Saint Etienne 'I Was Born On Christmas Day'
The history of pop music is intrinsically revisionist. While most people have chosen to forget 'Mr Blobby', 1993's Christmas number 1, Saint Etienne's collaboration with Tim Burgess on 'I Was Born On Christmas Day' has endured. Stalling at number 37 at the time, it is the alternative music fans equivalent to Mariah Carey's 'All I Want For Christmas is You'.
There was always a sense of injustice that it never made the Top Ten. However, it is proof, perhaps, of the 'by-stander theory of pop': radio play and numerous TV performances lulled the casual fan into complacency when it came to actually purchasing the record in the shops. It felt like it was already a smash before the official release had hit the shelves. And anyway, most people had already taped it off the radio for their Chritsmas party mix tapes.
Always a favourite of Indie-scenesters, Saint Etienne outlived 'Mr Blobby' and also the 1990s Brit Pop bubble, by reconceptualising themselves as a situationist art project. Slowing the pace down, they have released nine album to date, usually cohered around an avant-garde conceptual rationale, or film project. With fourteen Top 40 singles to their name, however, Saint Etienne have performed the neat trick of existing on the brink of the mainstream for over three decades. The closest they ever came to any sort of cross-over was the number 11 hit 'He's On the Phone' from 1995: a house reworking of French singer Etienne Daho's 1984 single 'Weekend à Rome'.
Befittingly, in a week that has seen Mariah Carey top the UK singles chart, and the Top 100 flooded with the festive hits of yesterday, Saint Etienne remain just out of view. In the roll call of Christmas songs invading the Top 40, the usual suspects are depressingly conspicuous: Wham, Paul McCartney, The Pogues, Brenda Lee, Slade, Shaking Stevens etc. Saint Etienne's absence is, therefore, reassuring. What is most significant about this mawkish invasion, however, is and how little it says about pop music culture. Mariah Carey's victory is hollow: like an empty netter goal. That is not to say that the chart does not contain innovative contemporary pop, but rather it is now just a barometer of consumption as opposed to cultural taste.
Since 2014 the inclusion of streaming into the calibration of the data has dramatically altered Top 40 dynamics. Songs hang around much longer, and heritage acts do not require an official rerelease to emerge in the wake of prominent use in film, TV or TikTok. As such, the charts are less a measure of the vanguard of youth culture, and more of a metre for the mundane use of pop as a utility. Rock 'n' roll may have always been a commodity; however, increasingly it is conceptualised as a convenience, with our usage as predictable as seasonal fluctuations in gas and electricity.
Had we been able to stream Saint Etienne back in 1993 it would have undoubtedly done much better than number 37. But maybe that's not the point. We learned from our mistake: as the chart battles of Brit Pop demonstrated. And nothing speaks louder of the diminished significance of the charts today, than the resonance of a song that grazed the top 40 once, 27 years ago.
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