Malcolm Middleton's Christmas Thought
My earliest Christmas memory is of running into our living room and punching an inflatable Spiderman punch-bag, whacking it off the corner of something and bursting it, spraying the room with water, sand and disappointment. At Christmas my Mum always went to a lot of effort for my sister and I to make it special and Disney-ish, while my Dad grumbled in the corner about all the “didn’t haves” from when he was a lad.
Christmas at my Grandparent’s in Aberdeen one year had me trying to kick a door down while my Granddad held it closed from the other side, warning me that Santa was stuck in the chimney. Wanting to catch a glimpse of the old guy, it made me all the more eager to get in. Children believe everything so people should be careful. I was in my late teens when it dawned on me that pickled gherkins weren’t really the preserved tips of dinosaurs’ tails… I wasn’t gullible. Just pre-cynical.
Yet Santa was fit and breathing throughout my childhood until one summer, when sat round the table the news was gently broken that he had died in a sleigh crash. There would still be a Christmas apparently, but it would be different, and less.
My blackest Christmas was in my late 20s. After a bad year of confusion, loss and dramatic irony, I found myself in a fugue of depression, tearing a set of stainless steel kitchen knives from their camouflage of laughing snowmen and trumpet-parping angels. A sour thought was there as I lay in the thick of it; blue and green neon coming in through the window courtesy of an unforgiving Falkirk District Council Christmas decoration bolted onto the side of my home.
Sitting in self-inflicted solitude wondering what present to play with first, I laughed my heart out at the timing of such a gift and decided it’d be easier to continue and maybe just write a self-mocking song about it. Anyway, the black humour of the situation snapped me out of it and I decided to watch Eastenders so that my own life wouldn’t seem so terrifying. Then I wrote a song about it.
Carrying on with the doom and gloom, a few years later I wrote another song called We’re All Going To Die, nothing whatsoever about Christmas, just general life worries. It made it to number 31 in the charts, riding on a small wave of anti-X-Factor feeling and reverse-reverse psychology. After a month of promoting it I ran back to Glasgow and had a long bath and was fine. Eh, anyway, Christmas to me isn’t about Jesus or Santa or Simon Cowell. It’s about putting another tally-mark on the wall; deciding which failures are worth trying to correct for the next year; buying gifts so that people you love might love you more; and of course, kicking the crap out of superheroes. Merry Christmas!