Smith & Burrows - Smith And Burrows Wrote Their Own Christmas Hits

Smith And Burrows Wrote Their Own Christmas Hits

Smith And Burrows wrote their own Christmas songs as there were "very few" traditional hits they felt comfortable covering.

Tom Smith from Editors has collaborated with former Razorlight drummer Andy Burrows for their festive album, 'Funny Looking Angels', and they chose to write original compositions - which include 'When the Thames Froze' and 'This Aint New Jersey' - as they felt more natural than covers.

Tom exclusively told BANG Showbiz: "We looked for something that was a bit more festive and, to be honest, there were very few I felt comfortable in doing.

"The Pogues' 'Fairytale of New York' is sacred turf, then stuff like Wham!'s 'Last Christmas' - the more poppy, shiny end of things - I don't think would have done either, so we thought we'd better write our own Christmas songs."

The album does feature coves, including Yazoo's 'Only You', The Longpigs 'On and On', Delta's 'Funny Looking Angels' and Black's 'Wonderful Life' - the track which kick started the whole project.

Tom explained: "I'd just been in Turkey and seemingly every time I got a cab they were playing that Black song, and I wasn't aware of anyone who's really covered it, so when Andy wanted to do a song, I chose that, and we did a fairly straight cover of it on stage.

"When we talked about doing a song together, I sent him an acoustic demo of me doing that, which was in a darker style, and that was the first thing we did.

"That went really well, so we did another cover, of Yazoo's, 'Only You' and they both felt kind of wintry and old fashioned and so I said, 'How about, to focus what we're doing, we made a Christmas album of covers?'"

'Funny Looking Angels' is out on November 28, and single 'When the Thames Froze' follows on December 12.