Time for a topical seasonal parody, regressing 44 years to 1976. This was not a vintage year for Christmas singles. Jethro Tull made a futile pitch for rural credibility with “Ring Out Solstice Bells”, and the least said about the irritating novelty song “Bionic Santa”, the better. This left Johnny Mathis with a clear run for No 1, never realising that one of his biggest fans would turn out to be Gerald the Gorilla from Not The Nine O’Clock News. As the Professor complained, “You’re not kidding, are you. ‘When A Child Is Born’ blaring out at all hours when I’m downstairs trying to do some work…” The song did, of course, seek to convey a message of hope. Here in 2020, as Christmas struggles to make its way past weeks and months of overreaction and exaggeration, a message of despair is a more symbolic choice: -
A length of rope dangles from the sky
A mighty scar blights from way up high
All across the land, freedoms are withdrawn
This comes to pass when a scare is born
A silent threat sails the seven seas
Foul winds of change, fuelled by the Chinese
Made our ruling class crumble, tossed and torn
This comes to pass when a scare is born
A gloomy view settles all around
They can’t reveal they’re on shaky ground
In a spell or two, all are made forlorn
This comes to pass when a scare is born
To save their face, they imposed lockdown
With their fake tiers, built the new ghost town
They’re all comfortable, we’re all overdrawn
This comes to pass when a scare is born
And all of this happens because the world is cowering
Cowering from one virus
Bats, labs, whatever, no one knows
But a virus that was hyped up to turn livelihood to ruin,
Hope to fear, pleasure to pain and quality of life to mere existence
And misery and suffering will be words to be inflicted, forever
It’s a bad dream, deep confusion now
Can we come through, sometime soon somehow
All across the land, dawns a time to mourn
This comes to pass when a scare is born
(The original, of course, only had three verses before the spoken bridge. I could not resist hammering the underlying message home by adding the fourth.)
