It’ll be lonely this Christmas…or will it? An extended soundtrack and story for a snowbound Yule…

Once upon a time…

Phoebe Bridgers — If We Make It through December

Lucy Dacus — Last Christmas

Pretenders — Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

John Mellencamp — I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus

Dave Edmunds and Plum Crazy — Jingle Bells/Run Rudolph Run

Nick Lowe — Christmas at the Airport

Hello Saferide — iPod Christmas

Maia Hirasawa — You Were All There

Tom Waits — Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

The Staves — Home Alone, Too

Fleet Foxes — White Winter Hymnal

The 1975 — Wintering

Julian Casablancas — I wish It Was Christmas Today

Rosie Thomas, Sufjan Stevens — We Should Be Together

Ron Sexsmith — Maybe this Christmas

Flaming Lips — A Change at Christmas

Goldfrapp — Winter Wonderland

Sufjan Stevens — Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel/Let’s All Boogie To the Elf Dance

The Legendary Hearts — Cold Christmas

Coldplay — Christmas Lightas

The Pogues — A Rainy Night in Soho

Steve Earle — Christmas in Washington

Phoebe Bridgers — So Much Wine

Future Islands — Last Christmas

Listen to me reading the story with an hour and a half of joyously melancholic, slightly left-field Christmas songs along the way. Click here:

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/christmas-at-the-broken-record-inn/

Or read the words below and listen to the Spotify playlist. There’s a link to that at the end.

There’s a tree. Of course there’s a tree. One of the Norwegian Spruces grown in Feargal Mutch’s plantation down the Clave towards Slanachan. We have the same tree every year,  traded for whisky, beer, the occasional mince pie, and allowing Feargal to sing Achy Breaky Heart. Once a year. Carefully dug up (the tree, this is), watered during its 12 days (no more, no less) in residence at the Broken Record Inn, then replanted. So far it’s survived a decade. Call me an environmentalist, why don’t you? 

Phoebe Bridgers If We Make It through December

Lucy Dacus — Last Christmas

Decorated with a variety of 12-volt LED lights, not the monstrous, 240 Volt deathtrap lanterns I remember from childhood, with dad getting shocks and the occasional explosion of sparks and glass, not to mention singed spruce. How the house didn’t burn down I’ll never know.

Pretenders — Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

John Mellencamp — I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus

Anyway, here I am, on Christmas Eve, all alone and it’s fine. Really. Where is everyone? Fingal, my landlord and escaped rock star, is on tour in Australia with his band, the revamped and revitalised Glamour Ghost and Adelaide is at her parents’ down in Sandvoe. I was invited, of course I was, but gracefully declined. It’s good for blood family to be together, and in their case, speaking German to each other. They do Christmas differently. Yule Logs and all that. Much hiking. Too much marzipan for me.

Dave Edmunds and Plum Crazy — Jingle Bells/Run Rudolph Run

Nick Lowe — Christmas at the Airport

Hello Saferide — iPod Christmas

The Creightons, remember them? Cry Town Management are flourishing in their 15 percent of Glamour Ghost’s ticket sales, merchandise and publishing. Records too, with a re-recorded Greatest Hits surfing the streaming charts worldwide on the back of a soundtrack appearance in the new, sexy Netflix version of Camberwick Green. Ginster the lost bass player, so mysteriously vanished decades previously, turned out to be working as something called a sonic bass reflexologist in Kirkcaldy (plucking double bass strings with your feet, apparently, and feeling the vibrations spiritually), but abandoned that when the Creightons and Fingal offered him all the sweets of being back in the band. And money.

Turned out he’d fallen in with a travelling Jehovah’s  Witness team back on that fateful Texas night when he disappeared, and subsequently became a star guitar-strumming evangelist for them in Detroit; before falling in love with a Peruvian yoga teacher who stole all his money and left him destitute in an Alaskan brothel. True story. Maybe I’ll tell it someday.

Drag the drummer had been working boutique cruise ships in the Black Sea, or possibly Blackpool; keyboard player Krankie (Giles Lobban) was playing cocktail jazz in a Milton Keynes steakhouse, and guitar tech, roadie and general drug finder Lexie ‘Dobber’ Anderson was now a millionaire tulip grower in Holland. Tulips. Aye, sure…But he was keen to revisit the old passions, and maybe make some new contacts in… international bulbs. Off they went and I hoped they were hating each other.

Maia Hirasawa — You Were All There

Me, I found some new bar staff and kept on with the Broken Record Inn. I had nowhere else to go, after all. Serving the limited passing trade and the band of loyal locals. Now it was Christmas Eve, and in the darkest days of winter, running up to the Big Day, we’d had several parties, nights for local businesses, a special bash for friends and families, and now, at last I was alone with the records of my choice. Christmas records, of course.

Tom Waits — Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

The Staves — Home Alone, Too

It’s all memories, Christmas, isn’t it? Absent friends, relations, parents, grandparents. Childhood comes clanging and tinkling into your consciousness like bells on Rudolf’s sleigh, even if you don’t want it back. Fights, fears, that terrible Christmas Eve we’d visited relatives in Lanarkshire, and the car broke down on the way back down to Ayr across the Fenwick Moor. Santa won’t come, sobbed my sister.

Fleet Foxes — White Winter Hymnal

The 1975 — Wintering

Over the years there were the standout presents, of course. That desperate longing for a record player of my own, sick of rationed time on the Bush radiogram in the living room. And told I’d have to save, but I’d get some money at Christmas towards it. Coming down on Christmas morning to the usual stockings with tangerines knobbling the toes, my sisters, at least one of them still believing in Saint Nicholas – even though as a family we didn’t believe in saints – beyond excited, me resigned and at 12, cynical. There was an envelope on the mantelpiece with my name on it. I opened it…and it was full of Monopoly money. Then dad took my head and turned it gently to the gap behind the sofa, where a brand new Dansette sat waiting.

Rosie Thomas, Sufjan Stevens — We Should Be Together

Ron Sexsmith — Maybe this Christmas

First guitar. That was before the record player, the Christmas before, and I still have the now-collectible Selmer 222 parlour with its wide fretboard and terrible machine heads. ‘222’ stamped for some reason in black ink on the front of the instrument. 

Not a great thing but I played it literally until my fingers bled. Bobby Shaftoe’s Gone to Sea. Play in a Day with Bert Weedon. Hold Down a Chord: Folk Guitar For Beginners, by John Pearse, whoever he was. But all I really needed was three chords, then a fourth, the associated minor. C-Am-F-G7 After that, pop music was mine. Except the Beatles. They were far too difficult.

That guitar was bought from Thomsons in Kilmarnock, after a despairing pre-Christmas journey to look in the window. A trip that reduced me to tears of frustration at the enormous cost of the red Watkins Rapier electric guitar sitting there, priced at 11 guineas. 11 pounds and 11 pence. About £250 today. For years I thought this was the cost of the Selmer I got for Christmas, but it couldn’t have been. I doubt that Selmer cost more than one old fiver. When you think of the quality of guitar you could get today for £250. The truth is, Watkins Rapiers were rubbish.

Flaming Lips — A Change at Christmas

Goldfrapp — Winter Wonderland

Further back in childhood, there was a Man from UNCLE set, badge and pistol, but never alas, the much longed-for Johnny Seven Gun. A Hornby train set and a Scalextric, both bought when I was too young for them, were really presents by dad for dad. I know this to be true because I did exactly the same thing with two of my own sons.

And there was the food. Always turkey, always grannies, aunts and uncles with us for Christmas dinner. So much to eat. Christmas pudding not on fire, because absolutely no alcohol until much, much later, when we kids were almost grown and continental caravan holidays had brought wine, croissants and peculiar cheese into our world. Church? No, because the Gospel Hall suspended operations for Christmas, unless it was Sunday, which was a disaster for us, as Gospel meetings and morning communions ruined the pagan indulgence we normally enjoyed. 

Sufjan Stevens — Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel/Let’s All Boogie To the Elf Dance

The Legendary Hearts — Cold Christmas

Now, here I am, on Christmas Eve, and I find myself setting out a plate of shortbread and a  glass of Croft Original sherry for a Santa I never believed in. But it’s a sentimental nod to the lost ones, my mum and dad, the grandfathers I never knew, the grannies who sat in contented glory over Christmas, dispensing the occasional pound note and smiling over a Shloer apple juice.

Coldplay — Christmas Lights

The Pogues — A Rainy Night in Soho

It’s snowing outside, now. Not the icy, vicious sleet and temporary precipitation of March but dry, deep silent stuff, falling like confetti or dandruff from heaven. The fire is…not roaring, but glowing quietly with the red, settled mixture of peat and logs. And it’ll soon be Christmas Day. I’ll listen to some more music, have a large Berry Brothers and Rudd sherry cask Speyside malt, and then head for bed. Friends down in Slanachan have invited me for dinner but I’ve been equivocal about going. I don’t feel lonely. Or particularly happy. But content. Remembering. Listening.

Steve Earle — Christmas in Washington

The doors of the Broken Record Inn are never locked. And the music is up loud, which is why I don’t notice anything until she reaches over the back of the big leather chair and grips my shoulder, shaking the snow from her Afghan coat, leaning down to kiss me with cold lips.

“Is that sherry for me?” she says.

Phoebe Bridgers — So Much Wine

Future Islands — Last Christmas

Playlist

Listen to the story with the songs inserted at more or less crucial or random points here.

https://www.mixcloud.com/tom-morton2/christmas-at-the-broken-record-inn/

Or just the songs on a Spotify playlist here:

Phoebe Bridgers If We Make It through December

Lucy Dacus — Last Christmas

Pretenders — Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas

John Mellencamp — I Saw Mummy Kissing Santa Claus

Dave Edmunds and Plum Crazy — Jingle Bells/Run Rudolph Run

Nick Lowe — Christmas at the Airport

Hello Saferide — iPod Christmas

Maia Hirasawa — You Were All There

Tom Waits — Christmas Card from a Hooker in Minneapolis

The Staves — Home Alone, Too

Fleet Foxes — White Winter Hymnal

The 1975 — Wintering

Julian Casablancas — I wish It Was Christmas Today

Rosie Thomas, Sufjan Stevens — We Should Be Together

Ron Sexsmith — Maybe this Christmas

Flaming Lips — A Change at Christmas

Goldfrapp — Winter Wonderland

Sufjan Stevens — Oh Come Oh Come Emmanuel/Let’s All Boogie To the Elf Dance

The Legendary Hearts — Cold Christmas

Coldplay — Christmas Lightas

The Pogues — A Rainy Night in Soho

Steve Earle — Christmas in Washington

Phoebe Bridgers — So Much Wine

Future Islands — Last Christmas