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Christmas Like Before For Grantham Passage

In 1963 I got a gig playing on a record produced by Joe Meek. The track was Christmas Stocking, sung by the late Roger LaVern. At the time this was my big break. Roger was quite a big name having had a hit the previous year with Telstar in the Tornados. As life goes this turned out to not be the start of a career filled with stardom but just another great gig I would look back on with fondness years later. It’s funny how life goes, if you would have told me in 1963 after I finished those sessions that the next time I would work on a Christmas song I would be 75 years old and it would be with a band making a style of music we current couldn’t comprehend I would have asked the landlord to cut you off.

But that is exactly what has happened. I’ve known Jon, who also had some success (their last album has had over a million streams worldwide which is quite good for streams these days) with his own band Grey Goes Down, for a year or so now and we’ve bonded over music, sharing a mutual taste in guitar lead rock n’ roll from across the decades, as well as being able to relate to the struggles and shenanigans that musicians encounter during time on the road in a working band. We were talking one day about earning a living from music and how the way that is possible, or not possible, these days due to various factors in how music in consumed in the 2020’s. We both decided having a Christmas song that rolled out once a year, every year, was the way to do it. It’s alleged Noddy Holder earns around £200k a year in royalties from Merry Christmas Everybody, which is played for approximately 5/6 weeks every year by pretty much most of the English speaking world.

As a bit of fun we wrote and recorded a Christmas song all about how Christmas in the old days was better, how there’s no great new Christmas songs anymore and all the usual topics related to the subject that come up in conversations in pubs this time of year.

Christmas Like Before is available out now on Itunes and Amazon Music, and you can add it to your Spotify Christmas Playlist too. However, instead of trying to use it as way of ensuring we don’t have to every write or record anything ever again, we’ve decided that it would be nice to remember the true meaning of Christmas and use it as a way of raising money for a concern close to my heart, which is the feeding and clothing of those living in extreme poverty and homelessness in my local area of Grantham. So we’re going to give the money, whatever it is, that we raise from the song to the Grantham Passage (part of Grantham Poverty Concern)

It’s 69p on Amazon and 79p on Itunes and help sthose who most need it this Christmas. Thank you so much.