The Hives collaborated with Cyndi Lauper back in 2008 on the rather splendid, funny – and not a little bitter ‘ A Christmas Duel.’ You can read the Hives’ Howlin’ Pelle Almqvist explaining about how the duet came together over on Rolling Stone here in a feature from November 2008. According to Wiki, the only place where this was a prope

r hit was in The Hives’ native Sweden, but you can still buy the track over on iTunes. please note: that link applies only to iTunes’ British store.

Meanwhile, next year will see Cyndi Lauper release her twelfth studio album, Detour in May. According to her website, t

he album was recorded in Nashville and showcases her signature takes on classic country songs from the 1950’s and 60’s. The album will also feature appearances by some of country music’s “most celebrated artists” [quotation marks mine]. Detour will be Lauper’s first album for Sire Records and will be executive produced by legendary Sire founder Seymour Stein, the man who signed the Ramones and Madonna, amongst others.

The first track to do the rounds is Lauper’s cover of Dolly Parton’s ‘Hard Candy Christmas,’ which originally appeared in the Parton film The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas and was also covered by Tracey Thorn on her

Christmas album Tinsel and Lights.

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 Chr

istmas track. Why haven’t I poste

d 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