Hang the DJ 30/7/08 14:01 Page 308
5 ‘White Christmas’ – Bing Crosby (1942, 1947),
Darlene Love (1963) and Michael Bolton (1996)
The most ubiquitous and covered Christmas pop song,
Irving Berlin’s classic number had its debut as a duet in
HANG THE DJ Holiday Inn (the film, not the chain of inexpensive
hotels), but the definitive Bing version was recorded five
years later. It’s a song all about mythologising
Christmas, wanting it to be something it’s unlikely to be
ever again, something you may have misremembered
from your childhood. Crosby’s very grown-up vocal
makes it a dignified resignation, passing on the baton to
another for the hope of a white Christmas now that his
own hopes seem so remote. Darlene Love’s glorious Phil
Spector version taps into the absurdity of the song as
Berlin originally conceived it: ‘There’s never been such a
day in old LA’, she says of the sunny weather, making it
not a lament but a joke at the expense of the myth itself
and our expectations of it. Michael Bolton’s cover is
notable only because his frantic over-emoting makes the
song sound like it’s a desperate apology from a prisoner
to a victim whose life he has somehow ruined, and for
whom a white Christmas is the best they can now hope
for (‘May all your Christmases be white’ has never
sounded so desperate). A song for all seasons, surpris-
ingly.
4 ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’ – Band Aid (1984),
Band Aid II (1989) and Band Aid 20 (2004)
What is to be said? Not the best song in the world, but
the three versions do tell us something about the evolu-
tion of pop in the last quarter-century. In 1984 British
pop was on a world-beating high, full of pretentiously
308
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7