Yule Love Alone Is Not Enough (et cetera)

And so to the Day In Question, the main event, the big kahuna. Christmas. 

Let Chaos Reign!

Christmas is a special time for me. A close to the year, a time for food and family, the stuff of memory building - and, indeed, memory revisiting. Nostalgia feeds our annual year-end feast, whether it's an imagined Victoria experience of snowdrifts, sleigh-bells, and red-breasted robins roasting over a crackling Yule log, or something more intimate and local. For me it's the memory of past family gatherings, the larger Simian whanau coming from Dunedin and Christchurch to share Christmas with us, the rolling maul of big dinners, eked out into leftover cold servings and, yes, barbeques. The last Christmases together, before one or more of us left our home, or left the embrace of our family. I lost a cousin two weeks ago; as one ages, Christmas mingles happy memories and sad, the most bittersweet of anniversaries.

But to a kid in the Seventies Christmas was huge. Toys, holidays, long summers, trifles and jelly, cousins and play mates. My family's Christmases are an unashamed attempt to recapture some of that for our kids and ourselves. A riot of colour, activity, smells, tastes and noises. You're pooped by the end of it all - eyes glazed with TV specials, belly groaning from rich multiple servings, ears ringing from the long hours and laughter. Enough nostalgia, though. Or... not...?

Christmas day, stuck in the seventies

Play all day with your Scalectrics

Oh my god, I got a tomahawk

How sweet life can be

Manic Street Preachers' Send Away the Tigers was an improbable hit. A chart-topper that delivered a righteous hit in Nina Persson duet, but delivered thin servings thereafter. Far from the experimental Lifeblood before it, or the divisive and cut-down double Know Your Enemy before it, Tigers is a wry re-run of past victories and crowd-pleasers, lacking only a needle to push. However, it did delivery some good B-Sides, including this particular burst of UK Christmas nostalgia - an unashamed mash of memberberries. It is, in the words of What Is Music podcast a right banger. 

Best of all for 2022 is Manics re-releasing Know Your Enemy in as close to its original intended form as possible. A real surprise and a Christmas treat to be sure. 

Merry Christmas, Everybody!    

Christmas Eve in the Valleys

 'Christmas Eve' by R.S. Turner, music by Manic Street Preachers (2021)

 

 It's Christmas Eve in the Monkey House, usually a time of slightly frazzled repose before the perpetual motion machine that is Christmas Morning to Christmas Lunch to Christmas Afternoon (brief pause for the King's Message) and then the likely-to-be-barbequed Christmas Dinner. It's a hectic time, the most ex-haust-ing time of the year, in fact. Christmas Day is the main event; the night before barely gets a word in, much less in songs (unless you happen to be in a New York drunk tank, of course)

 So spare a thought for this liminal pause, then. The moment of quiet betwixt the end of the Shouting Boxing Day Sale reminders of TV and the internets, and the blinking awakening of The Day in Question. To my mind, the commercialism has dominated Christmas Eve - one last, frantic exhortation of the nation's retailers to us to fill the tills emptied months before in anticipation, and reward the faith months of loss-leading have born witness to.

Bah, humbug.

And so to noted poetic Grinch, R.S Thomas, whose The Furies was once quoted in the liner notes to fellow countrymen Manic Street Preachers'; melancholic, none-more-Welsh peak This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours. In the same work Thomas dedicates four short poems to the winter holiday, and it's this one, Christmas Eve, a contemplation of the commercialism of the season with the coming of 'the child' triumphant and soundless, 'like radiation' - brief and full of mystery.

The music works, provided as usual by twin composers James Dean Bradfield and Sean Moore, who likely provides the trumpet for this piece. This is not a release proper, but is just a year old, a contribution to Michael Sheen's Christmas Day show for Radio Wales. I like it a lot, and I hope you do, too.

More Manic, more Christmas - tomorrow.