The Flaming Lips - 'Peace on Earth/Little Drummer Boy'

What song tenuously links The Man Who Fell To Earth, The Sound of Music, a crooner who had a penchant for golf and a bunch of psychedelic musical miscreants from Oklahoma? Any guesses? No? Well, obviously it's that festive favourite The Little Drummer Boy.

Written in 1941, and first recorded by the Trapp Family Singers some ten years later, The Little Drummer Boy has been covered by the likes of Joan Baez, New Kids On The Block, Marlene Dietrich, The Dandy Warhols and Jimi Hendrix. Of all the covers though the most famous and more peculiar takes on the song, notable for the pairing of the talents involved, is that recorded by Bing Crosby and David Bowie in 1977 for the former's final television special.

Bowie and Bing's version of the song interweaves Peace on Earth, written specifically for their television duet, and became something of a hit when it was released in 1982. The single peaked at number 3 in the UK Charts, becoming one of Bowie's best-selling singles, and I have the 7" of it safely stored here in a record box. It's weird but it's also rather sweet, this meeting of an old hand at the game and a performer who constantly and consistently reinvented himself. 

It's this version of the song that American psych-rockers The Flaming Lips have covered as their 2018 Christmas song, sprinkling it with their brand of Oklahoma magic and accompanying it with a suitably trippy video (co-directed by frontman Wayne Coyne) that could easily be an excerpt of a sequel to Santa Claus Conquers The Martians, starring Roy Wood, that would play back in my mind if I reach for the festive Absinthe.

A joyously bonkers take on a classic, reworked as only the Lips can, which might not be as far out there as the video would suggest though would sit well amongst a suitably alternative yuletide playlist.

Life on Mars

One of the sad facts about gaining years is that, with every day, there's an ever increasing chance that someone you know, love, appreciate, admire or respect will disappear. It's one of the choice parts of the human condition, a happy/sad twist that makes you reflect on what you have, what you've missed out on, what hours there are in the day to make something new or maybe just that it's high time that you bought that new shiny thing that you'd promised yourself. It may be that someone you know has passed on, or it may be that someone you've never met, but to you has had an equally important impact on your life, has died; the writer of a book you can quote offhand perhaps, or an actor who's work you enjoyed, the painter who's way with colour makes the juices in your brain fizz or the performer who's music lifts your soul. If life is like a box of chocolates, and you never know what you're going to get, there's a likelihood that some days you'll be handed the Peanut Cracknel and not the Noisette Triangle. Today was one of those days.

David Bowie is dead and, not to put too fine a point on it, it's bummed me right out. It bummed me out when I woke up to the news, half-dreaming the report read out on the radio, and it's continued to do so as the day has progressed. It's bummed me out, it's pissed me off, it's made me sad and, from the tweets I've read and the items I've seen populating my newsfeed in Facebook, unsurprisingly I'm not alone in how I feel. Today may be beyond Peanut Cracknel, today was a big bar of Marmite chocolate, chewed with a grimace. David Bowie is/was a genius, an artist, a chameleon, a creator of beautiful music and, by most accounts, was a really nice chap to boot. Part of me thinks that this is just another way of him reinventing himself, that he'll reappear as a new creation tomorrow, but that's just the dreamer in me. Bowie has left the planet. The body may be gone but the body of work remains and will always be with us. He really made the grade, and for that I am thankful.

RIP David Bowie (1947-2016)