Benjamin Shaw and Fighting Kites: This Christmas (I Just Want To Be Left Alone)

Audio Antihero has released this fine seasonal single from label stalwarts Benjamin Shaw and Fighting Kites, who I was lucky enough to see perform as ‘The Benjamin Shaw Band’ at AAH’s second birthday bash last year. ‘This Christmas (I Just Want To Be Left Alone)’ is a lovely song, with some of the pleasure coming from hearing Fighting Kites playing a more straightforwardly-structured song than usual and the rest coming from Ben’s voice – which also works really well with a fuller sound – and his lyrics. Is he looking forward to Christmas? It’s not immediately obvious whether he’ll be putting the tinsel up, though despite the title I detect some ambivalence about the festival. Maybe this is his answer to ‘Last Christmas’.

This was actually brought out last year, on Darren Hayman/Fika Record’s brilliant advent calendar – which contained no end of fantastic tracks like this and was mentioned in this post. It’s been re-released, presumably because it’s ace and all good Christmas records should be re-issued every year, and because it’s a charity single – pay as much as you like, with all proceeds going to Shelter. Buy it from Bandcamp here.

Mr Shaw made this slightly odd video out of film scraps and it’s quite affecting.

jkneale