Christmas story - For the Record: “Did yer granny always tell you – the old songs are the best?”

The record in the dream – an LP – is spinning on the turntable: Jim Reeves. ‘Twelve Songs of Christmas’. Illustration: Lesley-Anne Barnes Macfarlane

We hear it everywhere now, don’t we? They scream: “This will be The Best Christmas – EVER!”

Has it never struck ‘them’ (whoever ‘they’ are) that if every Christmas is the best Christmas ever, then no Christmas is actually the best - because every Christmas is the best? It’s like a race, where every runner comes first.

“Everyone’s a winner, baby - that’s the truth (yes, the truth)…” as the 70s pop group ‘Hot Chocolate’ used to declare (I still have visions of Errol Brown’s shining, baldy heid on ‘Top of the Pops’).

It was five years ago, not long before Christmas - my best Christmas ever, of course - I had a dream. And in that dream, I was a wee child, growing up in a working-class family in an old tenement building in the 1960s (in my case ‘yes, the truth’). One of those odd dreams, where you realise that at some level you’re actually dreaming.

In that dream, with that fuzzy, lucid awareness, I looked around at the 1960S dream-scene differently: there it was, my parents’ tenement flat subconsciously reconstructed. The flock wallpaper; that painting on the wall of the dark-eyed lassie, starkers and fondling a tree; the tinsely, shaggy silver Christmas tree in the corner (the very height of fashion); the crazy acrylic 1960s carpet, splashed on the floor like a faded Jackson Pollock; the glass ashtray, with that lonely cigarette sitting in its u-shaped groove, smoking itself into the room; smoke everywhere, dispersing slowly, slowly, like a Scorsese gangster movie; and the music…what is the music? What is that…sound? And where is it coming from?

I look around and see: it’s a record player. But why is the sound in that dream so different? Of course, 1960s technology – nothing is digital yet. It’s all that messy, unpredictable, old-fashioned ‘analog’ noise. Is it a warmer sound, or am I just being sentimental?

The record in the dream – an LP – is spinning on the turntable: Jim Reeves. ‘Twelve Songs of Christmas’. I look up from my toys, my long-dead mother and father are sitting opposite each other, glass in hand, talking and smiling. My heart leaps up to see them. My mother, in her mid-thirties, still beautiful. My father, in his early forties, the life and soul of every party. Jim Reeves starts to croon: ‘Silver Bells’. I listen. Warm and comforting. But now, the whole picture is starting to dissolve in my waking mind’s attempt to enter the reality of the new morning. I look up to speak to my parents. But, like a great wave, the dawn is coming and washing away the dream, crumbling my dreamy sandcastle grain-by-grain. And now I’m lying in bed with my eyes open. And what is my first thought? “What was that sound? An old record player. Must buy a stereogram - and we’ll put on some old Christmas records!”

*****

“Two hundred and fifty pounds? Two hundred and fifty pounds???” I stand, incredulous.

A couple of months later, Gumtree has worked its magic and I’m standing in the house of an auld fella and looking at his ancient - but extremely beautiful - stereogram and trying – in vain – to haggle. Fag in mouth, he wheezes through collapsing lungs: “Aye, son. The same as what it cost me when I bought it. ‘Dear’ is no’ the word, I’m tellin’ ye. I bought it in 1959. It was half the price of a Morris Mini-Minor…”

Deal done – no reduction, you understand – I arrange delivery to my flat. Only problem. It stinks of cigarette smoke and is radiating an unhealthy guff into my house. Solution? Cover the entire thing in cat litter.

After three weeks – and after much sniffing at it – the stereogram is deemed worthy to join the other antique pieces of furniture in our sitting room.

I turn it on and put on a record. Oh, my goodness, the sound is GLORIOUS. Just like in my dream, in fact.

So the hunt begins. For old records.

*****

You learn a lot about human nature when you start collecting old records. The scratches on the vinyl are like the rings inside the bark of a tree, except you don’t get the age of the record, you get the life of its previous owner.

Classical records are always in the best condition. They give the clear impression of one careful owner, relaxing after supper, shirt and tie now off, savouring their Mozart Eine kleine Nachtmusik over a glass of something nice. This record has been carefully chaperoned out of its paper sleeve each time and placed – reverentially – onto the turntable. The owner, like an over-protective parent, frowns at the suggestion that their little treasure should ever be allowed to leave the safety of the house.

Pop records are different. Pop records are the good-time girls of the vinyl world. The face of a second-hand pop record is invariably battered and scratched. It looks like the face of somebody who has taken too many drugs and is looking for a toilet at Glastonbury. This record has been carried under the arm of a spotty, long-haired teenager wearing a Prussian grey greatcoat from the Army & Navy Stores. Loaned out to friends, slapped onto the turntable at parties, smashed into by the record above it by the automatic record-changer, this copy of ‘Tapestry’ or ‘Mud Slide Slim’ or ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ is like the grinning pensioner in the pub, muttering: “If you only knew what I’ve seen…”

*****

The great thing these days, is that many of us live ten minutes’ walk away from countless charity shops. And you can appreciate what that means for the accessing of vinyl. It goes something like this: there’s a solidly upper middle-class family; an elderly relative dies; they look in the loft; there is a collection of vinyl; “What shall we do with all this old stuff, darling?”; “Well, we don’t have a record player, so put it in the boot of the Volvo and we’ll do a charity shop run later…”.

And hey presto! – a flood of once-precious, near-mint vinyl descends daily on Cat Rescue. And then sold for pennies. Note to self: one day we’ll all be that dead relative and the records will be worth nothing then. The true value of the record is in the memories attached to it.

*****

Anybody who owns a cat will tell you the same thing: you are only ever one step away from disaster.

So, I was enjoying my new acquisition: ‘Sinatra at the Sands’. The record where Sinatra sings with the Count Basie Orchestra – clearly worth the £3.99 that I had to shell out for it in British Heart Foundation Furniture & Electrical – and I decided to go into the kitchen to make a cup of tea. I left the record playing there, spinning happily on the turntable.

In my absence, enter the cat.

“Fly me to the moon/And let me play among the…[screeeeech!]”

Our cat – ‘Ollie’ (a.k.a. ‘The Orange Menace’) – has been moving his head in slow circles, entranced by the shiny, revolving blackness below him. The Orange Menace decides that he needs to take action to resolve this spinning mystery. Kind of like he might want to pounce on a salmon in a stream. One good swipe should do it! The arm holding the needle, currently moving slowly along the vinyl, must be captured. Ollie needs to master this mysterious creature - so he attacks it. The result is disaster. The record is scratched. Of more concern: the 62-year-old stereogram – a stereogram that cost half the price of a car, a stereogram that has been playing happily since the days of Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister – now has a broken arm. My immediate thought was that an appropriate way of responding to the situation was that the cat should be strangled. (For the record: this did not happen. In fact, as I write this, Ollie is currently sitting on my lap, purring, kneading his claws into my leg, destroying my good trousers).

I soon realise (as Scorsese’s gangsters are fond of saying): ‘It is what it is…”

*****

A quick show of hands: How many of you have tried to find someone who repairs ancient stereograms? Ah – one or two.

Next question: how many of you succeeded in finding such a person? Don’t be shy now…I thought so…no hands…

*****

Yes, it took years. Years. I found him by chance. On the internet. Based in England, but was visiting Scotland for repairs. He came to my flat. For two days. Two days. Ollie, The Orange Menace, watched him as he worked. I watched Ollie. My wife watched me watching Ollie. Two days. It was not cheap. In fact, for the money it cost, I could have bought a fleet of second-hand cars in 1959. But after two days…success. Sinatra and Basie are back in the house!

*****

So – what’s the lesson here? I’m not entirely sure. Like the sound of the old stereogram, life can be messy and unpredictable and wondrous. Oh – and extremely fragile. But we do our best to take care and repair and be happy. Like yesterday, when I put on the old, scratched vinyl version of The Beatles’ ‘Abbey Road’ and found myself cavorting around the room with my five year-old, both of us hollering along with Ringo singing ‘Octopus’s Garden’ (“Again, dad, again!”).

My wee one. Before she realises how uncool I am, I’ll make sure that her every Christmas is filled with the vinyl versions of the old songs that are the best. That fuzzy-warm sound of Christmas, of Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra and Jim Reeves.

And I’ll tell her the stories behind the songs: I’ll put on the record of Bing and tell her how Irving Berlin wrote ‘White Christmas’ in the sweltering heat of Los Angeles, making sense of the song’s introduction (that nobody ever sings):

“The sun is shining/The grass is green/

The orange and palm trees sway/There’s never been such a day/

In Beverly Hills, L.A./When it’s December the twenty-fourth/

I’d like it to look just the way it does up north…because…I’m dreaming…”

I’ll tell her about how Elvis Presley also recorded ‘White Christmas’ and how Irving Berlin tried to ban it. Berlin hated that version so much, he ordered his staff to phone around every radio station in the USA in an attempt to have it taken off the air. (In fairness to old Irving – it is not the greatest performance by ‘The Pelvis’. It sounds like a bad Elvis impersonator having a turn in a public toilet.)

I’ll put on Sinatra singing ‘Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas’ and tell her how the original lyric to the song was rejected by Judy Garland - because it was too depressing: “Have yourself a merry little Christmas/It may be your last…”

And then, when she is a wee bit older, I’ll tell her the story behind ‘Winter Wonderland’. How the man who wrote the lyrics (Richard Smith) wrote them in 1934 as a poem. While he was being treated for tuberculosis in a sanatorium. And how he died the following year. And nobody can tell us if he ever got to hear the song that we all love: “Sleigh bells ring/Are you listening?”

So, I’ll let those old songs on those old records create that scratchy soundtrack to seep into the fabric of the wee one’s own consciousness. And maybe one day, in the distant future, after I’m long gone – when the sky is filled with flying cars and her house is being cleaned by a robot maid – she will have a Christmas dream about me and her mum. And she’ll wake up that morning with one thought in her mind: “What was that sound? Must buy a record player – and we’ll put on some old Christmas records...”