How To Have Yourself a Very Merry Hardcore Christmas

What do you think about when you think about Christmas? Slade, Jesus Christ, and Quality Street? Trees, loneliness, and Morcambe and Wise? Parsnips, carols, and years and years of familial grudges being played out over a game of charades after a bottle or nine of Blue Nun? Those are all fine, but the real meaning of Christmas, obviously, is locking yourself in your bedroom with a selection box and a smattering of the best happy hardcore Christmas songs in the world…ever!

Here's five of the best from the oddly successful Christmas/hardcore crossover continuum.

"Silent Night" must just be the bleakest Christmas carol of the lot, and let's be honest, the entire canon is one big lachrymose, sentimental bundle of barely concealed sadness. Honestly, every Christmas eve I leave my local church a sobbing, sopping mess, too distraught to even eat the sweets poked into my ceremonial orange, and I blame "Silent Night" for that. So it was a surprise that DJ E-Rick and Tactic's luminescent semi-cover had me grinning from ear to ear for a good thirty seconds before I was left utterly exhausted by it's cloyingly sweet charms. The aural equivalent of downing a box of chocolate liqueurs in front of a Mastermind special.

You know I just said Silent Night is the saddest Christmas carol ever? Well it isn't, I was wrong, the saddest Christmas song is absolutely, hands down, "White Christmas." It's a wreck of a song, one big wintery weep, and I'm pretty sure that there's no possible way of getting a cover version of it wrong. The nicely named DJ Snowflake's take is a gorgeously atmospheric, icy, pitch-perfect one, and a song that absolutely nails the devastating blend of false euphoria and very real melancholy that the best hardcore gets so right. Hear it at 3am in a club in Bracknell and you'll fill that bottle of VK with hot, salty tears.

George Michael, despite all the absolutely hilarious things that have happened to him since, never really topped "Last Christmas". Sure it's the sound of every office party going slightly sour, but what a sound it is! That rumbling bassline! Those soft-as-snow synths! That yearning, resigned, destroyed vocal melody! It's perfection, a crystalline extrapolation of everything that's both perfect and wretched about the strangest time of the year. DJ Jonny B's experimental cover doesn't really work, but hey, since when did the big day ever go smoothly?

DO YOU WANT A TRULY TERRIFYING CHRISTMAS EXPERIENCE? YOU GOT ONE!

Remember when you were a teenager and Christmas stopped being magical and became just another thing you found tawdry and tiresome, yet one more thing that made your stomach shake with embarrassment and resentment? Remember how you'd silently sit through the dinner, saying nothing more than an occasional "salt, please" before skulking back upstairs and listening to the National? You were being a cunt, mate. And you knew you were as well. Even at the time. You knew it. Luckily, most of us grow out of the Christmas is Shit phase pretty quickly. These guys didn't. Let's hope they get coal in their stockings.

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