Macca Christmas-y songs

As some of my readers will know, I am a bit of a fan of the Beatles. Hence, I figured I'd throw in some bonus blog material. This will probably become a once a week thing during the next month or so.

So today, I figured I would start with some solo Beatles material, specifically, some Christmas-y music videos courtesy of Sir Paul McCartney.

First, we have the ubiquitous 1979 chestnut "Wonderful Christmastime" which seems to have no middle ground (or not much anyway), people seem to either really like it or really REALLY hate it. I reckon it is slight (especially where work from a former Beatle is concerned), but fun. Here is the video (my advice to the haters is, don't click the play button!):



Here are a couple of fun facts about the song:

* The pub you see in the video is the Fountain Inn in Ashurst, West Sussex.
* The synthesizer riff was played on a Sequential Circuits Prophet-5.
* The song did not crack the U.S. Billboard Hot 100 in the year of its release, but did chart at #6 in the U.K. singles chart.
* The song can be heard in the 1998 animated film "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer: The Movie," as well as all over your local pop radio station during the holidays.

The second video from Sir Paul that I am including is for "Pipes of Peace." Written for the 1983 album of the same title (released October 31, 1983), the title song was released as a single on December 5, 1983. Although it is not explicitly a holiday song from a lyrical standpoint (except in a "Peace on Earth, Goodwill to All" sort of way), the video is most definitely Christmas-y. The video depicts the famous WWI Christmas truce between British and German troops. Macca plays soldiers on both sides of the trenches who meet up in No Man's Land while other soldiers fraternize and play football.



* This song was Paul McCartney's first and *only* number 1 single as a solo artist in the U.K. (!)
* The single (with "So Bad" as the B-side) reached number 23 on the U.S. charts.
* The video was my introduction to the WWI Christmas truce of December 1914.

The Christmas Truce is also dramatized in the film Joyeux Noel, about which more later (hopefully).

So there you have some Beatle-y Christmas-y music videos for your viewing and listening pleasure. I plan to post a few more of these as the holidaze progress.