Salut! Live

Andrew Curry writes: I’ve spent a bit more of my life than is completely sensible listening to seasonal songs. For the last few years, at this time of year, I’ve compiled an ‘off centre’ seasonal playlist on Spotify for the amusement of friends. (The 2024 edition is here.)

It’s not just folk music, although obviously that’s in there; there’s always some jazz, blues, soul, pop, and classical in the mix as well. Sometimes some reggae. And one of the surprises in all of that seasonal listening is that the best seasonal record by a performer in the folk tradition, by some way, is Strange Communion, released by Thea Gilmore in 2009.

(Thea Gilmore performing in 2018. Photo: Jonas Söderström/ flickr. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

It runs the full range of the genre. The opening track, Sol Invictus, is a glorious piece of a capella. There’s a Christmas murder ballad written by Elvis Costello and originally performed by him with the Chieftains. There’s songs about snow and angels and midwinter and December and about being away from our loved ones, as well as a nod to T.S. Eliot and more than a nod to Louis MacNeice.

And there’s even a perky song with a Christmas lyric that sounds like it ought to be a seasonal hit, if Thea Gilmore had hits, but is just a bit too knowing:

Hot wine and a Christmas tree/ The Sound of Music and the family

Faith, hope and gluttony/ That'll be Christmas

In short, it manages to evoke all of the mixed feelings we have about this time of the year, and is also perfectly sequenced.

Gilmour’s then husband Nigel Stonier wrote a couple of the songs and produced the record.

I’ve admired Strange Communion for some years, but until this 12 Days of Winter series I hadn’t looked closely into its history. It turns out, according to the For Folk’s Sake site that it started life as a challenge from the Radio 1 DJ Janice Long. In 2004, Long had complained about the lack of good modern Christmas songs, and challenged Gilmore to write one. Gilmore responded by writing Thea Gilmore’s Midwinter Toast, and left it at that.

During 2008, she played the song as part of a her set on a North American record, and came back to the idea of a Xmas record, so started writing songs for it.

One of the things that had happened in the meantime was that artists that she admired, such as Low and Kate and Anna McGarrigle, had released seasonal records that had worked well.

I’d thought that my love of the record was something of a private pleasure, but doing some research it turns out that I’m not alone. It was uniformly praised when it came out—I can let a BBC review stand for the whole here. It called it a

festive feast of an album which mixes the pagan and agnostic, tradition and modernity.

And these days, Strange Communion seems to have a bit of a cult status. The Disassociated Press blog in 2022 said it’s an “annual tradition for me”. Matthew Barton, who wrote the For Folk’s Sake article mentioned above, calls it “as rich and emotive a Yuletide listening experience as you are ever likely to get.”

I think some of this is because of Thea Gilmore’s intent when she made the record. She told the music writer Adam Sweeting: 

I was more interested in the winter aspect and the community aspect [of Christmas], I suppose. Plenty of people who aren't practising Christians celebrate Christmas, so I thought I'd look into the secular side of the season.

And I think that reflects the way a lot of us feel about Christmas. In this spirit, here’s the song that started her off down this road, Thea Gilmore’s Midwinter Toast.