What’s that smelly looking old tramp doing lumbering towards me rattling some rusty old chains? Oh wait, it’s the Ghost of Christmas Past and he’s lifting me by the arm... dragging me skywards... HELP! We’re walking through the air! The mists clear and we’re floating – my smelly old tour guide and me – above a dreary looking small Northern Irish town. As I spy Santa’s sleigh breaking the lights and roaring off skywards with a small armoured personnel carrier in hot pursuit I notice that one small boy’s sack of Christmas gifts has been left in the snow, the hearty brown paper turning a sodden chocolate shade as the snow melts to slush.
Security forces are summoned to investigate. As the bomb disposal robot gingerly tips the contents out onto the road in amongst the Action Man dolls and Matchbox cars there are a handful of videos. No wait! Those aren’t videos, they’re... they’re 8-track cartridges! The betamax of the audio world, the lost audio giant of the early ’70s. Catching a glimpse just before ‘Rover’ detonates a controlled explosion I can see that one small boy will not be getting his copies of Gram Parsons’ posthumous genre blending country-rock-folk classic GP, that his stocking won’t contain a copy of Merle Haggard’s Christmas Present – Something Old Something New, that he’ll have to wait some more before he can call a copy of Bob Dylan’s Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid his own, that no copy of Planxty’s eponymous album will ease him through the dull days between Christmas and New Year.
As the prescient strains of Gary Glitters ‘Do You Want to Touch Me’ rumble over the dying bars of Slade’s ‘Cum On Feel The Noize’ a cloud of acrid smoke billows up obscuring everything and my spirit guide pulls me out of the path of the flying debris.
I wake, shivering, my night cap soaked with clammy cold sweat, to find it was all a dream. I close my eyes briefly only to wake again with a start as I see a bear of a man, not dissimilar to Brett Sparks from The Handsome Family, hovering like a strange bear-angel at the foot of my bed. “Come,” he says, “we haven’t a minute to waste”. Expecting another musical epiphany I reach for my overcoat, fully expecting to be dropped down outside Tower or HMV to see what this ghost of Christmas Present has to enlighten me, but it appears it is too late for that.
The only Christmas offerings adorning their shelves will be cynically compiled compilations and greatest hits albums. Instead, he pulls me abruptly into the screen of my own trusty laptop and off down a dazzling cybernetic highway to the online zouk where modern independent musicians hawk their wares. I see Derek Sivers, the mohawked founder of CD Baby, throw his warm winter coat over a huddle of freezing folkies, while outside the icy palatial doors of the iTunes Winter Palace, an angry starving mob of bolshevik revolutionaries armed with fiddles, banjoes and pipes mill around waiting in vain for the czars of modern music to show their faces. We turn down the endlessly long row of bristling slums that is MySpace Avenue, where every hovel blares its offering from the doorway, where the starving talentless mix uneasily with the starving musical genius, all uniformly taunted by the regular parade of hawkers who offer a chance of fortune and fame if they’ll only pay over their last handful of coins for a chance to enter the Sonicbids lottery.
I am distraught, and my guide, now looking old beyond the day we have spent wandering here together is tired beyond all human understanding. Neither of us can stand it any longer and I find myself up-ended in my freezing bed as he disappears in a fading glow.
Relieved, I fall asleep only to be awoken again an hour later by another spectral visitor who drags me kicking and screaming to an abandoned, untended grave in an overgrown cemetery. My companion’s boney hand points to a simple grave marker carrying the inscription ‘independent music’. Somehow though, the sight does not sadden me, it fires me up. I know that the shade has not brought me to the future but only to one possible future. Its job done, the shadow figure slips into the blackness and once again I wake in my bed on a crisp, bright Christmas morning.
At the end of my bed hangs a stocking overflowing, not only with a cornucopia of classic albums but with a raft of new ones and reflected in the shining cellophane shrinkwrap I catch the briefest of glimpses into the future, a future that brings new releases from the world of folk and traditional music and in an instant it becomes clear to me that the reason the three grim spectres have let me off the hook is so that I can go into the future singing the praises and promoting the releases of talents as diverse and enriching as Acoustic Dan, Clive Barnes, Dervish, Dual, Mick Flannery, Miss Paula Flynn, Martin Hayes and Dennis Cahill, Jinx Lennon, Seasick Steve, the Southern Tenant Folk Union, Teada, Tinariwen and the rest of that long list of artists blessed with something to say and the guts to cling steadfastly to their own way of saying it.
Have a happy Christmas, people. More importantly though, make that resolution to fly the flag for real music in the New Year.