Whether it’s grabbing a glass of mulled wine from one of the faux ski chalets in the Market Square or catching a screening of misty-eyed festive staple It’s A Wonderful Life at The Broadway, there are certain Yuletide traditions which are paramount in any true Nottinghamian’s December calendar. Another event high up on the to do list has been taking place for the last 22 years. First held at fondly-remembered Junktion 7 on Canning Circus in 2002, the Annual Christmas Covers Party has graced everywhere from Hopkinsons to The Maze over the last two decades and now resides at The Bodega. Ahead of this year’s event on 20th December, LeftLion caught up with three of the organisers and past performers, Alex Hale, Scot Lambert and Joey Chickenskin to garner intel on how it all works…
Alex, Scot, Joey - tell us a bit more about your musical backgrounds…
J: I play solo acoustic comedy music and I’m also in another band called Burly Nagasaki with Theresa from Rattle.
S: I’m between projects at the moment. We did Vanity Project as a thing for Christmas Covers. It was difficult to get people to open the show in the beginning as there wasn’t a great deal of people there at the start of the night. So it was a band featuring some of the organisers and a few friends. Now when it begins you’re playing in front of 50 people, but we’re not doing that this year and it turns out nobody wants to go on first (laughs).
J: We got too good, that was the problem - we were supposed to be a bit of a joke but we started practising!
A: I’m in a band called ACHB which is my initials and the letter ‘B’. I've played Christmas Covers seven or eight times and my band three or four times.
This year will be the 23rd year - that’s quite the legacy…
A: Yes it is. Last year I went through the archives and collected all the footage we had before releasing it like an Advent calendar, which took about four hours to do. There was loads of stuff on YouTube and Instagram thankfully.
J: If you want to know anything about Christmas Covers, Alex is quite the historian - he has tracked down everything!
How long before the night do you start rehearsing the tracks you are going to cover?
A: It depends on the band really. My band would start about now, although we’re not playing this year, while others leave it a lot later.
J: There are some bands, some annoying bands (!) who say we’ve only had two practices and they’re brilliant! Whereas when we did Vanity Project we needed eight practices which were about three hours long.
S: It varies depending on how competent the acts are.
Is it like 6Music’s The Chain where there is a list of what’s been played before and they can’t be re-covered?
S: There’s an extensive database! We’ve actually had to relax the rules and said it can’t be played if it has been in the past five years, as we thought it was a bit rude to expect musicians not to play something that was played before they were born!
So, no performances from you this year…
J: There’s so many bands who wanted to take part, we’re not performing this year and we’re not going to have a house band. It took a little while to recover after COVID as bands were concentrating on writing their own stuff, so it was a bit tricky. Now, it’s really popular again. Alex has done a lot of work putting it together so there’s so many good people who want to do it now.
Is there a deadline where they have to submit what they are going to perform?
A: Technically they can do it the night before, but if they do that and we tell that it’s already been done then it’s kind of tough luck.
S: There’s a keeper of secrets who keeps a check on what everyone’s planning and has to vet them to ensure more than one person isn’t playing the same song on the night.
J: It seems like a redundant rule as one year we still had two bands playing the same song which involved swaps as the band who played first would have an advantage, so we thought it would be best to be more organised.
What are the timings for each act?
A: It’s 15 minutes per band and how many songs you can fit into that.
S: The record goes to a band called The Cusp who played a medley of 15 rock ‘n’ roll songs.
Are there any past performances which stand out in the memory?
S: Even though it was only last year, Cheap Dirty Horse were absolutely incredible. Sometimes you get a band who play an entire set by one particular artist, so one year Rattle did Kate Bush the year her gig tickets went on sale and that was great.
J: One of my favourite memories was by a band called Savoy Grand. One of the nice things about Christmas Covers is playing against type. They came in and did I Wanna Know What Love Is (by Foreigner) which, because they kind of kept their aesthetic, was weirdly moving - it was like a beautiful thing in the room as well.
A: I think everyone last year was fantastic from start to finish - Tom Gensler was incredible.
J: Tom Gensler is the future of rock’n’roll!
The money raised traditionally goes to local charities - what’s the plan this year for the proceeds?
A: We always do Nottinghamshire Hospice, we do Zephyr’s, which gives support to families who have lost children or had miscarriages and, then this year, we’ve also added The Sameer Project which is Palestinian charity (emergency humanitarian aid) and one of the organisers, Eleanor McGregor, is playing this year, too.
I imagine on the night it’s a struggle to get everyone to run to time?
J: Surprisingly not. We always have a sound engineer who is pretty on it. Every now and then somebody might over run, but we’re pretty anal about all the rules and on the whole that helps it run.
A: If they get broken there’s a vendetta!
I imagine if you put a group of bands in a room there’s going to be an element of competition - how does that play out?
S: There is a secret competition that only people who’ve played a few times know about! To win Christmas Covers it’s not necessarily the band that everyone agrees on, but you can kind of feel it on the night.
A: In 2019, Matt (Williams) from Connexion Man (who are playing this year) fronted Don’t Panic with Christmas Covers’ mainstay Emily Kawasaki and they won that night, but my band came really close! That was the first year I felt that competitive element. I feel like we’ve won it a couple of times since, but we’re not going to go on about it!
If you were allowed to cover any song to play - which one would it be?
J: In all the incarnations of Vanity Project I’ve pitched London Calling (The Clash) loads of times and we haven’t done it and every time I revisit it, I realise it’s probably a bit hard so there’s an element of relief there!
A: Probably Like A Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan).
S: Bikini Girls With Machine Guns by The Cramps - that’s the most fun I’ve had playing live.
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