Thanksgiving may be over (hey, it’s a joined-up, mixed up world we live in, doncha know, non-Americans?), but if you’re not a fan of chilly weather then it seems winter hangs around like a bad smell. Hello, me.
While those in colder climes try to warm their hands and hearts quaffing a nice cup of cocoa, there’s possibly something missing: that reassuring feeling that makes you think you’re curled up in a nice heavy-as-snow blanket, reminding you that, baby (cue corny Christmas “classic”), it’s cold outside but everything’s fine, because you probably have everything you need at your disposal. And if you don’t then what the hell dya think internet shopping is for?
So, without further ado, here’s another rock and roll listmas to add a little spice to those coldest days and nippy nights: a perfect clutch of tracks with Winter somewhere in the title – from the prettiest pop pieces to the gloomiest gut-wrenchers.
On with the Ten then…
Simon & Garfunkel — Hazy Shade Of Winter (1966)
Though you might know the Bangles’ beefier remake better, A Hazy Shade Of Winter was originally a somewhat Roy Orbison-ish standalone single for feted folksy duo Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel. Written by the shorter of the two, the rifftastic track reflects on Simon’s sojourn in the merrie olde England of 1965, by depicting himself as a struggling poet, armed with “manuscripts of unpublished rhyme”, deliberating about what to do next.
A mediation on the inevitability of mortality and aging, the seasonal transition when fall mutates into winter is the perfect picture to convey those reflections. And after re-listening to the song for the first time in aeons I can’t help but regard it as one of the little fella’s greatest compositions.
Love Unlimited — It May Be Winter Outside (But In My Heart It’s Spring) (1973)
The ’70s authority on coming from the body heat, Barry White a.k.a. the wondrous Walrus Of Love himself, co-authored this ode to steaming up those winter nights for Californian chanteuse Felice Taylor in 1966. Six years later, White eschewed the Motownish arrangement for a more sweet soulful rejig for Love Unlimited, the female vocal trio who did so much to make his records a succession of aural orgasms.
In the first verse, they coo, “When the temperature dips, I’m in my baby’s arms / His tender fingertips know just how to keep me warm / It may be zero degrees with the snow fallin’ down / But I’ve got warm and tender love just as long as he’s around.” An undisputed R&B gem, it achieved its biggest success in the UK in, appropriately, the spring of 1975, which is presumably why queasy quintet Steps thought they just had to cover the song in 2012 for an unnecessary Crimbo album called Light Up The World. Guess what — it didn’t.
Donna Summer — Winter Melody (1976)
As punk blazed an angry trail in Blighty, Donna Summer and Giorgio Moroder’s magnificent Munich machine crafted Four Seasons Of Love, a concept album exploring the peak and demise of a love affair through, yep, you’ve guessed it: spring, summer, autumn, and winter.
Representing just a fraction of Summer’s incomparable range, the fourth track on her fourth studio set is Winter Melody, a slight but emotional ballad that finds the singer wiping away tears as she endures, in later Eurythmics parlance, a chill in the heart. On a happier note, it also gave Summer her third UK Top 30 hit, just before the orgasmic I Feel Love revolutionised pop forever.
Yazoo — Winter Kills (1982)
Talking of electronica exotica, Alison Moyet and Vince Clarke’s brief moment in the sun as Yazoo may have been an arranged marriage but also a wonderfully symbiotic example of how disparate minds were tuned to the same wavelengths. Moyet’s gutsy, bluesy vocals and Clarke’s plinky-plonky synth-pop sensibilities made for one of the oddest musical pairings, but it worked incredibly well, most memorably on the duo’s delicious debut Upstairs At Eric’s.
Only You and Don’t Go might be the perennial chart-slaying singles that announced their cross-cultural mix-and-match majesty, but buried as the album’s penultimate track is the mournful Winter Kills, an ode to joyless so desolate it’ll have you in tears before you can say SAD.
Duran Duran — Winter Marches On (1986)
Debuting as a trio after 1985’s splinter groups The Power Station and Arcadia banged the nail in the quintet’s coffin, Duran Duran’s album number four, Notorious, saw soul power producer Nile Rodgers (Chic, Bowie, Madonna) flesh out the band’s Princely funk influences – even enlisting the Dame‘s Serious Moonlight era’s brass section, The Borneo Horns, to jazz up the white bread.
However, on the decidedly downtempo Winter Marches On (“It certainly does if Nick Rhodes on the cover is anything to go by, remarked one uncharitable reviewer) the latter’s layers of electronics give the icy evocation (cf “Dreams have frozen crystal in the morning”) a solemn, almost funereal atmosphere unlike anything else on the record. Indeed, its artiness is more like something Arcadia might have conjured up. Or, dare I say it, Bryan Ferry during the Avalon era, making the Brummie boys the Midlands’ answer to Roxy Music they always deigned to be.
Tori Amos — Winter (1992)
The fourth 45 from Tori Amos’s acclaimed debut Little Earthquakes, Winter is a mesmerisingly moody call out to the cold season, with an opening verse finding the ginger singer reflecting on the winters of a misspent youth: “Snow can wait / I forgot my mittens / Wipe my nose / Get my new boots on / I get a little warm in my heart when I think of winter / I put my hand in my father’s glove.”
The haunting melodies and poetic lyrics embracing life’s endless uncertainties have made this pretty piano ballad a fan favourite and a standout track in Tori’s capacious discography. It’s more about coming of age than the season itself, which is a rhapsodic device as the song goes on: “Boys get discovered as winter melts,” she evokes in the second segment, where “flowers competing for the sun” would seem to be a metaphor for adolescent felines, which sets up the denouement. “Years go by and I’m here still waiting / Withering where some snowman was.” The world can be a cold place, but this is downright frostbitten.
Billy Mackenzie — Winter Academy (1997)
Think of a spellbinding combination of Scott Walker and Shirley Bassey and you’ve only just begun to get close to describing the supernaturally gifted operative voice of former Associates miscreant Billy MacKenzie. A masterful duality of toughness and fragility, glamour and spirituality, his wilder than the wind vocal gymnastics could bang like a barn door in a blizzard, and soar high like an eagle through the sky.
Beyond The Sun would turn out to be the Scottish singer’s inaugural posthumous project, released the same year as his death in 1997. Consisting of reworked demos he was working on prior to his suicide, the best bits are when he’s accompanied by just piano and strings (the melancholic orchestral arrangements being generally overseen by former Cocteau Twin Simon Raymonde).
Second track Winter Academy is raw, remarkable and spellbinding — a slow-motion torch song full of deep autumnal regret, with McKenzie’s once wayward voice now tamed to a near whisper. It’s bleak but beautiful, and almost unbearingly poignant. Best listened to during the colder, harsher winter months with a glass of Scotch whisky, the bittersweet symphony crystallises the essence of a dead December night. There goes a tenor.
Gwen Stefani — Early Winter (2007)
The fifth and final 45 from Gwen Stefani’s sophomore solo outing, Early Winter was a late addition to The Sweet Escape and showcases the No Doubt hypegirl’s penchant for an emotive breakup ballad, with lyrics concerning the need for fidelity and transparency as she metaphorically compares the end of a relationship to a tree shedding its leaves.
As with much of the Stefani oeuvre, this sleek piano-led piece, written, not at all surprisingly, with Keane’s Tim Rice-Oxley (and helmed by Nellee Hooper) is luxurious and winsome, with stylish throwbacks to ’80s old schoolers Billy Idol and Cyndi Lauper. The Hollaback’s delicate nasal tones suit the self-pitying sentiment of the subject matter, but then, just before the chorus kicks in, the singer swoops through a throaty revelation with the painfully self-knowing line “The song’s getting cold: It’s snowing.” It’s a sly, powerful shift that finds her verbalising about nothing more than the track itself, and she owns it.
Kanye West — Coldest Winter (2008)
Mama used to say if we restricted our music loving to those artists who were exemplary salt of the earth humans we’d have very small record collections. Enter the frequently odious lover of the balloon-butt, K West. On this Tears For Fears-sampling slice of ice magic (almost a quarter century after Band Aid’s Do They Know It’s Christmas? pulled that trick, natch), the Chicagoan cretin sings — aye, sings — of “memories made in the coldest winter” inspired by the recent death of his mom Donda. As it turned out, heartbreak was the sound of a Roland TR-808 drum machine, as the rapper deemed hip-hop insufficient in channeling his emotions, instead gaining inspiration for “the first, like, Black new wave album” by evoking the spirits of British electronica acts, in particular Gary Numan, Ultravox, and a certain gay pop duo that we’ll get to in a minute.
While insistent tribal beats pound insistently over dry, frosty synths evoking an Icelandic landscape, the despairing minimalist mood is set pretty quickly. Befitting the spareness, there’s not a huge amount to it lyrically, but the heartbreak comes through loud and clear as West warbles, “Goodbye my friend / Will I ever love again?” He also asks, “If spring can take the snow away, can it melt away all of our mistakes?”
Feted by the likes of Michael Jackson and Pet Shop Boys (for it is they, who returned the inspiration by pinching Kanye cohort Andrew Dawson for 2012’s Elysium), the attendant long-player 808s & Heartbreak spoke to two of art’s eternal truths: that raw emotion powers the most coruscating work, and that such sentiment is often in its most affecting form when alchemised into the margins of a mere pop song. Though you might not want a whole album of it, because as a Neil Tennant uber-lyric on PSB’s Nonetheless eloquently observed, “You need some happy music when winter comes around.” Enter Macca then.
Paul McCartney — Winter Bird/When Winter Comes (2020)
Delicious froth in isolation doesn’t come much better than from that bassist bloke that used to be in The Beatles. When Sir Paul Thumbsaloft released a lockdown album in COVID-ravaged 2020, there was a flurry of excitement, not to mention about six scullion different formats. Completing a trilogy of one-man band, one-name opuses, whether McCartney III was a “brilliant” work of “genius” was largely immaterial. The main thing was Macca was back, back, BACK, and talked a good game about it (as is his wont) in the process. To be fair much of it was pretty decent – although those who considered it out-there were probably ignorant of his daring excursions in experimentalism as The Fireman with producer Youth.
For me, the most affecting tune was and still is the set’s show closer Winter Bird/When Winter Comes. It’s a pastoral, playful reverie so cosy you can almost picture the Sussex country retreat where it was recorded, right down to the rivers and meadows Paul warmly depicts in a sunny delivery that can only be described as rose-tinted: “When summer’s gone / We’ll fly away / And find the sun / When winter comes.”
It might seem slight but it’s also rather cute in that effortlessly endearing way Macca’s known for. Fortunately, his optimistic melodious pop makes the adage easy to take, especially as the bulk of the whimsical ditty dates back to a 1992 session with the “Fifth Beatle” George Martin, ie before his voice started to go.
In summation, the previous pair of McCartney albums capped off significant eras in his life — his first solo releases, respectively, after the breakups of The Beatles and Wings—causing some speculation that the third volume might mark the end of his recording career. Four years on, if it is indeed a swansong, then the Mac 3 will stand as a classic coda for the singer-songwriter who’s been churning them out for longer than many of us have been on the planet*: a sentimental journey that’s strong, a bit wistful always looking one step beyond.
Steve Pafford
*Who were sitting pretty at the top of the singles charts the day I was born in June 1969? Of course it was The Beatles, with the Macca-led Get Back doing the business in America and Australia, while in their lovely island homeland it was Lennon’s last Fabs 45 in his lifetime with The Ballad Of John & Yoko.
