Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody is a quintessentially British Yuletide hit.
Released in November 1973, against the backdrop of national strikes and general misery, Slade’s rousing opus to the festive period was the band’s third song that year to go straight into the UK singles chart at No. 1.
“Nobody had ever done that,” Slade vocalist and co-songwriter Noddy Holder told The Big Issue in 2023. “Not even The Beatles. We had a gold record in the first week of release and it stayed at number one. We knew we’d got a hit record on our hands, but no way on earth did we think it would be going strong 50 years later.”
By 1973, Slade were one of the biggest bands in Britain, with a stream of hit singles including two No. 1 singles that year with Cum On Feel The Noize and Skweeze Me, Pleeze Me.
The band started out as The ‘N Betweens, formed in Wolverhampton in 1965 by drummer Don Powell and guitarist Dave Hill. In 1966, they recruited vocalist/guitarist Noddy Holder. The addition of classically-trained Jim Lea on bass guitar and violin completed the line-up.
The band built a fearsome reputation on the live circuit with a sound centred on R&B and Tamla Motown, while Holder’s flair for showmanship gave them a real visual focus.
In 1969, they renamed themselves Ambrose Slade and adopted a skinhead look, an ill-judged stylistic shift that simply made them look menacing.
But in 1971, having shortened their name to Slade, their manager Chas Chandler (former bassist of The Animals and manager of Jimi Hendrix) suggested they release a version of the Bobby Marchan song Get Down And Get With It. The song captured the energy of Slade’s live performances and by mid-August it had reached No. 16 in the UK charts.
The band grew their hair and allied themselves to the glam rock movement. Chandler demanded that they write a follow-up single and it took Lea and Holder just half an hour to come up with Coz I Luv You.
The first of many gleefully misspelt Slade hits, Coz I Luv You shot to No. 1 in the UK, while the follow-up Look Wot You Dun in 1972 reached No. 4. Subsequent singles Take Me Bak ’Ome and Mama Weer All Crazee Now both made No. 1 while the final single of 1972 , Gudbuy T’ Jane, reached No. 2 in the UK.
It was Chandler who suggested the idea of a Christmas single. The band were not keen but Jim Lea was spurred on by a comment from a relative. “Jim’s mother-in-law challenged him to come up with a Christmas song,” Noddy Holder told The Big Issue in December, 2023, “like a Bing Crosby song that would last forever. Jim sort of pooh-poohed it at first. But then he took it as a challenge.”
After coming up with the melody for the verse, Lea remembered a song that Holder had written called Buy Me A Rocking Chair.
“Nod had written the chorus of it in 1967,” Lea told Record Mirror in 1984. “The verse was naff but then he came to the chorus and went, ‘Buy me a rocking chair to watch the world go by, buy me a looking glass, I'll look you in the eye’ – very Sgt. Pepper. I never forgot that chorus, and I was in the shower in America somewhere thinking – Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan – and suddenly out came, ‘Are you hanging up the stocking on the wall’, and I thought that'll go with that chorus Nod did in ’67. So I rang Nod and said, ‘What about doing a Christmas song?’ He said, ‘Alright,’ So I played it to him and that was it.”
Holder then wrote the lyrics after a “heavy session” one evening at the band’s favourite pub, The Trumpet, in the Bilston area of Wolverhampton.
“Holder went back to his mum and dad’s house and sat in the kitchen and jotted down a list of all the obvious things people associate with Christmas,” wrote Daryl Easlea, author of the 2023 biography Whatever Happened To Slade?: When The Whole World Went Crazee. “It is an accessible, everyman celebration of the festive season. So simple, it was akin to a nursery rhyme. With lines about the anticipation, families arriving, dismissive yet jiving grannies, references to Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer, I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, snow, and the overall optimism, Merry Xmas Everybody is undoubtedly Holder’s greatest lyric.”
The song was written in a year of industrial unrest, which Holder’s referenced in the line: ‘Look to the future now, it's only just begun’. “I wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas,” Holder told the Mail On Sunday in November 2007. “Economically, the country was up the creek. The miners had been on strike, along with the gravediggers, the bakers and almost everybody else. I think people wanted something to cheer them up – and so did I. That's why I came up with that line.”
A few hours later, the song had really taken shape. “Once I got the line, ‘Does your granny always tell you that the old ones are the best?’ I knew I'd got a right cracker on my hands," Holder added. “It says it all.”
Lea and Holder then played the song to Chas Chandler on acoustic guitars and Chandler immediately predicted a No. 1 hit. Due to live commitments the band had to schedule the recording of the song in the middle of their US tour.
Then disaster struck. Ten weeks before they were due to record, drummer Don Powell was seriously injured in a car accident in which his girlfriend Angela Morris was tragically killed.
Powell remained in a coma for almost a week and suffered fractures to both ankles and five ribs. He slowly recovered from his physical injuries but went on to suffer from acute short-term memory loss and sensory problems.
By the time they began their tour of the east coast US, Powell was back behind the kit. The studio chosen to record Merry Xmas Everybody was the Record Plant, perched at the top of a skyscraper at 321 West 44th Street, New York. The recording took place in September 1973 in the middle of a freak heat wave.
”It was really hot and it certainly wasn’t Christmassy,” guitarist Dave Hill told the Yorkshire Post.
The band were using the building’s corridors in their bid to achieve a particular sound. “We said we needed an echoey room but in those days nobody went for this big, big sound that they're all into now,” Jim Lea told Record Mirror in 1984. “I said, ‘What about the hallway downstairs?’ They went, 'We can't use the hallway, there's all these businessmen walking through for the other offices.’ Anyway, we ran lines down to the hallway, and there we were in September singing ‘So here it is, merry Christmas!’ We were totally unknown over there and people thought we were mad!”
In an interview on Lea’s website, he recalls being in a state of “high anxiety” over the recording. Don Powell, due to his short-term memory loss, needed constant reminders of the song and his part on it. And according to Lea, the band were still not enamoured by the idea of a Christmas song.
“Don couldn’t remember anything and no-one would rehearse it with me,” recalled Lea. “They were against the idea. So what you hear on the track is me playing bass, acoustic guitar, piano and harmonium as the track was built out of thin air, through lack of rehearsal. Dave conceded to play electric guitar. Poor Don looked on in horror as he drummed a single rhythm just to get it down. I knew it was good, but there was only one player in the team. Everything I tried out is on the record as [the engineer] Dennis Faranti liked all the ideas I had. I dreaded hearing the mix, as we were on the road, while Chas and Dennis mixed it. I was relieved when I heard what was born from stress.”
The initial recording was rejected by the band, but a take recorded in the adjacent hallway was the one they chose. One key element selected by Lea for the intro was a harmonium. This instrument was loaned by John Lennon, who was in an adjacent studio completing his Mind Games album.
In an interview on ITV’s This Morning on 1 December 2020, Noddy Holder recalled being thrilled when John Lennon paid them a visit. ‘Lennon came in and… it was the best compliment I ever had… he said, ‘Oh I like the sound of this bloke, he sounds just like me’,” beamed Holder.
There’s a beautiful warmth and simplicity to Merry Xmas Everybody. From Don Powell’s stomping shuffle and Jim Lea’s deft walking bass lines to Dave Hill’s nifty guitar chords and Holder’s rich, bellowing vocal, the whole thing just soars.
Slade spent a total of five days recording Merry Xmas Everybody and despite their initial misgivings, the final mix exceeded all expectations. “We listened to it and it was bloody great,” Holder told The Big Issue in December 2023. “This was a hit record. Chas took it to the record company in London and they said, ‘We’re gonna put everything behind this. This is a multi-million seller!’”
And so it proved. Merry Xmas Everybody received half a million advance orders with a further 350,000 copies being bought upon its release.
The song shot to No.1 on 15 December 1973 and stayed there until the end of January 1974.
According to PRS for Music, 42% of the world’s population have heard Merry Xmas Everybody.
The song still notches up plays in 139 countries although, curiously, it is virtually never played in the United States, having not been released as a single there in 1973.
In 2015, it was estimated that the song generates £500,000 of royalties per year, which is why Noddy Holder refers to the song as his pension scheme.
Merry Xmas Everybody is a song with a joyous, exuberant spirit that perfectly evokes the giddy essence of Christmas. As Uncut magazine put it in December 2013: “Jim Lea’s simple melody, Dave Hill’s chunky chords and Noddy Holder’s lyrics contain the perfect blend of nostalgia and optimism that help define the Christmas experience for many… Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody might not be the first Christmas song, it might not even be the best Christmas song, but it’s surely one of the most important, the most memorable, the most successful and the most, well, Christmassy.”
