Merry Xmas Everybody: How Slade's evergreen hit was its own Christmas miracle

ILLUSTRATION: Lesley-Anne Barnes Macfarlane

I always considered ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ something of a Christmas miracle because the more you learn about its creation, the more you learn it’s a miracle that it ever got made at all.

After a string of hits, with the previous two Slade singles entering the charts straight in at Number One, bass player Jim Lea was asked by his mother-in-law: ‘Why can’t you write a Christmas song - something that folk can sing every year?’

Lea suggested this to the other members of the band, but they said no. They maybe felt that the band who had most recently topped the charts with the mis-spelt anthems such as ‘Cum on Feel the Noize’ and ‘Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me’ weren’t quite ready for the pipe-and-slippers approach of a ‘Winter Wonderland’.

Still, the idea wouldn’t let Lea go and he found himself writing Christmas verses while standing in the shower. They sounded pretty good, but he still needed a chorus. It was then that he remembered a tune written in 1967 by his band-mate, ‘Noddy’ (born ‘Neville John’) Holder during Noddy’s ‘Flower Power’ days: ‘Buy Me a Rocking Chair’ (if you sing it to the tune of the chorus of ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’, it’ll make sense:)

‘Buy me a rocking chair to watch the world go by/

Buy me a looking glass, I’ll look you in the eye…’

‘Rocking Chair’ had never been recorded, but Noddy’s tune had stuck in Lea’s head for the last six years. Lea called Noddy, singing some ideas down the phone and Noddy agreed to try to write some Christmas lyrics.

So, one night - after an alcohol-fuelled session at the ‘The Trumpet’ pub in Wolverhampton - Holder went back to his mum’s house, worked all night and wrote the lyrics, as he says, ‘in one go’.

This visit to the pub might account for the unusual lyric about Santa: ‘Does he ride a red-nosed reindeer/does he turn up on his sleigh/Do the fairies keep him sober for a day…’

The song completed, Holder and Lea played it to their manager, Chas Chandler who liked the song and said they should record it.

Then - disaster and tragedy. On 4th July 1973, Slade drummer, Don Powell was involved in a car crash. The accident was so serious that his fiancée, Angela Morris, was killed and Powell was left in a coma for six days. Surgeons had to drill into his skull to ease the pressure on his brain. When finally discharged from hospital, he was so poorly, he had to be lifted onto his drum kit to play.

The band - unknown in America at this time – had agreed to tour the East Coast. While on tour, they booked the illustrious Record Plant recording studio in New York and tried to get the song recorded. But nobody in the band actually wanted to rehearse it. Plus, the drummer, Powell, now suffered poor short-term memory from the accident and kept forgetting the drum part. Drum parts finally recorded – bit by bit - bassist Jim Lea then assembled the track gradually, instrument-by-instrument by himself, playing bass, acoustic guitar, piano then harmonium. He managed to coax their guitarist Dave Hill (yes, he of the pudding-basin fringe) into adding electric guitar. Then the vocals were added. The whole thing took five days to complete. Finally, they sat back and listened to the finished version of their Christmas offering.

And it was no good.

Part of the problem was with the vocals. The studios were expensive and hi-tech, but the band wanted an old-fashioned echo on the vocals. Lea had an idea: there was a good echo in the hall of the building – so record the vocals out there.

Thus it was that any businessmen entering the building came out of the sweltering 80 degree heat of the New York streets to be treated to the sight and sound of four hairy English blokes standing around a microphone in the middle of the corridor shouting and singing “Merry Christmas - everybody’s having fun”. In September.

The single, when finally released in December 1973, topped the charts immediately, sold over a million copies and stayed in the best-selling charts for nine weeks (Holder has questioned why people would still be buying a Christmas single into February as being anybody’s guess).

If the song seems omnipresent each year since then, that’s because it probably is. By 2009, it was estimated that ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ - played in 47 different countries - had probably been heard by 42% of the world’s population. That’s a whopping three BILLION people. Spotify has confirmed that last year alone, the song was streamed 88 million times.

And that’s not including the sizeable numbers of cover versions of the song by other artists including Oasis, Girls Aloud, Tony Christie and…um…Max Bygraves.

When reminiscing about the song, Holder said that he had tried to write a lyric that was optimistic because at the time of writing in 1973, the UK was being crippled by strike action - the miners, rail workers, dock workers all striking. That accounted for his attempt at a brighter tomorrow with the lyric: ‘Look to the future now/It’s only just begun…’

Time passes. Irony abounds. Holder couldn’t have known that almost 50 years after he penned those words that they would be constantly played in a UK headed into another Christmas of strikes and political uncertainty. Even more ironic, the twenty seven year-old Noddy who wrote ‘Does your Granny always tell you/That the old songs are the best?' couldn't really have predicted that the 'granny' of today would possibly be referring to old Slade songs like 'Mama Weer All Crazee Now'.

Still, despite the daily incursions into Holder’s life - on seeing him, people tend to yell the song lyric in his direction - the financial rewards of being the writer of the song are significant. Holder has referred to ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’ as his ‘pension’ and it’s estimated that each year he receives at least £500,000 in royalties from repeated plays all over the world.

Perhaps that’s why, almost 50 years later, it’s understandable that the daily shout of ‘It’s Christmaaaas!’ in the direction of 76 year-old Neville John Holder is still met with a good-natured smile. And a (very grateful) thumbs-up.

Merry Xmas Everybody: How Slade's evergreen hit was its own Christmas miracle

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