‘Walk Out To Winter’ represents what floppy-fringed pioneers Frame, Collins, Grogan and the innumerable others who followed in their counting-me-in-and-couting-me-out-ripping-it-up-and-starting-again-not-talking-to-me-aboutlo-o-ovvvvve musical footsteps got up to around the Christmastime. But what of their transatlantic contemporaries, with their obsession with college radio airplay, the use of the hideous term ‘alt-rock’, and insistence on singing “O! Christmas tree, O! Christmas tree, oh tree of green unchanging” to the tune of the opening theme from Citizen Smith? If imported television Christmas specials are anything to go by, not least the perennial favourite A Charlie Brown Christmas with its parade of wry amusements at the expense of various quaint customs while the titular jagged-stripe-jumpered curmudgeon wearily sighs “my only dog, gone commercial” before being shown the true meaning of Christmas by Peppermint Patty and that weird girl who called her ‘Sir’, they have all manner of weird and alien customs over there (it’s a fair bet that the hateful, loathsome practice of ‘Secret Santa’ has its roots in the good ol’ US of A) that undoubtedly make their Christmastimes into an imperceptibly yet profoundly different experience. It’s unlikely that said college radio-favoured ‘alt-rock’ types would be able to avoid this even by cunningly retreating to their ‘loft’ apartment for the duration of the festive season, and yet surprisingly few have ever elected to set their experiences to music.
Best known at that time for their mildly controversial single I Know What Boys Like, a surprisingly explicit anthem of female sexual dominance (“I got my cat moves, that so upset them, zippers and buttons, fun to frustrate them”), The Waitresses were very much the American counterparts of the likes of Aztec Camera, emerging from the emaciated shadow of The Ramones, Blondie and Television with an artier, funkier take on the hallmarks of punk rock that was in effect the first stirrings of Stateside ‘indie’ (do we really have to call it ‘alt-rock’???).
Christmas Wrapping, which over time would become their best known song, was originally released as a single in December 1981. Although it seems likely, quite whether the title was supposed to be a pun on the concept of ‘rapping’ is not entirely clear – it’s certainly true that vocalist Patty Donahue employed a semi ‘spoken-sung’ performance style, but she did that on most of the band’s regular releases too so it was hardly an even worth signposting in a song title. Also, the lyrics have a definite and structured narrative and are some distance from both the more discursive style favoured by actual rap music, and from the once predominant now-historically swamped American slang term of ‘rapping’ (in other words, chatting in a light conversational style) about a given subject. In fact there had been a Yuletide-themed rap record called Christmas Rapping a couple of years earlier, courtesy of genre pioneer Kurtis Blow. The mainstream audience in the UK initially seemed far more receptive to rap than their Stateside counterparts, and the single was enough of a success to land Blow a slot on Top Of The Pops. Weirdly, it seems almost to have been forgotten about in the intervening years, but it was covered in the excellent BBC1 documentary Platforms At Christmas a couple of years back, in which the rapper (who barely looked a day older than he did then) revealed that he had no idea just how significant a show Top Of The Pops was, and visibly cringed at the sight of himself in a decades-old tweed jacket.
Like Walk Out To Winter, Christmas Wrapping is not set to an overtly Christmassy arrangement, preferring to adhere to the art-funk sound that had effectively had its ultimate roots in The Velvet Underground but which had been streamlined through the punk era into a more commercially-orientated classy pop sound. As if to signpost the band’s intent from the outset, the track opens with a tinkly sleigh bell and toy piano intro that is interrupted by a gloriously impolite rasping guitar riff and a nice bit of warming up from the bassist and the drummer, before settling into an insistent choppy rhythm with some neat drum fills and revving guitar sounds, and the occasional appearance of what appears to be the sound of a reversed sleigh bell. The only real problem with the arrangement is that the saxophone accompaniment hasn’t worn tremendously well; in retrospect, although it was no doubt far from what a band like The Waitresses would have intended, it represents the first stirrings of the nasty LA Law-style ‘American saxophone’ sound that was inescapable for much of the rest of the decade (and which The Housemartins would memorably trash on the superb b-side Step Outside, complaining that “my fingers are always in their ears, but the reed’s always in their mouth”). Worse still, there is a recurring break that sounds as though it more rightly belongs to some horrendous BBC daytime ‘reality magazine’ show presented by Carol Smillie, and towards the end it goes as unhinged as the deliberately off-kilter saxophone playing on Vic Reeves’ album I Will Cure You (another that was no doubt routinely demanded as a Christmas present in 1991).
However, even in this historically-tarnished sense it still works well in the context of the song, as it complements the lyrics brilliantly as it creates great mental images of a tacky and sentimental but nonetheless enjoyable TV Movie featuring Jennifer Aniston as the song’s protagonist, and no doubt indulging in her time-honoured habit of spending her screen time skating around wherever that building is that all Americans in films are required to skate in front of at Christmas by law.
The narrative of Christmas Wrapping can effectively be distilled down to an age-old story of girl-meets-boy-but-forgets-cranberry-sauce (or should that be “I buried Paul”/”Cranberry Paul”/”I buried sauce”?), but this story is told in a distinctive and highly personal first-person observational style. It begins with an amusing exclamation of “bah humbug, no, that’s too strong”, outlining that the narrator desperately wants to enjoy Christmas but “all this year’s been a busy blur, don’t think I have the energy”. She is still annoyed that the previous year’s “ski shop encounter, most interesting” (and assuming that this is the same narrator as that of I Know What Boys Like, we can only guess at what she got up to during that ‘encounter’, particularly bearing in mind the intriguing understatement) and that she “had his number but never the time, most of ’81 passed along those lines”, and that while she is all for the decking of halls and trimming of trees, she just needs “to catch my breath, Christmas by myself this year”.
So she turns down all of her party invitations, bemoaning the fact that “A&P has provided me with the world’s smallest Turkey”, but realising when it’s half cooked that she has forgotten that all-important cranberry sauce (it is alleged that if you play all that line backwards, you can quite audibly hear the hidden message “Stig has been dead for ages honestly, The Walrus was that boring old BBC Schools programme about spelling and grammar that had an unrelated caption card featuring loads of unidentified teens with The Tomorrow People haircuts, Ken Boon is not the cake, and we won’t allow The Goodies Rule – OK? to come out on DVD”), and traipses off to the local all-night grocery where – surprise surprise – she bumps into that guy from the ski shop last year as “Christmas magic’s brought this tale to a very happy ending”, and the chorus’ previous cry of “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas, but I think I’ll miss this one this year” mutates into “but I wouldn’t miss this one this year” (presumably, she knew what he liked). Packed with pleasing incidental descriptions like “on with the boots, back out in the snow”, the engaging song is almost like the other side of the coin to the contemporaneous and equally compelling vision of New York life depicted in Joe Jackson’s Stepping Out, representing how the cash-strapped arty types were probably spending their Christmases while the forgotten piano-pounding new-wave hero was persuading a hotel chambermaid to dress up in disproportionately expensive clothes and play at being rich aesthetes for a night (while, erm, travelling by yellow taxi – no expense spared on that particular romantic escapade, obviously).
Christmas Wrapping sadly attracted very little attention in the USA at the time of release – in fact, the band never were that successful in their homeland, and the nearest that they came to breaking through to a larger audience was when they provided the theme song for long-forgotten sitcom Square Pegs (about two nerdy misfit teenage girls, one of whom was played by a very young Sarah Jessica Parker) – but strangely it seemed to strike a chord in Britain, where it became a perennial radio favourite and also attracted two ill-advised cover versions well over a decade later. The first of these was by The Peaches, an ad hoc studio-based girl band featuring one girl who used to be a member of earlier failed girl band Milan along with a pre-fame Martine McCutcheon, and another who was once a regular cast member of Grange Hill in the days when it had already begun the slide into predictable issue-crusading mediocrity. Their version not only shortened the song by an entire verse (which did appear elsewhere as part of the 12” mix), but also changed the lyrics to “Santa has provided me with the world’s smallest turkey”, clearly not wanting to risk the wrath of the broadcasting authorities for plugging one of those feared ‘brand names’, but also considering the original to be far too esoteric for audiences who spend most of their time watching virtually identical references in American sitcoms. The single bombed, despite (or perhaps because of) Steve Wright’s enthusiastic support on Radio 1, but it did later find a small degree of notoriety amongst those who were given to buying those bundled packs of five flop CD singles that record shops were keen on selling off cheaply at the time. The second was by The Spice Girls, in their dismal cadaverous ‘style’-obsessed post-Geri Halliwell incarnation, and must surely rank as one of the worst ideas in popular culture ever. The fact that it appeared on the flipside of a single that bore the legend ‘Goodbye Spice Girls’ on the cover is really all that needs to be said. Although it isn’t quite goodbye Spice Girls yet, as they’ll be making another appearance later on.
ON THE TWELFTH DAY OF CHRISTMAS… it’s a Waitresses-less Waitresses, as mimed to by an odd duo going by the name of ‘Owen Frost’…
