Are any two forms of artistic expression more widely maligned than musical comedy and the Christmas album? It would take a talent of Santa’s-sack proportions, surely, to redeem both at once. Step forward the gadfly sketch trio Sheeps, who have released their maiden (and I think we can assume, only) festive album, A Very Sheeps Christmas. The “musical passion project” of Sheeps’ Daran Johnson and Al Roberts, and supposedly 10 years in the making, it features 20 original tracks and guest vocal appearances by fellow Sheep Liam Williams alongside comedy megastars Rose (Starstruck) Matafeo, Lolly (Ghosts) Adefope, Jamie (Stath Lets Flats) Demetriou and more. Oh, and it’s very funny indeed.
A good way to experience it would be at one of the trio’s three live gigs this month that launch the album: my enjoyment of it was greatly intensified by familiarity with Sheeps as live performers. On record as on stage, the joke when Liam Williams opens his lungs to sing is that such a gruff and deadpan man should be going all light entertainment in the first place. But Johnson and Roberts take more of the strain here, with a suite of songs of sometimes sublime silliness – lyrically, conceptually and vocally too, whether that’s Johnson’s high-pitched Prince stylings in the sexy-Santa number Hoo Hoo Daddy X or the sinister little yelps in the death-worshipping country-and-western carol (“that baby’s gonna die for me”) No Room at the Inn.
Does that give you a sense of the variety at play? Every imaginable genus of Christmas song, and several unimaginable, are burlesqued here. You want Seventies rock? There are vocals a la John Lennon and Slade. The baby Jesus hymned in choirboy falsetto? Listen to Tiny Baby King, a ridiculous paean to our “so well behaved” infant saviour that piles harmony upon harmony, a great big vocal millefeuille of piety. Elsewhere, a new chapter is written to the seasonal hit I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus, in which a cuckolded husband sings of his kid’s resemblance to a man referred to throughout this album as “Big Red”. You want a romantic festive duet? Well, here are Johnson and Matafeo with Christmas Number One, a heavy on the cheesy sax two-hander about the partners we’re prepared to stomach at Christmas.
That track ends with a dissolve into laughter: the sense is palpable of the fun Sheeps and co had making this. That fun is non-exclusive: there are jokes and infectious humour at every turn, sometimes in the idea (such as a song about Father Christmas’s jealous cousin, muscling in on Santa’s territory by delivering “sacks of wet fish” down people’s chimneys) and almost always in the execution. Several songs pull back and reveal in the best joke-telling fashion, as with the story that unfurls in Adefope’s vocal, Mistletoe Umbrella, or the perspective flip late in Demetriou’s daft love-makin’ number (with shades of the Conchords’ Business Time) Christmas Sex. Sometimes the gag is the absence of a gag, as when Charlotte Ritchie pitches in with the album’s lushest voice to sing the forlorn lyric of Santa’s abandoned spouse, Mrs Claus.
There as elsewhere, the joke is underscored by lovely music and production: the mismatch of absurd lyric and finely crafted sound is often an entertainment in itself. If, as they have been threatening for years, Sheeps’ days as a live act are numbered, this Christmas album should be doubly welcomed – as a richly amusing and very listenable stunt in itself, and as an extended lease of audio-only life, perhaps, for the funniest triple act in British comedy.
Sheeps are at Moth Club, London, 16-18 December. A Very Sheeps Christmas is available now
