Watch Bastille Cover Slade’s Holiday Classic ‘Merry Xmas Everybody’
The cover is part of Nest’s Audio Sessions by Google, which enlists top artists to cover past Christmas No.1s, including Olivia Dean, Ella Eyre, and Sam Tompkins.
Fresh off dropping their surprise EP Goosebumps, U.K. alt-pop outfit Bastille has released a cover of Slade’s 1973 holiday classic “Merry Xmas Everybody.”
The cover is part of Nest’s Audio Sessions by Google, which enlists top artists to cover past Christmas No.1s. Other featured artists include Olivia Dean, Ella Eyre, and Sam Tompkins.
Dressed in their best Christmas jumpers, the band gets into the spirit, delivering an acoustic rendition of the glam rocker’s holiday tune.
Despite the song coming out well before any of the Bastille bandmembers were born, the group shared their love for the track calling it, “potentially the best Christmas song ever!”
Slade’s “Merry Xmas Everybody” is what really kicked off the arms race to No.1 on Christmas Day in the U.K., when the band went head-to-head with fellow glam rockers Wizzard and their holiday single, “I Wish It Could Be Christmas Everyday.” Eventually, Slade came out on top in 1973, and a holiday tradition was born.
“I wanted to make it reflect a British family Christmas,” Slade vocalist Noddy Holder told the Daily Mail in 2007.
“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 ‘Look to the future now / It’s only just begun.’”
Bastille’s version may not have the fuzzed-out guitars of the original, but they nail the song’s singalong harmonies, which makes “Merry Xmas Everybody” the perfect holiday pub song.
The band’s latest EP Goosebumps, collects together fan-favorite “survivin’,” along with the Graham Coxon-assisted “WHAT YOU GONNA DO???,” and the new title track “Goosebumps.”
Regarding the new song, Bastille frontman Dan Smith said, “We wanted to make a throwback R&B song and something a bit more playful. We’re big fans of Kenny Beats and having met him in L.A. invited him to hang out at the studio when he was in town. We played each other a load of music, and he loved ‘Goosebumps’ and immediately started working on beats and sounds for it, and it kind of went from there.”
Goosebumps can be bought here.
