I Pray God It's Our Last.

Hello. How are you?

I don't normally welcome the reader to my blog but it's my first for a week, the longest break since I started, so I thought I'd say hello and welcome back. Thanks for reading. Really appreciate it. Oh, and merry Christmas.

The season has begun. Last night I did my first Christmas gig of the year and I realised that we are all in an interesting time of year. Wherever we go for the next month we will all hear music that we hate. We will complain about hearing these awful festive tunes and the fact that we cannot avoid them. Slade's Merry Christmas Everybody, Wizard's I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day and Gary Glitter's Another Rock n' Roll Christmas will be played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and fucking played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and played and we will be upset.

Upset at hearing the same awful songs over and over and just simply coming to terms with the fact that apparently it's fine to play Gary Glitter songs as long as it's only at Christmas time. It is a time for children after all.

We will be upset and we will complain. "Not this again", we will think to ourselves. "I fucking hate Shakin' Stevens. Even his non-Christmas catalogue is not to my taste, if I'm being very, very honest". BUT....

We will also say BRILLIANT very loudly when The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl's Fairytale Of New York gets played. That's the Christmas song that everyone in the world likes. At this time of year, we are all drowning in the 3000ft swamp of excrement that is Christmas music and when someone throws us the life preserver of The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl's Fairytale of New York we grab it and cheer.

Then, in two weeks time, we will all hear that song for what we hope will be the last time ever. It too will be overplayed beyond recognition. It will become one of THEM. It will change, from something we trusted, something we thought could never let us down, something we loved.... into a bastard. A lying bastard. A lying, cheating bastard that now has now decided that the company of Wham!, Johnny Mathis and The fucking Darkness is more preferable to just being with you. That song definitely said it was yours once, remember? It said it was yours and not for the thick that actually get happy when they hear Mary's Boy Child.

In two weeks time, we will hate that song for letting us down so badly. And it hurts. So much. Battering it with it's own golf clubs is too good for it but we will do it anyway. And that's it for us and that record. We've given it chance after chance but no more. No matter how charming it might appear, we won't fall for it again. Oh, it can try to woo us with it's " I regret those transgressions", "I have not been true to my values" and it's utterly baffling claim that it's a professional "athlete" when it so obviously isn't but we know that it's all just words. Meaningless words that are meant simply to manipulate.

And it works. This time next year we will pretend that the hurt is something we can handle. We'll even be happy to hear it again. I mean, it's a great song. And, my God, it's better than anything else around.

IT. USES. US. Remember that.

Please let me know if you think I'm taking this all too seriously.

By the way, last night's gig in Reading was fine. In fact, it was kind of a classic Christmas gig. Some listened, some didn't. Some laughed, some didn't. But mainly, it was better than I expected. I left just as John Maloney started his set and was doing an excellent job and getting big laughs. I mean, who needs to stay and see that?

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