We've all heard someone's granny say it - usually after a couple of sherries when her bloomers are starting to show and she's up dancing. The single was certified Silver for sales of , copies on pre-orders alone—"the first time a single has done this since the days of the Beatles ," the missive touted—and sold , copies the first week of release.
Naturally, "Merry Xmas Everybody" entered the U. The song regularly re-enters the U. I think it's because of the way the melody lilts around and it's got a happy-sad feel.
It sounds nostalgic. Home News. Despite its association with the British working class, it was actually recorded at the Record Plant in New York, [5] where, in an adjoining studio, musician John Lennon was working on his album Mind Games.
Lennon planned to use a harmonium , which Slade's producer Chas Chandler decided the song needed. The first sequence is then repeated, with the final chorus sung four times. On the last rendition, Holder screams out "It's Christmas!
For the line "Are you hanging up a stocking on your wall? You can imagine why we never released that. I like a hot toddy when I get up on Christmas morning, then I shall have a drop of wine at lunchtime. Christmas is a family time, and you always want the family around. There are good songs today, as there were in the past. In the older days, it always used to snow regularly at Christmas, so using your sleigh was something we did. It sets the mood for the whole of Christmas, I reckon.
And yes, I will be outside building a snowman with my little lad if it does snow. If you have fun and a sense of humour, you can get by in most situations. It takes me a bit of time to warm up these days, but my enthusiasm has not waned over the years. At parties, I tend to get too pissed to care what anyone else thinks, ha ha! Noddy Holder in , followed by Dave Hill , Slade's guitarist.
Before its release, "Merry Xmas Everybody" received about half a million advance orders. Polydor, Slade's record label, were forced to use their French pressing plant to keep up with the demand, and the song eventually went on to sell over one million copies, [8] becoming the Christmas number one of , beating another Christmas-themed song, " I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday " by Wizzard. When it was used as a b-side, we didn't even know it was being used, it was chosen by the offices.
We were in America recording the Christmas single, there was a rush to choose what to put on the back of it, and that track happened to be used. For the best single of the s, "Merry Xmas Everybody" placed at 2.
A Slade spokesman at the time said this was exaggerated. For the song's first CD single release in the late s, the Slade fan club of early had confirmed the CD single had sold 15, copies within the UK. In a December interview with Record Mirror , the magazine tested Lea's memory by asking him to recall the story behind certain hits.
In those days it was all flower power and Sgt. Pepper and Nod had written this tune. The verse was naff but then he came to the chorus and went 'Buy me a rocking chair to watch the world go by, buy me a looking glass, I'll look you in the eye' - very Sgt. I don't use tape recorders, I just remember everything and if something's been written 10 or 15 years ago, it stays up there in my head.
I never forgot that chorus, and I was in the shower in America somewhere thinking - Boy Dylan, Boy Dylan - and suddenly out came 'are you hanging up the stocking on the wall' and I thought that'll go with that chorus Nod did in ' So I rang Nod and said what about doing a Christmas song and he said alright, so I played it to him and that was it.
We recorded it in the Record Plant in New York which is on top of a skyscraper. We said we needed an echoey room but in those days nobody went for this big, big sound that they're all into now.
These engineers thought we were mad, they're going 'no man, you know the Eagles , a very tight sound, ' Hotel California and all that pinging out of the speakers at you. I said what about the hallway downstairs and they went 'we can't use the hallway, there's all these businessmen walking through for the other offices'. Anyway we ran lines down to the hallway and there we were in September singing 'so here it is merry Xmas' and we were totally unknown over there and people thought we were mad.
Of course it was a monster hit and now we have to keep competing with it every Christmas. Polydor send us crates of champagne every year and we keep telling them, we don't drink the stuff, we don't like it - give us beer.
Although most of the band weren't too convinced, Jim Lea came up with the majority of the song while having a shower. After writing the verse melody, Lea remembered a song Noddy Holder had got rid of in , which he had written when the band were still called the 'N Betweens.
Speaking to Record Mirror in , Lea said: "Nod had written the chorus of it in In those days it was all flower power and Sgt. Pepper and Nod had written this tune. I never forgot that chorus, and I was in the shower in America somewhere thinking - Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan - and suddenly out came "are you hanging up the stocking on the wall" and I thought that'll go with that chorus Nod did in ' After a night out at the pub, Noddy finished the song at his mother's house in Walsall.
Speaking to the Daily Mail in , he said: "We'd decided to write a Christmas song and I wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas. The miners had been on strike, along with the grave-diggers, the bakers and almost everybody else.
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