The final seasonal Music Monday is (probably) a little bit more familiar: it’s the Queen song and you can’t go wrong with a bit of Queen!

It was released as a single in 1984 and surprisingly, it wasn’t a massive hit (Brian May thinks this was because of the lack of a video; the fact it overlapped with “Do They Know It’s Christmas” may also have been a bit of a factor, though!), but it’s a gorgeous gem of a track.

If Tom Petty’s Christmas song is the one that gets your party started, Jona Lewie’s makes you think and Troika takes you for an afternoon sleigh ride, then this is how you close out the day. It’s a slow hug of a song to dance to when the kids are in bed and things are calming down.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little series and maybe you’ve found a new Christmas favourite. Music Monday will take a break next week and then the Elsehere Soundtrack will resume for the release of Valkyrie.

You can find my Christmas With a Twist playlist on Spotify.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!

Veering away from popular music this week, we have the 4th movement from Prokofiev’s Lieutenant Kijé suite that I’m certain almost everyone will recognise. Even if you don’t know Prokofiev, the theme crops up in plenty of places, including Greg Lake’s “I Believe in Father Christmas”

I’ve adored this piece of music since I was a very wee tiny thing and one of my fondest memories from my teenage years was mastering this on the clarinet for my Grade 4 exam. So much fun (and, uh, just a few squeaks while I was learning – sorry neighbours!)

It’s a simple melody, but with the percussion it always makes me think of taking a sleigh ride through a winter wonderland and I love the freedom that thought brings.

You can find my Christmas With a Twist playlist on Spotify.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!

It’s another Music Monday and today is the Jona Lewie anti-war song.

It’s not an obvious Christmas song, and yet…it pops up on Christmas compelations with regularity. (I believe this puzzles him, too!) It gets there for several reasons:

1. The song was a hit in the UK in December of 1980
2. It features the line “I wish I could be at home for Christmas”
3. The brass arrangement just SOUNDS like it should be in a Christmas song.

All of these are…tenuous at best, but they all add up. So, while I know it’s a protest song (it’s not even subtle – “Bang! That’s another bomb on another town/While the Tsar and Jim have tea”), I hear it it does make me feel Christmassy…but the lyrics also make me stop and think and recognise just how lucky I’ve been.

You can find my Christmas With a Twist playlist on Spotify.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!

And we’re back with a seasonal series of posts about my favourite Christmas music. For anyone fearing the worst, no, a certain song written by George Michael won’t be featuring. Nor will a certain infamous seasonal track by Mariah Carrey.

Instead, I’m going for the more quirky – and probably rather less played – stuff. Things that you may never have heard before and things that (hopefully) won’t induce you to groan. To kick things off, then, a track by Tom Petty and it was written for the charity album ‘A Very Special Christmas 2’.

So what can I say about this? Well, it’s a very…Tom Petty Christmas song. It has humour (“Long distance relatives/Haven’t seen ’em in a long, long time/Yeah I kinda missed them/I just don’t wanna kiss them!”) and it never ceases to make me smile when I hear it. It’s about the perfect summation of a REAL Christmas holiday, as opposed to the Hallmark version.

There’s no broken hearts or schmaltz and schmoop, just a lot of fun and dancing. Kids having fun. And it finishes with one of the best Christmas wishlists!

You can find my Christmas With a Twist playlist on Spotify.

That’s all for now. Happy reading and listening!