Don't look now, but we are officially entering the seasonal time for cheese. I'm not referring to a nice wodge of Stilton with your port, sadly, but rather to the kitsch, camp and just downright tacky music that suffuses Christmas parties, shopping-centre public address systems, and even home stereos as people let mulled wine go both to their heads and their sense of what is sonically good and decent. It's Bing Crosby roasting on an open fire - that level of inappropriateness.
Carols are one thing, if sung by a good choir in the right environment, but it's the fact that cheesy pop music is on every sound system that makes one pine (excuse the pun) for a non-festive season. Unfortunately the real spirit of Christmas is: if you can't beat them, join them. And what better way than with the Three Stooges of appalling music, Messrs Stock, Aitken and Waterman, responsible for giving the 1980s the bad name it has miraculously managed to lose in recent years.
These writer-producers have just released a box set of the songs they inflicted on the world - called, with due tackiness, Gold - and so this Christmas you, too, can sway drunkenly to such blasts from the past as Sonia, Rick Astley, Sinitta and Brother Beyond.
You can take your pick of the 38 tracks off iTunes, but surely some Jason Donovan and Kylie Minogue has got to be in there? They are responsible for some of pop's best guilty pleasures of the past few decades - Donovan's "Too Many Broken Hearts" has me choking on my mince pies every time, and the Aussies' duet "Especially For You" is ideal for merriness below the mistletoe.
Finally, some advice on saving face: if you are caught bellowing along to Kylie's "I Should Be So Lucky" when you thought you were alone, simply allude to her recent uber-serious, spoken-word performance of the same song with Nick Cave. There's nothing cheesy about pretentious pseudo-poetry. Alas.
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