We Wish You A Spotify Christmas

Long-term readers of "Left and to the Back" may remember that for last two Decembers I've tried to include some vaguely Christmas themed mp3s on the blog. This year, however, it's not going to happen. In all honesty, finding Christmas records that hardly anyone has heard or noticed before is a bloody hard job, and on the rare occasion you do chance upon one it's usually complete and utter rubbish. To make matters worse, so many other blogs have done this sort of thing far better - "Sweeping The Nation", for example, produced several CDs worth of Christmas themed material.

For 2011, I've decided to change tack a little. Instead of shoving obscurities in your face like so many mince pies, I've created a Spotify Playlist of established Christmas songs with a few ones thrown in which, on the surface, appear to have nothing to do with the season whatsoever. This might seem like a ridiculous thing to do, but these are all tracks I regularly dig out for my own listening pleasure over Yuletide, purely because something about them - perhaps the time of the year they were originally released, the clanging bells in the mix, the Spector-ish wall of sound, the wintery feel - feels indicative of the season to me. This means that Pulp's "Bad Cover Version", Johnny Boy's "You Are The Generation That Bought More Shoes and You Get What You Deserve", The Jackpot's "Tiny Goddess" and the Dukes of Stratosphear's "Pale and Precious" sit alongside Slade, Jona Lewie and Greg Lake.

It's not a hugely long list at the moment, I'll agree, so I'd be grateful if you could chime in with your own suggestions in the comments below, either of a traditional festive hue or perhaps using more oblique reasoning. Answer soon enough (and provided the track is on Spotify) and I'll add it to the list like a little audio present beneath Spotify's giant Christmas tree. Answer later than 19 December, and I'll probably be too busy to do that. Soz, but other obligations beckon.

Added apologies to all you people living in countries which can't access Spotify. I haven't done this to deliberately exclude you from the Festive fun, but it's the only easy way of making all these tunes generally available.