MOG

A MERRY XMAS TO ALL MOGGER'S EVERYWHERE

At number 1 Slade - Merry Xmas Everybody ok not everyone's favourite. this and the Pogues are both classic's but one of them had to be number 1

This was based on a psychedelic song, "My Rocking Chair," which Noddy Holder wrote in 1967. In 1973 the Slade vocalist decided to convert it into a Christmas song after a night out drinking at a local pub. He and the band's bass player and co-writer Jimmy Lea camped out at Noddy's mother's house and got down to changing the lyrics to make them more Christmassy. Jimmy Lea incorporated into the verse parts of another song which he was then writing and Noddy re-wrote the words incorporating different aspects of the Christmas holiday season as they came to mind.

When Noddy Holder wrote the line "Look to the future now, it's only just begun," he had in mind the strikes that were blighting Britain at the time. He told the Daily Mail On Sunday November 10, 2007: "We'd decided to write a Christmas song and I wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas. Economically, the country was up the creek. The miners had been on strike, along with the gravediggers, the bakers and almost everybody else. I think people wanted something to cheer them up - and so did I. That's why I came up with the line."

This went straight in at #1 in the UK, selling over 300,000 copies on the day of its release, making it at the time the fastest ever selling record in Britain. It eventually became Slade's best ever selling single in the UK, selling over a million copies. The harmonium used on this is the same one that John Lennon used on his Mind Games album, which was being recorded at the studio next door. This was recorded at the Record Plant studios in New York while the band were on a tour of The States in the summer of 1973. When they recorded the vocals, they sang the chorus on the stairs in order to achieve the echo that they required. Producer Chas Chandler opened the song with a howl recorded during some of Noddy Holder's vocal exercises. In the UK this has become a standard, and it is usually reissued in its original form each Christmas. On several occasions the song has re-entered the Top 40.