Paper hats off to John Lewis. They’ve finally ditched the maudlin covers of pop hits and commissioned a brilliantly bonkers blast of original music as the soundtrack to their annual Christmas advert. It’s a pure joy of a track, written by Italian electro duo Le Feste Antonacci and sung by popular Tuscan tenor Andrea Bocelli, which builds rapidly from a heart-snagging piano ballad to a demented, drum-pounding synth-backed headbanger. It will surely have pub floors across Britain shaking through December as punters leap up and down in a blur of tinsel.
The advert – created by Saatchi and Saatchi – is a celebration of each family’s unique seasonal traditions. It features a little boy who grows a pantomime version of a Venus flytrap for the family Christmas tree. Alas, the naughty Little Tree of Horrors is rejected by the family and sent out into the cold (boo hiss) – but when the little boy wants to open his presents under the carnivorous plant instead of the traditional pine number, the wacky flytrap is welcomed back into the fold.
The music captures all this silliness and sentiment with a song which, unlike most Italian opera, is easy to sing along to because it’s only got four words: “La Vita, La Festa.” That’s it. The 65-year-old Bocelli (the most successful classical singer of all time) has enormous fun injecting the simple line – translation: “The life, the celebration” – with the whole gamut of emotions. There is yearning, loneliness, excitement and pure unfettered glee. In the background, the classic chord progression roughly echoes that of the familiar, classical structure of Pachelbel’s Canon. Mercifully, though, it has no pretensions of seriousness. It’s glorious to hear the song build into a crazy daft explosion of proggy electronic squeals accompanied by earnest choral backing – something like watching the cast of Wayne’s World head-banging their frayed mullets to Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”.
Yes, to some extent “Festa” is the “Go Compare” or “Just One More Cornetto” of Christmas songs. Often disdained for his poor technique by classical critics, Bocelli isn’t the world’s most technically proficient tenor. He’s a pizza commercial of an opera singer; when he hits the high notes you can almost see his tonsils cartoonishly quivering in the back of his throat. But who wants a technically proficient Christmas? We want the jingle bells and whistles; passion over precision. We want feelings expressed in messy reds, greens and golds.
The first time my kids heard “Festa”, they declared it “the absolute worst thing ever” – but after a couple of listens, they were leaping around the lounge in their onesies and giggling like loons. At a time when the world seems so dark, every conversation so weighted with potential disaster, a giddy song like this is just what we need. It’s corniness works just like the cracker jokes, which unite families not by the brilliance of their wit but by the collective groan that gives way to delight. It goes off with a real bang, too.
‘Festa’ is out now via Decca Records
