One of the things about Christmas records is that it does seem to take forever for some stuff to become regarded as perenial. Now, the Pogues’ ‘Fairytale Of new York’ became a hot pretty quickly, but with stuff being put out every year, it seems to take a while for it to take hold. The Killers have done several and these seem to have made absolutely no impact on the charts so far as I can tell. ‘A great Big Sled’ was fantastic -and it featured the Goddess, Toni Halliday, of Curve fame and of course, ‘Original’ with Leftfield.

Yet this week’s Top 75 -done entirely on sales, remember – shows that Mariah Carey is back again with ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ at no.51 and ‘Fairytale Of New York’ is at no.58. The likelihood of these climbing into the Top 40 is pretty much a foregone conclusion. To be fair, whilst I normally can’t stand Mariah Carey, her track is OK, and the Pogues track is probably my favourite Christmas track. Why haven’t I posted it here? Because that would be pretty obvious, frankly!

I only found out about today’s track by chance -and I don’t recall hearing it on the radio last year. But it’s great; and one of the best things either party has been involved in for a little while. Trying to find out how exactly this duet came about it seems that…well, The Hives like Cyndi Lauper’s first album [She’s So Unusual ] and they asked her.

Anyway, see what you think…

The Hives & Cyndi Lauper -‘A Christmas Duel.’ mp3