmastime. Its disingenuity is ingenious in scope.
Still ? its not as stupid as Merry Christmas ? (War Is Over).