Outside of the traditional, there are I think two types of Christmas songs that work best; raucous party singalongs like 'Merry Christmas Everybody' and, at the other end of the joy spectrum, the more downbeat affairs.* Misery and Christmas always go well together and it's this category that 'Lonely This Christmas' slots nicely into.With their faux Glam tresses long since shorn, Mud had no further need to try to get down with the kids and Les Gray was now free to fully indulge his karaoke Elvis fantasies. And by god he goes to town on it, helped in no small way by 'Lonely This Christmas' sounding exactly like something the sixties Elvis would have recorded (though maybe he already did under the title 'Are You Lonesome Tonight' - 'Lonely This Christmas' wins no prizes for originality I'm afraid).
"I just break down as I look around and the only things I see
Are loneliness and emptiness and an unlit Christmas tree"
Oh dear. Les isn't having a good time at all, and though its anti Christmas greeting card lyric reads as cynically hollow as those found in cards proper, with 'Wombling Merry Christmas' poised at number two then the subversion of Chinn/Chapman's song provides a welcome diversion for all the 'Bah! Humbuggers' worn white with the jollity of it all. As The Samaritans are wont to remind us, it's not the party season for everybody.
* Though if you can manage both, as The Pogues & Kirsty MacColl did on ' Fairytale Of New York', then so much the better.
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