Rock On

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Your Alternative Christmas Playlist

You don’t have to listen to the same old tosh

Alex Markham
Rock On
Published in
5 min readDec 23, 2024

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an image of a treble clef
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Bored of Band Aid? Weary of Wham? Maddened by Mariah? Then you’ve come to the right place.

Yes, it’s that time when your brain wants to shut down at the 1,253rd time you’ve walked into a shop, turned on the TV or the radio and been assaulted by Christmas songs.

I tried some classical radio stations only to be assaulted by those horrible massed choirs singing Hark The Herald Angels and God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen sung at a pitch approaching the hearing range of a dog.

I still want to celebrate with great music what my uncle insisted on calling Midwinter Festival. He was pedantic like that which is why I loved him. I do like a contrarian.

I also liked that he served in the Royal Air Force but never went anywhere near an airbase. He spent all his time in the groundforce branch of the airforce working in British Embassies around the world, particularly in countries where we had a bit of a sticky relationship with the locals.

There were quite a few.

He then got fed up with all that and decided to drive across Syria and live in his car, as you do, dragging my aunt along. That got a bit tedious after a while so he…

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Alex Markham
Alex Markham

Written by Alex Markham

Classic rock/pop aficionado. Fiction and travel writer.

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