1999 Westlife: I Have A Dream/Seasons In The Sun

I wonder what sort of Christmas they have over at the Westlife place? Is it all day party of food, drink, fun and good times, or do they sit around the table, crackers unpulled and turkey uneaten, stressing about all those worse off and remembering all the low points of the year just gone? Evidence tends toward the latter - there's never much of the easy going about Westlife's singles to date and this Christmas number one double A side isn't bucking any trends on that front.

Originally a number 2 hit for Abba in 1979 , 'I Have A Dream' was never a 'Christmas song' per se, but its sleighride jaunt and lyrics about angels meant there was no need to quibble over small change; it was festive enough. Unfortunately, the light and breezy melody that made it so sounds rather less so after Westlife transfuse a ton of their readymix into its veins. True to form, their heavy handedness creates a Frankenstein's monster of a song that kills, crushes and destroys the fragile delight of the Abba original by replacing its slippers with hobnail boots which it proceeds to stomp around in. By the time the choir of kids appears at the climax, the whole thing has stumbled off the edge of a cliff into the rollers below where, being as indestructible as nuclear waste, it keeps on singing until the tide carries it out of earshot.

'Seasons In The Sun' could never be classed as a 'Christmas song' no matter which way you cut it, and coupling Abba's song of hope with Brel and McKuen's deathbed reminisces makes for an odd pairing at any time of the year, let alone Christmas.* At least now the "Goodbye my friend it's hard to die" gave the boys something suitably grim to sink their serious teeth into, and they do with aplomb, but 'Seasons In The Sun' is a song written for one voice and by breaking it up so that each of the quintet gets a turn then it defuses the 'message' of the lyric until it becomes a Chinese whisper, shorn of its emotional charge by a confidence totally absent from the quivering longing of Terry Jacks' original which made it such a delight/horror (take your pick on that one). But whatever, even Scrooge would think twice about giving this a spin on Christmas morning.


* In order to provide some linking narrative, both tracks are shot through with a good blast of a penny whistle. No doubt it was meant to remind us where these boys hail from, but it's sheen is as authentically Irish as an O'Neils bar in Cardiff.