Christmas is perfect time for vinyl and CD revival – Euan McColm

Great music, like Jona Lewie’s Stop The Cavalry, The Cocteau Twins’ shimmering take on Frosty The Snowman, and A Charlie Brown Christmas, is an important part of the festivities for Euan McColm

Every year, as November slips along the icy pavement into December, I perform the same small ritual. From the end of the shelves bearing my overgrown but entirely necessary record collection, I retrieve the Christmas albums.

For the next month, this selection – some on vinyl, some on CD, and one a home-made compilation tape of odds and sods – will soundtrack my evenings. Some of these albums are bona fide blockbusters, classics that we all know. There’s Phil Spector’s “A Christmas Gift For You” from 1962, for example, containing those wall-of-sound girl group interpretations of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus”, “Sleigh Ride”, and “Winter Wonderland”, whose power cannot be diminished by familiarity.

And there are more obscure ones, too. The American finger-style guitarist John Fahey’s 1968 album, “The New Possibility”, is a glorious thing, a collection of carols picked out on acoustic guitar as crisp and clear as a fresh blanket of snow.

Joining these great examples of the genre are more recent creations. “A Sunflower at Christmas” by The Pearlfishers is a gorgeous collection, created in 2004 by Davie Scott, a musician who provides the answer to the question “What would Brian Wilson sound like if he’d made his music in a home studio overlooking the Union Canal in Falkirk?”, and Low’s “Christmas”, from 1999, which takes festive music down to a hush and is all the more powerful for it.

On the compilation tape are those artists who recorded Christmas singles that endure. Here we find familiar tunes by Slade, Paul McCartney, and Mariah Carey, alongside forgotten gems like The Cocteau Twins’ shimmering take on “Frosty The Snowman”. The star on top of that particular tree is Jona Lewie’s “Stop The Cavalry”. I’m not sure I’d know what to say to someone who doesn’t love that one. Let me tell you, singing Jona’s “Dubbadubbadums” to a baby is one of life’s great pleasures. Seize the opportunity if you get it.

Most of the greatest Christmas music shares a particular quality. These might be songs of celebration but melancholy is an essential ingredient; the wise contemporary composer understands that reflection is at the heart of the carols we learned as children and maintains that tradition.

So far as I am concerned, the musician who understood and delivered this best was the jazz pianist, Vince Guaraldi. In 1965, he was commissioned to create the soundtrack for the animated TV special, “A Charlie Brown Christmas”. Guaraldi’s Trio captured, perfectly, the mixture of optimism and angst that ran through Charles M Schultz’s “Peanuts” comic strip. Contained in the grooves of this record is music that will make you weepy, then envelop you in a comforting hug.

Vince Guaraldi’s masterpiece contains music with roots deep in the past – “Hark, The Herald Angels Sing” and “O Tannenbaum”, for example – but its highlight is an original, with music by the pianist and lyrics by the producer of the TV show, Lee Mendelson. “Christmas Time Is Here” is now a yuletide standard, a sad and beautiful song, delivered by a children’s choir, that will thaw the iciest of hearts.

Almost 60 years after its release, “A Charlie Brown Christmas” remains unsurpassed in the Christmas music canon. Listen to it now. I doubt you’ll disagree.