"Merry Christmas Everyone" by Stylusboy

As I neither want you to think of me as a Grinch or Scrooge figure nor to think of myself, I have had to adjust myself to special Christmas releases and recalibrate my critical tools.

OK: they are often a thing unto themselves and while some local artists have produced interesting original season songs, covers become proportionately more popular. All that I ask is that people don't get tempted into dubbing on sleigh-bells please.

Fortunately, Stylusboy has so much credit with me through his excellent, sensitive original compositions that the odd cover is perfectly acceptable: and since the profits go to Coventry Foodbank, I'm more than happy to tell you about his own contribution to this niche genre.

As you'll have worked out, it's Stylusboy's very own electro-indie (recorded in his own Truffle Room studio) take on Shakin' Stevens' "Merry Christmas Everyone" (written by Bob Heatlie) which has been a British musical institution for nearly forty Christmases. There is also a "stripped back" take clocking in appropriately at a few seconds shorter. Oh and when you buy it on his Bandcamp page https://stylusboy.bandcamp.com/album/merry-christmas-everyone) which you can now do, you also receive an exclusive digital Christmas card designed by Fig and Joy. You can also access the whole package a week earlier than it's available on more general streaming platforms if you go with the Bandcamp option.

‘It would be super-churlish in these circumstances to bear down critically on a charitable single but thankfully as it's Stylusboy performing I don't have to equivocate about the quality of performance: indeed such is his delicacy of approach that you may, as I did, detect within it, nuances of pathos which Shaky's original more exuberant mainstream romp didn't dive down into. It's not a masterpiece of complex experienced emotions perhaps, but it's a genuine gesture of goodwill and benevolence and if the original rather assumes a homogenous party-led Christmastime for us all, then Stylusboy's new reading reminds us that the season is not wholly joyous for everyone, that we should be conscious that many will face significant challenges and we really ought take positive steps to help them.

Now go out & buy it please. It is a ‘pay what you want' release so you can be as generous as you are able to be.