When it comes to the sound of
festive tunes competing on the airwaves, Paul McCartney’s Pipes of Peace and
Jona Lewie’s Stop the Cavalry are perennial Christmas favourites. They are songs
we have come to associate with Christmas and think of as Christmas tracks.
The message in both songs is
something different. Stop the Cavalry, set at the Front during the Great War,
features a soldier missing his girlfriend. The only link to Christmas is the
line in the song: 'Wish I was at home for Christmas'. This was picked up
by the record company and, with the addition of a tubular bell, the track was
marketed as a Christmas song. The video for Pipes of Peace was a great piece of
film to go with one of McCartney’s lesser known hits. The video depicts the
famous 1914 Christmas truce between British, French and German troops. It
portrays a British and a German soldier who meet up in No Man's Land and
exchange photos of their loved ones while other soldiers fraternise and play
football. When a shell blast forces the two sides to retreat to their own
trenches both men realise that they still have each other's pictures.
With the
anniversary of the beginning of the Great War approaching, Pipes of Peace conveys
a powerful and poignant message, encapsulating perfectly the human aspect of that
war. If you hear the song over Christmas, listen to the lyrics. Better still,
take a few minutes to watch the video clip.
Argentine singer-songwriter Sergio Denis recorded a Spanish version of Pipes of Peace re-titled Pipas
de la paz on his album La
Humanidad (1984).