THIS IS CHRISTMAS

No point in having a blog if you can’t go off topic every so often and do a little bit of advertising for a friend. So the lovely and beautiful Petula Clark, pictured recently after a performance in Canada, and looking about half as old as she should be, has her first ever Christmas album out in the USA. It’s a mixture of traditional Christmas songs, carols and new stuff, some of which she wrote herself.

I’m not much of a Christmas person. I’ve seen how the commercialisation of the festival has changed it from being a warm, bright and cheery time in the middle of the winter, when families and friends got together, exchanged gifts and spent a day together, into a mad frenzy of money spending, gluttony and drunkenness. We now all know far more about how disastrous it will be for the “High Street”, if we don’t all dig deep, or rather put it all on our credit cards, and fill up their tills, than we do about why we are celebrating in the first place. And, although I’m not a Christian, I think that’s a bit sad. I can’t imagine any other religion that would allow itself to be so hijacked.

Working in some of the poorer parts of the city here, I’ve often seen people in real misery, having not yet paid off last Christmas’s excesses, and still taking on more debt to ensure that their kids aren’t left out... and at the same time, I’ve listened to colleagues boast about how much money they have spent on their children, the lucky ones whose parents have a job. So, you’ll not find me raving much about the joys of Christmas. I’ve seen too many of the miseries.

But, back to our Pet. I’ve been a fan ever since I was a little lad, and I think I have every single thing that she has ever recorded in a multitude of languages and formats from 78 rpm records to laser discs.

The album is of course just plain magic, what else would you expect? My favourite tracks are a soulful version of “Silent Night” as sung at the Icelandic Frost Roses Gala a couple of years ago in Reykjavík. A beautiful recording of “Il est ne, le devin enfant”, a fabulous new song written by Petula “Butterfly in the Snow” and an amazing “Away in a Manger”, where she first sings the version that is sung here in the Europe, then the one that is sung in the States, then joins them together, hands across the sea.... and finally both French and English versions of the “Little Drummer Boy”

Well, of course if it’s not your cup of tea then you won’t want it, but if you are looking for some Christmas music, you could do a lot worse than "This is Christmas". Unfortunately it is not released in Scotland, so it has to be bought online. You can find it on http://www.petulaclark.net/ .... where you'll hear a bit of “Butterfly in the Snow” as a wee bonus.

.....and no, she’s not paying me for this. I wish!...:¬)