Yes, it’s the last days of November, yes, it’s one month until Christmas today, and yes, this is the last /Tuesday Ten of 2025.

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/amodelofcontrol.com now has a Patreon page, at this stage purely as a potential way of helping to cover the running costs of the site. There is absolutely no compulsion to do so: if you feel you can chuck a small amount to the site each month, that would be appreciated.

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Next week /Countdown /2025 begins on this site, and over the next four Tuesdays up to Christmas, I’ll be looking at the best music of the year as usual.

But in the meantime, I thought I’d make a diversion into something I usually try and avoid: Christmas-themed music. But not the same old fucking songs rolled out on TV, adverts and every work Christmas party until the end of fucking time: those released for smaller audiences away from the mainstream. Some of them are unexpected songs from artists who’d normally run the fuck away from this kind of thing, some are reinterpretations of Christmas classics, some are simply on the subject of Christmas.

This one had a lot of great suggestions when I asked about it last December, and naturally very few had ever been used in this series before: thanks, as ever, to everyone that contributed, and the /Tuesday Ten series will return in early January 2026.

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A quick explanation for new readers (hi there!): my Tuesday Ten series has been running since March 2007, and each month features at least ten new songs you should hear – and in between those monthly posts, I feature songs on a variety of subjects, with some of the songs featured coming from suggestion threads on Facebook.

Feel free to get involved with these – the more the merrier, and the breadth of suggestions that I get continues to astound me. Otherwise, as usual, if you’ve got something you want me to hear, something I should be writing about, or even a gig I should be attending, e-mail me or drop me a line on Facebook (details below).

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/Malcolm Middleton
/We’re All Going to Die
/A Brighter Beat

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Needless to say, if the title didn’t give it away, this lo-fi punky track is one full of gallows humour, as Middleton notes that we’re going to fucking die no matter what, so take those small moments of joy regardless, as that’s all we’ve got. The video sees him playing being a drunken Santa staggering across Oxford Street and on the tube, with little Christmas cheer on show…

William Hill gave this 1000/1 to reach Christmas Number One – the longest odds for it ever offered. It peaked at Number 31 – the chart topped that Christmas by X-Factor winner Leon Jackson (an artist who only ever released one album).

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/Type O Negative
/Red Water (Christmas Mourning)
/October Rust

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The late Peter Steele was very much a glass-half-empty kinda guy when it came to his songwriting (even if he possessed a wicked, sarcastic sense of humour that was sometimes missed in his songs and actions), and one of the bleakest on the band’s meisterwerk was this song. This is a song mourning those gone, as Peter Steele reflects on Christmas as we age, dining or celebrating with less and less family members and loved ones over time (“My table’s been set for but seven / Last year I dined with eleven“), and amid the gloom, and the soaring, yearning chorus, it’s clear that there is little to celebrate at Christmas here.

Steele died young himself, of course, dying aged just 48 in April 2010, apparently of heart failure.

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/Harvey Danger
/Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas
/Sometimes You Have to Work on Christmas (Sometimes) EP

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Best known for their glorious takedown of alt-rock fads (Flagpole Sitta), this song is much more subdued. A lament about those on the margins who have to work whenever they can to get by, it’s about lonely young people a long way from home, without much of a support network and end up working shitty, lonely jobs: like the cinema (“movie theater”) staff who staff near-deserted screens whose only attendees are those escaping winter weather and without anything else to do, or anyone to spend that time with.

I’ve spent a Christmas or two alone when I was younger, and it’s the fucking worst.

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/The Knife
/Reindeer
/The Knife

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The Reindeer is something of an icon of Christmas in a number of legends, particularly as the animals that haul Santa’s sleigh through the night sky. Interestingly, they are the only species of deer where the females can have antlers, and they are also the only deer to be semi-domesticated on a large scale, providing food and shelter by way of their meat and hides across millenia for the Artic people.

On a song on their first album, The Knife celebrate the humble reindeer for their part in both Christmas legends but also being such a useful animal in the bitterly cold, Scandinavian winters, and unlike their later, darker work, this is a bright, almost innocent sounding song.

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/The Vandals
/Oi To The World!
/Oi To The World!

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The Vandals live Christmas show has been a punk rock tradition for years, and indeed this year’s is the 30th Anniversary. Back in 1996, The Vandals released a Christmas-themed album (in October!), with a handful of covers and a bunch of original songs. Probably the best known of them is the title track, later covered by No Doubt. A song of cross-cultural understanding and support, it has strong anti-racist undertones, and is genuinely two minutes of joyous fun. Oi! Oi!

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/Keith Top Of The Pops
/& His Minor UK Indie Celebrity All-Star Backing Band
/I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas
/The Komplete Keith’s Khristmas Kovers Kollection Vol 1 & 2

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Originally by Gayla Peevey in 1953, it perhaps nicely sums up the ridiculous kind of requests we made for Christmas as children. I mean, why can’t we ask for something outlandish? Keith TOTP turns it into a punky, two-minute blast, but keeping the original, surrealistic streak of the song nicely intact.

Nowadays, I struggle to think of anything that I want for Christmas (and it often drives my wife mad as a result). Then again, I was never this out there in my requests when I was a child…

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/Weezer
/O Holy Night
/Christmas With Weezer

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Not being a dedicated Weezer fan – I like a few of the hits, and the Blue Album of course, but never really dug any deeper – I missed this when it came out, but it doesn’t especially surprise me that the band did a Christmas release. But one that was essentially a soundtrack for a corresponding iOS game?!?

The release is six covers of well-known Christmas songs, but hearing Weezer do them is genuinely quite strange. Particularly setting Placide Cappeau‘s Cantique de Noël – in it’s English translation, of course – to typically Weezer-esque, lurching rock balladry. Bowie and Bing Crosby taking on Little Drummer Boy this is not…

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/Low
/Just Like Christmas
/Christmas

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There’s at least one person close to me who would be very disappointed indeed if I didn’t include Low this week, so for them, here they are. And talking of Little Drummer Boy, that is one of the songs on here, and remarkably was used in a GAP advert in 2000… But I’m featuring the lead track on the release, the lovely Just Like Christmas, which rather upended what I expected Low to sound like. Rather than barely-there instrumentation, and vocals I strain to hear, this song gallops along with the jangle of bells, tumbling drums, and the plaintive, sweet vocals of the late Mimi Parker, as she hints at a journey across Scandinavia at Christmas, and the snow not delivering the winter wonderland they might have been hoping for…

Said friend maintains that it is the greatest Christmas album ever released, and listening again recently, they may have a point…

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/Eels
/Christmas Is Going To The Dogs
/How The Grinch Stole Christmas OST

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For an artist who seemed to detest the idea of fame and being popular from the start, Mark “E” Everett has a hell of a way with a tune (and ended up with a good number of hits as a result). Which included a song on the soundtrack of one of the biggest-grossing Christmas films of all time, the 2000 adaptation of a Dr. Suess story starring Jim Carrey. Eels twist things, of course, this being a song from the point of view of a dog, pondering why their owner is racing around doing everything at Christmas, rather than settling down and paying attention to the dog…

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/Total Fucking Destruction
/Simply Having A Wonderful Christmas Time
/Goddamn Ye Merry Gentlemen

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Sadly an album that’s no longer in print, but a grindcore band taking on Paul McCartney’s Wonderful Christmastime kinda has to be heard to be believed. The lyrics are there – albeit somewhat faster – and there’s a bit of that melody being distorted to fuck on a guitar, and everything else is twisted into probably the most fucked-up Christmas song I’ve ever heard in my life. Some of you may think of this as sacrilege, but meh: everyone celebrates, or chooses not to celebrate Christmas in their own way or has their own other traditions, religious or otherwise – I’m keenly aware that not all of my friends and colleagues are of the Christian tradition.

It’s a bit early, but Happy Christmas? May your upcoming holiday season hit the mark for you in the way you want it to.