Christmas All Over Again - Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers

Here's another non-typical Christmas song with rocky undertones. Christmas All Over Again by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers reminds me of years of Christmas seasons with my band. We didn't play this number ourselves but it was part of the Christmas CD I'd play during our third break ... actually, that brings back mixed memories but this is one of the songs I preferred listening to every December.

Santa Claus Is Coming To Town - Bruce Springsteen & The E Street Band

If you Google Santa Claus Is Coming To Town, you will find versions by dozens of artists - just check out this list! One I like (even if it borders on cliché) is by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band. Again, there are heaps of versions of the band performing this live at Christmas shows, each with its own variation on the ad lib at the start. It picks up near the middle and turns into quite a rocky version, one which even goes well with ukulele backing! What will Santa Claus bring you for Christmas?

Fairytale of New York - The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl

As clichéd as this song has become in bars and Irish pubs around the world, Fairytale of New York by The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl is essentially a bittersweet love song with something for everyone: hope, cheap romance and passion, as well as drunkenness, naughty words and insults for the boys to chuckle at. A working class immigrant couple down on their luck are plagued by alcoholism and drug addiction before being swallowed up by the big apple itself ... dreams are crushed and reality bites. All good Christmas themes, right? ;-)

Snoopy's Christmas - The Royal Guardsmen

And so begins Café Chick's 12 days of Christmas. :-)

Here's a song to polarise the punters. I've decided to start with it and see who sticks around. As a huge Snoopy fan growing up, Snoopy's Christmas by The Royal Guardemen is my annual Christmas indulgence. I spent years of Decembers playing it in my bands and somehow still manage to love it to this day. Three key changes and some great keyboard lines - what's not to love?

Reckless - Australian Crawl

I might say this a lot, but I really mean it when I say that Reckless by Australian Crawl is one of my favourite songs of all time. The lyrics left me always wanting to catch the Manly Ferry to Circular Quay the next time I was in Sydney, something which is not as glamorous as this song makes it sound.

From its simple start featuring nothing but fretless bass, kick drum and a gated snare, the magic of this song is largely in the gaps between notes ; teasers, if you like, or pregnant pauses filled with anticipation. (Gosh, that's poetic for a Friday!) The bowed cello parts are complemented beautifully by a lightly plucked nylon acoustic guitar, which comes to the fore and steals the scene during the classical style solo and outro. Pure magic.

Mary Had A Little Lamb - Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble

I was taught to enjoy Stevie Ray Vaughan by my musician father, who has every one of SRV's albums, copies of which have made it onto both of my iPods over the years. There is almost too much to say about Stevie Ray Vaughan, the roller coaster lifestyle he led and his massive contribution to modern blues guitar playing. Like many, I vividly remember being touched by the news that SRV had met an untimely death in 1990.

The guitarist in my former band was the ultimate SRV fan and it showed in his playing. On the tragic day of SRV's death, his wife set up his guitar in the lounge, arranged candles, flowers and all his SRV albums around it, creating a little shrine for the man. Apparently that was going a step or two too far (the emotions were pretty raw) but it's a story we've all dined out on for years. However, thanks to him and my father, I have an ongoing love of all his music today.

There's another story in our musical circles about the time that SRV played a concert in Wellington several years ago (still the loudest concert my father has ever been to). Another guitarist from our band insists he was jamming in The Rock Shop, or whatever it was called in those days, alongside an American guitarist who had wandered in. It turned out to be SRV himself. How cool is that!

Mary Had A Little Lamb, released in 1983, is not my favourite Stevie Ray Vaughan song but is incredibly memorable for me, my family and our bands. We played this version of Buddy Guy's arrangement as part of our fourth bracket for years for purely indulgent reasons; it was our excuse to play long and loud, with each of us enjoying a solo or two on a simple bed of twelve bar blues. Hearing it again today takes me right back to those late nights and good times. Once again, listen to this one loudly.

Nightswimming - R.E.M.

I went through a stage of really liking R.E.M. back in the 90s before I reached saturation point with their music a few years ago. I still occasionally enjoy spinning the odd R.E.M. album but listen to them a lot less these days. Nightswimming was released in 1993 and is so very different to the usual R.E.M. sound, which is what first caught my attention.

As a pianist, I love how this entire song is built around a single, circular piano line (and a few of its variations) played repeatedly. The string arrangement was done by the legendary John Paul Jones and Songfacts tells me that it was written and played on the same piano featured in Derek and the Dominos' Layla; that's a pretty cool.To be honest, I've barely ever listened to the lyrics or much beyond the piano part and orchestration, but I'm allowed to be biased. ;-)

Zoot Suit Riot - Cherry Poppin' Daddies

Zoot Suit Riot is a ska swing song by Cherry Poppin' Daddies. It is big band style swing music with a definite ska twist. In the late 1990s, swing music was yet to experience the renaissance of recent years and I remember noting this song as something distinctly different from other music of the day.

Zoot Suit Riot is more memorable than a particular favourite for me. Around the time it was released in 1997, my mother was in hospital. As she was in the process of waking up after her operation, she kept mumbling something about a bottle of beer. As someone who doesn't drink and had just had surgery, we thought this was a really strange thing for her to say. It wasn't until we'd got her home and she was listening to the radio that she said, "that's the song the doctors were listening to!". Hopefully she meant before theatre, and not during her surgery when she should have been well and truly anaesthetised!

Dream Police - Cheap Trick

Dream Police is the title track from an album released in 1979 by Cheap Trick, a highly underrated American rock band. It is a very cleverly organised aural represenation of a nightmare. (That doesn't sound quite right; I know plenty of other songs that are aural nightmares, but they're not clever at all. The key word here is: organised.)

Dream Police is a feast of orchestration, integrating driving string lines with an intense rock sound. The lengthy solo sequence has a definite pattern if you listen closely before the ongoing nightmare resumes when the chorus come crashing in again. I've listened to that bridge over and over and over and was chuffed when I eventually clicked on the 2:1 phrasing. Once again, this is a song best enjoyed repeatedly and loud.

She's Not There - The Zombies

She's Not There was released by English rock band The Zombies in 1964. The tone is distinctively different to your usual 60s pop sound, even if the image of the band remains somewhat sanitised and respectably scrubbed up.

The song pumps up during each verse before abruptly stopping and letting the bass calm things down again. Listen for the lower harmony; it's what defines the tone of the song at any given point as the chords modulate between major and minor keys. Add a distinctively melodic bass line and a superbly anticipated electric piano solo (there is a complete stop before the solo begins) and you have the makings of something really different.

There are a few versions of this song floating around, some of them pretty good, but The Zombies' original composition remains my favourite.

There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) - Eurythmics

I've been going through a bit of a pop resurgence lately. There Must Be An Angel (Playing With My Heart) from 1985 typefies the 80s sound and presents it in an upbeat, positive package sans cheese. Eurythmics (not The Eurythmics, as they are commonly yet incorrectly called) were far better musicians than their synthesised demeanours suggest. One thing's for certain, no-one else has a voice like Annie Lennox; no-one even comes close, but that's not all there is to this duo. 

There Must Be An Angel is my favourite Eurythmics song (but a few of their other numbers are not far behind). To me, it is a complete package which builds from the instantly identifiable intro right through to when it fades out while still on such a high. Hear how the bridge into the solo builds and builds - more of a stairway to heaven than another cliched songs I could name. I have listened over and over (and over) to the chunky piano octaves leading into the superbly spine chilling harmonica solo by Stevie Wonder, who also jams an amazing outro. *drool*

Hold On Tight - ELO

Hold On Tight was a major single for the band ELO (Electric Light Orchestra) in 1981 but I don't remember being really aware of it until sometime during the 1990s. To me, this is a very different sound to any of their other material. Hold On Tight is the first ELO song that doesn't feature strings, but it's more than that; I love the throwback to rock and roll with a chunky piano part that punctuates each line. Nostalgia kicks in as I hear the guitar during the chorus; for some reason, I can envisage the guitarist from my old band leaning back with his eyes closed and strumming those long chords, even though I don't think he/we ever played this song.

This has to be one of the most uplifting songs EVER, lacking even the tiniest touch of cynicism. The lyrics have got me through some tough times; this song always seems to play at just the right time and place for me. It was several years before I looked up the lyrics for the third verse and discovered that it is the first verse repeated by in French. Très intelligent!

Lola - The Kinks

Let's start with a classic. :-)

Lola, Ray Davies' 1970 hit by The Kinks, really is one of my favourites. Its raunchy rock style describes an ultimately sleazy scene that a fresh-faced, wide-eyed boy encounters just a week after leaving home. His naïve introduction to the seedy side of the city and one particular drag queen is way more than he bargained for. Slow and measured, the music plunges you further into the tangled mess that unfolds.

The sheer terror the boy feels once he realises that Lola is not the woman he expected is perfectly captured in these desperate lines, after which he completely succumbs to Lola's charms:

I pushed her away.
I walked to the door.
I fell to the floor.
I got down on my knees.

You need to listen to this song nice and loud.