Station of Critical Review by Kennedy Hiscox-Wormegay: Christmas is Really Fantastic - Frank Sidebottom

Being of Solstice Season, I, Kennedy Hiscox-Wormegay of the nearly-Republic of Scotland am in the happy position of being well-placed to offer up a critical response to the Christmas cash-in novelty song "Christmas Is Really Fantastic" by the rock monolith and Timperley tour guide, Frank Sidebottom. His behemothic porportions, entertainally-speaking, are such that any effort by which I might attempt to make avoidance with regards offering up said critical response would be professional suicide.

Owing to my detestation of wordy and letter-spattered ramblings, it is probably of maximised benefit to you, the reader, that I say nothing about this fun-but-irritating E.P. except that it exactly what one should be in the position of expecting from the cephalically-spheroid Sidebottom: song-like (but not excessively so), lyrically competent (yet somehow deceptively incompetent), nasal (yet throaty) and circular - except when purchased on audio cassette, in which case it's to be found crushed and distorted into a rectangular shape.

Nineteen eighty-six was the year in which this here 7" single was ejected upon an unsuspecting public horde. Many people died. Some people didn't. None of that had anything to do with the single's release. But that is the nature of life. Frank might have testified to that, lyrically, in one of the E.P.'s songs. But he didn't. Instead, he chose to squeeze song juice from the oranges of such issues as Christmas, a town called Mull, which is where autograph hunters attack Paul McCartney, and Demon Axe Warriors.

This wouldn't be a review unless this song was in receipt of some hot, gaseous, celestial bodies, so I shall oblige, as is the tradition of my opinionated heritage, with four of them.