Elvis Presley - Elvis' Christmas Album (1970)

Glitzy, ostentatious, overindulgent and thoroughly warped by the clammy hand of commercialism - Elvis and Christmas go together rather well.

Listening to Elvis inevitably comes with an unfortunate dash of irony - he's just been lampooned too many times for both his fashion excesses and singing style not to seem slightly cartoonish. But cut through all the hubris and the man still had a glorious voice. Tender, raucous, pleading, defiant, playful, devout - it's all there.

Elvis' Christmas Album originally came out in October 1957 and featured a religious and a secular side. Despite the controversy just a year earlier when the Ed Sullivan show would only broadcast pictures of Elvis from the waist up, his choice of traditional songs such as Silent Night and Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem caused scarcely a stir.

The same could not be said for his cover of White Christmas, however, which composer Irving Berlin lambasted as a 'profane parody', despite the fact that Elvis' version drew heavily on The Drifters' take on the song, which had come out three years ealier.

Berlin (a Russian Jew) rated White Christmas as one of his finest works, reportedly telling his secretary in 1940: "I want you to take down a song I wrote over the weekend. Not only is it the best song I ever wrote, it's the best song anybody ever wrote." 

The public certainly agreed - Bing Crosby's version has now sold north of 50million copies, making it the most popular single of all time. Though a few of those may have been by people simply determined to stop Achy Breaky Heart from taking that particular accolade.

Elvis' Christmas Album was a solid seller at the time but it didn't get the cash registers jingling at full pace until 13 years after its originally release when RCA Camden put out a budget version that ditched the 4 gospel songs (Peace In The Valley, I Believe, Take My Hand Precious Lord and It's No Secret), added the 1966 single If Every Day Was Like Christmas and then padded out the running order with the 1970 B-side Mama Liked The Roses, a maudlin song about his dead mother than isn't in any way festive.

Despite the reduction from 12 to 10 songs and the rather slapdash way it was put together, the RCA Camden reissue proved massively popular, going on to sell 9million copies.

As well as finishing with the gloomy Mama Liked The Roses, the LP also starts with a cover of Ernest Tubbs' 1949 country hit, Blue Christmas. However, Elvis and the Jordanaires gave this tale of pining for a loved one at Christmas a few rock'n'roll embellishments that hint of good times just around the corner. If you want a gloriously maudlin version of Blue Christmas, head straight for Low's Christmas LP.

Silent Night is another song previously cover by Crosby, and Elvis gives it a beautifully devout reading, his voice at its most softly angelic.

Following the controversial take on White Christmas, Elvis decided the time had finally come to really rock out with Santa Claus Is Back In Town, one of two original numbers on the album. Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, who had previously supplied him with Jailhouse Rock and Don't, as well as writing Hound Dog for Big Moma Thornton, apparently knocked the song together in minutes in the studio and Elvis rips through it gleefully, revelling in the sly innuendo lurking in the lyrics.

I'll Be Home For Christmas is yet another tune popularised by Crosby, particularly hitting a note with servicemen based overseas and their families. Twelve months after releasing his own version, Elvis was drafted into the army himself.

Side 2 starts with If Every Day Was Like Christmas, a towering slice of smaltz given a Phil Spector-style Wall Of Sound production job that betrays the fact that it was recorded nine years later than most of the other songs.

Here Comes Santa Claus (Right Down Santa Claus Lane) is a jaunty take on an old Gene Autry hit from 1947, Elvis again tipping his stetson to his old country heroes.

A respectful take on Oh, Little Town Of Bethlehem is followed by a perky new number, Santa, Bring My Baby Back (To Me), written by Claude Demetrius and Aaron Schroeder, the latter of which also wrote It's Now Or Never, A Big Hunk O'Love and the theme tune to Scooby-Doo.

Despite Mama Liked The Roses providing a slightly odd finale, Elvis' Christmas Album still nags you into repeated plays. It's less than 25 minutes long but still manages to cover rock'n'roll, country, blues, traditional seasonal songs and some old-school crooning. Just like that tin of Quality Street you've got in for the holidays, it's hard not to keep dipping in. After all, if you accidently pick a Toffee Penny you can soon follow it with a Strawberry Cream to get rid of the taste.

Slade - Slade In Flame (1974)

Flame is one of those great moments in cinema that really shouldn't work but does, like Ben Kingsley's gangster turn in Sexy Beast or Tom Cruise as the bitter and neurotic author of 'Seduce and Destroy' in Magnolia.

Those hirsute purveyors of blunderbuss glam rock starring in a gritty kitchen sink drama in the tradition of Billy Liar, Taste Of Honey and Kes? If you haven't seen the film then it probably sounds like a particularly fanciful Reeves & Mortimer sketch.

But then it's easy to forget what big stars Slade were by the end of 1974. After a three-year run during which they had 12 Top 5 hit singles in succession, they were just about the biggest band in the country.

Their manager Chas Chandler (the former Animals bassist and Jimi Hendrix manager) decided making a film was the next step, after all it hadn't done The Beatles or Elvis any harm. Well, The Beatles anyway.

They must have known The Who were turning their 1969 rock opera Tommy into a film with Ken Russell at the helm, and perhaps they saw this as an opportunity to earn a little gravitas and stretch themselves.

Social realism probably didn't seem that odd a choice with the TV popularity of Whatever Happened To The Likely Lads? and the success of 1973's That'll Be The Day, in which David Essex had taken the chance to prove he was more than just a pop pretty boy by starring alongside Ringo Starr in the tale of an aspiring rock star.

The 1974 follow-up, Stardust, took a slightly more jaundiced view of fame, with Essex ending up a bloated, over the hill star wasting his life hanging around in a castle with Adam Faith.

To an extent Flame seems to amalgamate many of the ideas from both That'll Be The Day and Stardust with its tale of the fall and rise of a band, their dreams and friendships steadily ground down by the venal characters of the music business.

The band all make a decent fist of acting, particularly Noddy Holder (Stoker) and drummer Don Powell (Charlie), with guitarist Dave Hill (Barry) just appearing to play himself and bassist Jim Lea (Paul) tending to stick to the background.

The whole film also captures the incidental details of the early 1970s brilliantly - all battered, smoke-filled nightclubs, bad fringes, bushy facial hair and muddy fabrics.

The scenes shot outside in Sheffield are full of post-industrial decline, with dirty canals, pigeon lofts, closed factories and neglected terrace streets that make The Full Monty look like it was shot in Manhattan.

Despite some knockabout humour along the way, the film ends on a decidedly downbeat note as the the band split up unable to deal with the hassles any more.

Flame came out in February 1975, just a month before Tommy, and many of Slade's young fans were left pretty baffled, forcing the band to repeatedly assure crowds that they didn't actually hate each other during the subsequent tour.

The album Slade In Flame had come out four months earlier, with the gatefold inner sleeve providing a teaser for the film with a series of stills.

The band signalled their intention to experiment with opener How Does It Feel?, which starts as a piano ballad before the horns and guitars roll in, with a nice bit of flute playing thrown in for good measure. It's a good song but not really what most Slade fans were after at the time. When they released it as a single to mark the film opening, it only reached No.15, their worst chart placing for four years.

Not that Slade In Flame deviates too much from the template elsewhere. Horns feature on a few songs and there's a sax solo on Standin' On The Corner but the songs still stomp along and the choruses are still rousing.

Holder's voice really is a remarkable thing, both high pitched and gruff at the same time. He belts through the likes of Them Kinda Monkeys Can't Swing and OK Yesterday Was Yesterday leaving you wondering how he didn't blow his voicebox out.

So Far So Good brings to mind Oasis's Roll With It, with an mid-paced anthemic tune about taking success in your stride, and Far Far Away celebrates life on the road, managing to smuggle the lines 'I've had a a red light off the wrist/ Without even being kissed' onto the radio.

Considering the cynical trajectory of the plot, the band never sound melancholy or bitter. Them Monkeys... is about the snake-tongued double-dealers of the music business but seems to celebrate more than despise them, and This Girl starts by bemoaning a woman's untrustworthiness before Noddy comes to the lascivious conclusion that he should give her a call.

The public's perception of Slade nowadays is mainly coloured by Merry Christmas Everybody, which has been jamming seasonal jollity in our ears for the last 37 years, leaving the rest of their career deep in its shadow - including five other No.1s and a further ten Top 10 hits.

But you shouldn't underestimate the influence of Slade on Oasis, a fact partly acknowledged by their cover of Cum On Feel The Noize.

Another band inspired by the boys from the Black Country were Kiss, with Gene Simmons admitting: "The one we kept returning to was Slade. We liked the way they connected with the crowd, and the way they wrote anthems. We wanted that same energy, that same irresistible simplicity, but done US-style."

Despite their influence, it seems a strange twist of fate that most of Slade's career has now been largely forgotten due to a Christmas single. Still, the royalty cheque must ease the pain when it arrives in January.

Delaney & Bonnie & Friends - Motel Shot (1971)

It was the presence of Gram Parsons and Bruce Botnick (engineer/producer for Love, The Doors, Buffalo Springfield etc) on the credits that drew me to have a £2.99 punt on Motel Shot.

The Eric Clapton connection had previously put me off checking out Delaney & Bonnie, and I must confess that my prior knowledge of the duo largely consisted of the 1979 bust-up between Bonnie and Elvis Costello, when the nerdy English rocker made some incredibly offensive remarks about James Brown and Ray Charles, resulting in a slap across the chops from Ms Bramlett and being chucked against a wall by one of Stephen Stills's road crew.

Bonnie's career was on the slide by this point but she'd been feted by bigger stars than Costello in her day, with her former husband Delaney Bramlett a magnet for fellow musicians even if mainstream success largely eluded him.

Clapton was a particularly keen cheerleader for Delaney & Bonnie, insisting that they were better than his own band Blind Faith when the couple supported them on tour in 1969 and later joining them as a sideman on the road, as captured on the 1970 D&B live album On Tour With Eric Clapton.

Delaney co-wrote six of the songs on Clapton's self-titled debut solo album of the same year and also joined him in hanging around with George Harrison around the time All Things Must Pass was being recorded, apparently teaching the former Beatle how to play slide guitar.

Chumming up with Clapton came with a cost, though, when he pinched Delaney & Bonnie's backing band (keyboardist Bobby Whitlock, bassist Carl Radle and drummer Jim Gordon) for his own Derek & The Dominoes project. Still, they got off lightly compared to Harrison, who ended up losing his wife to Clapton.

Whitlock and Radle returned to the fold for Motel Shot, along with a host of famous friends keen to help out on an album recorded in one long night at Botnick's house in Los Angeles.

The deal was that you had to show up by 7pm when the door was locked and everyone got on with capturing whatever happened during the night.

Presumably Botnick had a pretty big living room because attendees included Buddy Miles, Joe Cocker, Jim Keltner, Dave Mason, Duane Allman, Eddie James, Leon Russell, Jay York, Sandy Konikoff, John Hartford, Kenny Gradney and Ben Benay, along with the previously mentioned Parsons, Whitlock and Radle.

Delaney's mother's Iva Bramlett was also present, which may have at least moderated everyone's behaviour and helped ensure 12 good takes were safely in the can come sunrise.

The thinking behind Motel Shot probably stemmed from the reputation Delaney & Bonnie had for being a better live act than they were in the studio. Their three previous studio albums had all sold in moderate amounts and they were considerably more respected by their peers than by the public at large.

Motel Shot is designed to reflect the kind of loose, joyful sessions musicians enjoy together after the show when the pressure is off and they just want to have fun together.

In Delaney & Bonnie's case that meant running through some old gospel numbers, mixing in some country and blues, and then sprinkling in a few originals just for good measure.

Admittedly half the fun here is trying to spot the famous guests - Cocker's croak on Talkin' About Jesus, Duane Allman's slide guitar on Sing My Way Home, Parsons drifting in the mix on Rock Of Ages - but Motel Shot definitely isn't about big stars stepping up to make guest appearances.

The decision not to record the album in a regular studio is also reflected in the choice of instruments, with Leon Russell playing a central role on piano, while acoustic guitars and tambourines are pretty much the only other instruments.

Bonnie later revealed that there weren't even any proper drums at the session, with Buddy Miles improvising with a large suitcase he found lying around while Cocker took to whacking the side of the piano. On Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad), Bonnie, Parsons and Allman provided percussion by slapping their thighs.

Side one is dominated by gospel, particularly the opening trio of Where The Soul Never Dies, Will The Circle Be Unbroken and Rock Of Ages, the first two of which sound like everyone in the room had been handed a tambourine and a Salvation Army instruction booklet. The vibe is rough, simple and soulful with everyone obviously giving it their all.

Long Road Ahead was written by Delaney with Carl Radle, but the testifying tone and mass vocals on the chorus fit in perfectly with what's come before.

Faded Love changes the mood by beautifully transforming Bob Willis's country lament into a soulful piano ballad with a stunning vocal from Delaney. But he doesn't keep everyone waiting on the sidelines for long, and the full-on gospel call and response of Talkin' About Jesus, which lasts nearly seven minutes, soon has the aisles rocking.

Side two heads off in a bluesy direction, with a great cover of Robert Johnson's Come On In My Kitchen and a so-so take on Chuck Willis's Don't Deceive Me (Please Don't Go), which sadly loses the barrelhouse piano and Bonnie sings in a husky voice that sounds a little Janis Joplin lite rather than her best Deep South soul tones.

From this point, Russell takes a deserved break after sterling work on the piano and Delaney's experiences hanging around with Harrison come to the fore. Never Ending Song Of Love is crammed with acoustic guitars and massed vocals not a million miles away from the Beatles' All You Need Is Love or Harrison's My Sweet Lord. The result was Delaney & Bonnie's biggest hit single in the US.

Sing My Way Home is equally laidback and joyful with slide guitar from Allman adding nicely to the atmosphere. Going Down The Road (Feeling Bad) brings back Russell on piano, along with the gospel feel, so it ends up sounding considerably more upbeat than the song title might suggest.

Closing song Lonesome And A Long Way From Home was written by Bonnie and Russell but had already appeared on Clapton's solo album of the previous year. They reclaim it as their own in a laidback, soulful manner with beautiful fiddle from John Hartford.

The album ends with the words 'Y'all come back soon' and the closing of a door as Botnick concludes a fine night's work.

Delaney & Bonnie were riding on a high at this point, with the Carpenters also enjoying massive global success in the same year with the Delaney-penned Superstar (which Sonic Youth later also covered on a rather splendid red vinyl single). However, it didn't last long. Motel Shot failed to sell, Russell and Jim Keltner left to join Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen tour and then Delaney & Bonnie's marriage foundered, leading to a split in 1972.

Both went on to experience problems with drink and unsurprisingly, considering the heartfelt gospel aspects to Motel Shot, both went on to become born-again Christians. Delaney died in 2008 but Bonnie is still going strong, which ensures Elvis Costello continues to mind his manners if nothing else.