DEAR GOD NO, NOT CHRISTMAS SONGS. PLEASE STOP! BUT WAIT, THE AUDREYS & JULES MOUNT A DEFENCE
- Bernard Zuel
- 8 hours ago
- 8 min read
It’s coming on Christmas, they’re chopping down hymns, they’re putting up Buble and songs so bad it’s a sin. Oh I wish I had headphones I could hide away in. (With apologies to J. Mitchell.)
YEAH, IT’S THAT TIME of year and it’s happening: Christmas songs and Christmas albums and Christmas albums of Christmas songs sung by Christmas people in Christmas gear wishing you a very Merry Bloody Christmas. Everyone who has access to a microphone and mixing desk is tempted to cash in with their own version and everyone loves it except for grumpy old bastards muttering bah humbug.
But is there any excuse? Is there any justification? Is there anyone who can answer for their part in this? Actually, yes, there is. Two of them.
Adelaide’s roots-meets-jazz band, The Audreys, and Sydney’s pop-meets-R&B singer/songwriter, Jules, have just done their bit: a cover of Dolly Parton’s Hard Candy Christmas, and a six track EP called I’ll Be Home For Christmas, respectively. And reluctantly I have to accept they’re pretty good. Ok, very good. But that’s by-the-by when we have the bigger question of why do this at all. So they have accepted the challenge to explain themselves before us.
We begin with Taasha Coates, singer and main songwriter for The Audreys, found today in the non-more-Christmas environs of an Adelaide pub (better Wi-Fi and not bad wine – red but not mulled despite the season) with the racing odds on the TV above her, because it’s what Jesus would do if he had a TAB account. And then Jules, who has a second name but for now we can just say it’s Yuletide making more names unnecessary, facing me in her music room with the only thing not wearing a Christmas decoration being her dog George, safely sleeping in the corner. (He did start the day with a bow on him but “it didn’t last”. Good boy George, good boy.)
WHY ARE YOU DOING A CHRISTMAS RECORD? WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?
TAASHA: “It’s a good question,” she says once she stops laughing. “First off, I didn’t like Christmas for a lot of my life, and then I had kids. Suddenly Christmas becomes this magical thing again, so I discovered the joy of Christmas again a little bit: we talk about Santa, we read books about Santa, we put the tree up, my lounge room constantly smells like whatever that fucking Christmas scent you buy is.
“Then there is the other side of it, where something happens to everybody’s taste in music at this time of year. It’s shit we would not tolerate any other time of year, and it’s not just music. Christmas movies are shit, Christmas jumpers are shit, the jokes you read on Christmas day are shit, you know. Our whole tolerance to taste and class just goes out the window for a month, which I find fascinating and used to find really annoying, but now I find strangely compelling. But let’s make something very, very clear: I have not made a Christmas record, I have recorded one Christmas song. And I have no intention of recording any more.”
JULES: “The past three years I’ve had a lot of Christmas traditions with my kids and I said one day I might do something Christmassy, and at the end of last year I thought I have to hang onto that feeling or I won’t do it. As time went on I thought I would make it Christmas-adjacent: tapping into the season without hitting it on the nose.”
So she kicked off with Sarah McLaughlin’s Angel, which was “Christmas around the edges”, similar to Joni Mitchell’s River, also on here, but she went full-bore with I’ll Be Home For Christmas “and that unlocked this world of Christmas music and [the EP] very quickly became Christmas proper”.
WHY THESE SONGS?
TAASHA: “We’ve been doing a covers album for the last few months and we kind of have this approach to it where we go into the studio and everybody knows what we are doing and made notes but we haven’t had a discussion until we get in there about how we are going to do it. It’s been a really fun and creative process and there’s something really nice about it not being our songs so we are not doubting the songwriting: it’s 100 per cent about arrangement, which I find really creative and enjoyable.
“As it got closer to Christmas we were like, we really have to do a Christmas song, because fuck it why not? But I wasn’t sure I could find a Christmas song that I could stand singing, so I honestly spent three hours, it might have been longer, sitting at a bar with my headphones on listening to hundreds of Christmas songs and every time someone walked past me I’d say, hey what’s your favourite Christmas song? Honestly, I was losing hope a little and then I heard the opening couple of bars of that Dolly song and I went, done, love it! Before I even got to the chorus.”
JULES: As well as a musician, and one-time media entrepreneur with her female-focused site Music Love, Jules is also a musicologist with a deep interest in sacred music such the two originally-German hymns she has recorded, Silent Night and Lo, How A Rose Is Blooming she believes remain, through various language and historical iterations “made for the common man”.
But for all of the songs “I found that in the different songs there were these incredible stories and I think a Christmas album, in defence, is what most people call a cover, but what I like to call a standard. When you used to sing the standards it was making it your own and reinterpreting it, I much prefer that [and] the six songs that we chose I found the back stories so interesting that I really enjoyed living in that world.”
So she worked back through Simon and Garfunkel’s version of Silent Night, which they juxtaposed with their own 7 O’Clock News, as she has too, bringing a combination of the birth of Christ and the turbulence of mid-60s America. Elsewhere, considering nostalgia in its Greek roots in the word nostos which means homecoming and algo meaning pain, and how many songs we now think of as seasonal songs were written from the perspective of separation, whether by war or other means such as I’ll Be Home For Christmas, written in 1943 amid WWII, then James Taylor’s version of Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas.
“The way he sings it is sombre, it’s got a sadness about it, and I wanted to explore where that sadness came from, and the more I went into the history of the song I realised the original songwriters [Hugh Martin and Ralph Blane] who wrote it for Meet Me In St Louis, it was meant to be a sad song for this little girl who doesn’t want to leave her home … Judy Garland sings ‘in a year we’ll be together/And until then we’ll have to muddle through somehow’.
“I chose River early on and called the EP It’s Coming On Christmas because the imagery in that song is she is in California and it could be any number of breakups, the child she gave up, but she doesn’t want the warm sunshine, she wants a frozen river to skate away on. And I would say my other defence of making a Christmas album is it’s an amazing defence of winter. I know that feels weird to say in Australia but I was never going to write a song about prawn cocktails [she laughs].”
WHO HAVE THESE SONGS BEEN MADE FOR IN 2025?
Taasha: “Our fans. Our fans,” she says. “But I tell you who loves it, my mum. She did that fantastic Boomer thing of going, well I looked on YouTube and I said mum why are you listening to music on YouTube? She said, where else am I supposed to listen to music?”
Jules: “I said to Sean [Carey, producer] we’ve made a Christmas album on a whim, it wasn’t really planned, but when we had these arrangements became more and more like a hug for people. We wanted people to feel comforted, like ‘I see you and here is a hug’. I kept saying I want it to feel like a cup of tea, a mug you can put your arms around, something comforting so even though the themes are cold, it’s warm in its instrumentation and sound.”
WHAT A CLINCHING ARGUMENT TO PUT TO CHRISTMAS MUSIC SCEPTICS?
Taasha: “I think before anything else you need to listen to [Hard Candy Christmas] and understand that it’s not a ‘Christmas song’. Apart from anything else, Santa on the cover has got a cigar, a bottle of whiskey, and is clearly about to pass out on a park bench.”
So a normal Audreys gig then?
“Exactly! We nearly went for a picture of Santa leaning, with one hand up against the wall, taking a piss, but I thought I wonder if that’s not going just a bit too far.”
Yeah, the mums market might have an issue with that.
“But [to sceptics], fucking why not? Look, I wouldn’t have done it 10 years ago, so I understand that question, I really do, but, aah, you just can’t fight it anymore. I mean, Coles have got mince pies out in October. But could we fight back in the tiniest way with some quality Christmas content?”
Jules: “Authority in society comes from current use. For example, River is not a Christmas song, she just opens the song with the line it’s coming on Christmas, but what is it in that song that over 500 artists have said, actually I want to put that on my Christmas album? They are tapping into something that I think Joni was tapping into about I would like to run away, I don’t want warmth right now I want to stay on a frozen river.”
A FINAL CONCESSION TO THEM BOTH: THEIR FAVOURITE CHRISTMAS SONG OR RECORD?
Taasha: “Obviously you know I lean towards the melancholy so I would probably pick something like River by Joni Mitchell or something like that, or I would pick the Pogues and stuff like that. But having said that, I don’t mind me a bit of Michael Buble.”
Ok, that’s enough of that. Taasha, get out.
Jules: I think it would be O Holy Night, and I think it would be because of one lyric that says ’chains shall he break for the slave is our brother’. I find that lyric very moving.”
So why hasn’t she included it on the EP?
“Some things are too sacred to touch,” she laughs self-consciously. “I also love A Charlie Brown Christmas’ Christmas Time Is Here. I love that and it was on the shortlist but again I just thought, I can’t touch that.”
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