Our list of the 50 Best Holiday Songs of All Time wouldn’t have been complete without a nod to Cocteau Twins’ “Frosty the Snowman, ”a seasonal holiday classic. As it happens, the band’s bassist and keyboardist, Simon Raymonde, has made Christmas music a family business; his father, the late arranger and composer Ivor Raymonde, once played an integral part in Britain’s Christmas cheer. We’ll let Raymonde take it from here.
Growing up in the UK during the ’60s and ’70s, the concept of “holidays ”meant trips to decaying, windswept seaside towns or, if you were very lucky, a week on a beach in Spain or Portugal. In 1962, on one such seaside visit to West Wittering near Bognor Regis—both real places, I should add—my father Ivor Raymonde wrote a melody that would change his and his young wife's lives forever. He had been working with a country-folk band called the Springfields, but with singer Dusty about to launch her solo career, together with lyricist Mike Hawker, he presented her with the song “I Only Want to Be With You.” The rest is history. In 1962, Dusty's parents moved to Hove, Brighton in East Sussex, and it is a delightful coincidence that I was born the same year. Fifty years later, I moved to within 100 meters of that very house, and here I remain to this day.
Along with his work producing, composing and arranging for Dusty Springfield, my father wrote string arrangements for the Walker Brothers (“The Sun Ain't Gonna Shine Anymore,” clearly not a holiday song), a young David Bowie (“Love You Till Tuesday”), and many others. At the time, he was one of the top three arrangers in London.
By 1977, when my own ears had been pricked by punk rock, and my conscience enlightened by the music of the Slits, the Clash, Wire, the Pop Group, and more, I spent the rest of my teens at gigs most every night. My father and I both were obsessed with music, but at wholly opposite ends of the spectrum. He loved jazz like Billie Holiday, and great soul singers like Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, the Commodores, Heatwave, and Rufus and Chaka Khan. In October of that year, the Sex Pistols’ “Holidays in the Sun” was released; as a 15-year-old punk, I loved the sneering sarcasm of John Lydon as he sang of “the new Belsen,” pointing fingers at both politicians and the elite.
Meanwhile, the Ivor Raymonde Orchestra & Singers were releasing a compilation of jolly holly-day songs on the 20-track LP Holidays ’77. You would call this “easy listening.” (I’ll take a wild guess that the most “popular” holiday songs these days generally include the word “Christmas,” so it is to his credit that not one track on Holiday ’77 even mentioned Xmas.)
Aged 15 and growingly anti-establishment, the idea of liking any traditional “holiday ”song, let alone recording one, couldn’t have been further from my mind. (Fast forward to 1993.) My early holiday song memories are, of course, mostly by Slade and Wizzard, but also, curiously, “Hava Nagila” looms large, mostly because Dad would play it at family gatherings and, while celebratory, it seems kinda doom-y.
Our tastes were clearly more out-of-sync then, but he lent me his four-track cassette recorder when I was 15 and starting to learn the bass, primarily by playing along to Never Mind the Bollocks. I'll never forget what he said when I asked him if he liked the Pistols: “If I was your age, I would love it, too.” That Christmas, he showed what a top feller he was when he bought me possibly the first punk holiday song ever, on 7 ”by the Ravers, “(It’s Gonna Be a) Punk Rock Christmas.”
Having children will soften even the most punk-rock heart, and while I am sure that some of the more hardcore Cocteau Twins fans may still balk at the Christmas EP we released, playfully titled Snow (was it for festive reasons or for the cocaine connotation? I really cannot recall), we were all young parents by this time. Our own CD collections were increasing every tour, now including the likes of Bing Crosby, Jackie Gleason Christmas albums, and the brilliant Vince Guaraldi Trio’s soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas. I guess we liked the idea of flying in the face of fashions and expectation.
Within a whirlwind year of emotional ups and downs, I experienced death, marriage, birth, and the release of my band's most successful record Heaven or Las Vegas—one my father would never get to hear. I discovered my own sentimentality along with an appreciation of his. He died in June 1990, just as my first wife Karen and I were due to be married. Although we postponed it, we did marry later, and when my first son Stan became bewitched by the magic of Christmas, I found some of Ivor’s old Christmas records to play. I remember two in particular that he was involved with: Christmas with the Springfields with Dusty on vocals, singing a very merry “Twelve Days of Christmas,” and an awful comedy record from ’62 called A Cockney Christmas by Dick Emery, a comedian who would later become a big star on the BBC, although I am not sure why.
Modesty forbids me to comment on the merits or otherwise of my own band’s versions of “Winter Wonderland” and “Frosty the Snowman,” but put it this way: The 54-year-old me is much like the 24-year-old me, in terms of feeling disturbed at the current state of our lands—so the likelihood of me recording cheery Christmas songs again is slim. In fact with every passing day, I feel more and more like Larry David than I care to admit. Since my sons left home a few years ago, the “family” Christmas really hasn’t been the same, until now; for the first time in maybe 10 years, this Christmas will be spent with my mum (now 90 years old), my two brilliant sons Stan and Will, my brother Nick, my adorable wife Abbey, and our new puppy Bodhi. As we all get ready to drive down to my mum’s flat on Christmas Day morning, we will of course put Christmas With the Springfields and Holiday ‘77 on the turntable to get us in the mood, and even this old punk will quietly shed a tear.
These days, Simon Raymonde runs the labelBella Union (Father John Misty, Beach House, Explosions in the Sky) and started a new band this year called Lost Horizons. Next year he will release Paradise — The Sound of Ivor Raymonde, a double vinyl release of the work of his late father, in the 20th year of Bella Union.