How Michael Bublé ate Christmas, one silky standard at a time

Christmas as we know it was invented in the spring of 2011, when a former fishing trawler crewman from British Columbia and a renowned heavy metal producer teamed up in a studio in Hollywood. Assisted only by a scrum of session players, a children’s choir and a 60-piece orchestra, they conjured mistletoe magic in the crisp LA air.

The ex-commercial fisherman was Michael Bublé, who, as a teenager, had spent six summers at sea alongside his father – a period that taught him the value of hard work and of keeping a clear head in challenging circumstances. The producer was Bob Rock, best known as midwife to Metallica’s Black album. The record they made together was, of course, Bublé’s Christmas.

Bublé didn’t quite invent the 21st-century Christmas, with its mix of super-charged sentimentality and planet-wreaking conspicuous consumption. The John Lewis marketing department, and its ruthlessly twee and weepy adverts, played its part, too. But his Christmas, released on 21 October 2011, is unquestionably among the great seasonal juggernauts of the modern era. It has sold in excess of 30 million copies, spent more than 80 weeks in the UK charts and racked up four billion streams – and counting. In the singer’s native Canada, it is the first record to reach No 1 in five separate calendar years.

But Christmas is more than merely a commercial success. Numbers alone cannot convey the steamroller that Bublé and Bob assembled at Capitol Studios in LA (followed by further sessions in Bublé’s hometown of Vancouver). Bublé’s Christmas has transplanted its DNA into the entire festive season. His smooth, raffish take on classics such as “It’s Beginning To Look A Lot Like Christmas” and “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas” have become infused into the air we inhale. From late November onwards, those silky standards can seem to follow us wherever we go – the feel-good ghosts of Christmas past, present and future rolled into one.

Walk into a store, switch on the radio, slap on a Christmas playlist and the sense is that Bublé’s jingling bells are woven into the fabric of life itself on a sub-atomic level. Was 25 December a thing before Bublé and Shania Twain duetted on LP stand-out, “White Christmas”? Historical records say “yes”. I have my doubts.

The best gifts are a combination of something old and something new. And those are the values that Bublé celebrates on Christmas. Because while, in one way, the album is merely a collection of familiar favourites, in another it is the distilled essence of the Canadian, who describes himself as an old soul born out of his time. “Musically, Bing Crosby’s Merry Christmas album had an enormous impact on me,” he writes in his 2011 memoir, Onstage, Offstage. “It is the quintessential record. As a kid I sang every one of those goddamn songs. I was singing Mele Kalikimaka [the Hawaiian-themed Xmas tune that closes out Merry Christmas] in July. Let’s face it: I was a weird kid. What other kid would find an old Christmas record so exciting?”

Crosby and Christmas Day were two of the foundational influences on Bublé. His entire career and persona – his whole life, in other words – could be said to have been shaped by repeated listens in childhood to Crosby crooning his way through the tinsel-bedecked hinterlands of Yuletide. “Michael heard Bing Crosby singing ‘White Christmas’ and that was it: he was hooked,” writes Juliet Peel in Michael Bublé: The Biography. “Perhaps it was fortunate that it was Bing who was his formative influence rather than, say, the Sex Pistols, for that is exactly the style of music he has made his own.”

Bublé recalls first hearing Crosby’s seasonal collection at age four. Stealthily, Christmas by Christmas, it seared itself onto his soul. “Those swinging arrangements,” he would say. “Even now, I can sing you any sax line from that record.”

He may have been shaped by Crosby’s knitted-cardigan take on the festive season, but Bublé’s Christmas is no copycat affair. He hasn’t simply emulated Crosby and other crooning colossi such as Sinatra and Perry Como. Their records had an ambling, hand-in-pockets sensibility; aided by Rock and all those session players, Bublé’s Christmas has the quality of a hormone-injected turkey. Sonically, if not thematically, it’s brash and incessant. When Bublé sings “Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas”, it isn’t a salutation – it’s a command. You can’t help but wonder: what would happen were you to defy him and choose NOT to have a merry Christmas? It doesn’t bear thinking about.

In other words, he and the Metallica side-man have created the crooning equivalent of whatever “Enter Sandman” was to heavy metal. It’s steam-roller nostalgia, powered by the furious pistons of Bublé’s old-fogey persona. Rock and Bublé brought a full metal intensity to the sessions. Bublé insisted on “live” recording. That involved banning “cheats”, as he termed them, such as Pro Tools, a software that allows musicians to stitch together separate recordings.

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“I pushed to keep the music recorded live, the old-school way,” he writes in Onstage, Offstage. “And I mean really live, like Frank and Bing and Dean did it – not the so-called live recording where you sing it live, then fix everything afterwards… I wanted it beautiful, rich and authentic.”

Rock, meanwhile, seemed to have taken away a great deal from the experience of working with his fellow Canadian. “It’s great. I am definitely having fun,” he told Canadian TV, after Christmas had gone to No 1. “I’m learning… When you’re using 60-piece orchestras and doing everything live, it’s a new thing for me.”

That authenticity didn’t extend to every facet of the project, it is worth noting. Covering Philip Springer’s 1953 staple “Santa Baby”, Bublé artlessly gender-flipped the song – with (presumably unintentionally) rib-tickling results. “Santa Buddy,” he sings, “a 65 convertible too, steel blue. I’ll wait up for you, dude.” He may as well have retitled it “Dude, Where’s My Pressie?”

When it comes down to it, there are only three flavours of Christmas. There’s the neo-Dickensian, “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” one – the Christmas of fluttering snow globes, seasonal ghost stories and cherubic carollers. There’s the naff Seventies Xmas – the Christmas of Slade, snogs at the office party and paper crowns at the dinner table. And then there is the Christmas sweater, crooning Crimbo. The one that used to be the preserve of Sinatra, Perry Como and their generation. But Bublé has swept in and remade it as a 21st-century phenomenon.

Purists will tell you his versions of “Santa Claus Is Comin’ To Town” and “I’ll Be Home For Christmas” are about as authentic as a Christmas jumper from Poundland – and just as disposable. Such criticisms will wash off Bublé. This Christmas, like every other Christmas, you will find him dashing through the snow and all the way to the bank.